Y&T - Going Dutch! Page 2
by Martin Popoff
"Yeah, we recruited them (laughs). If you don't know every lyric, you're not getting in tonight (laughs). No, it's pretty much an average crowd. They were maybe more pumped because they knew we were recording this for DVD, so they wanted to make sure they knew that they were giving it to us so we would give up a great performance. But I would say most crowds for Y&T are such dedicated fans that they really do love it that we come out to play in their area. It's a special relationship we have with the fans. Every band has that, but for some reason, something about the Y&T fans, it's like they're such a dedicated bunch. They've either been with us from the very beginning, or for ten or 15 years, or maybe just a year or two, but they just seem to be passionate about the band. Basically we get that similar reaction everywhere we play."
Which carries on to the meet and greets. "Yeah, our fans that come for the meet and greets are always very energetic, let's put it that way. They usually push the table right into us. They're all trying to touch us or hand us something, 'Hey, sign this for me!' People bring anything from a couple of CDs to 20 of them, and old records, old posters, things that we've never seen before in a magazine. So it's always a good time when we're doing a meet and greet. They're always so excited to just be able to meet us in person. And we give it back to them too. I mean, we don't just sign stuff and throw it to them and onto the next guy. We always try to be personable and talk to everybody. I must admit, we did see something kind of memorable the other day. A guy goes, 'I know this is kind of embarrassing, man, but I've had this sitting in my house for like 20 years, which I did when I was in high school and I was in a home economics class.' And this guy in Cleveland hands us this thing that he did when he was a teenager. And it was like a quilt he made with a Y&T logo or something. He was kind of embarrassed. But that was something I remember (laughs)."
"Three out of four of us were sick, including myself," confirms Dave (the guys can bee seen joking about it within the cool backstage footage included in the DVD, covering pre-show, post-show, meet and greet, out-takes and soundcheck). "In fact I am right now, and I don't normally get sick that often. But it was just one of those things. I was a little concerned going in, obviously. I didn't want our first DVD being with me sick. And I was concerned that I wasn't going to be able to sing correctly. And it took me a couple of songs to get my voice warmed up to the point where I felt confident and felt, 'OK, my voice is going to be OK.' I sing two-and-a-quarter hours every night and sing high and sing aggressively, so when you're playing a 20 date tour, and now you've got your fifth show of five in a row without a day off, and you're sick and you're going from country to country, it was a little bit of a concern. But I think it turned out fine. And I didn't overdub anything on the DVD. That's exactly how I sang it that night."
