Hot Stove Cool Music puts on yet another foot-stomping roof-raising barn-burner of a show

Back from an incredible concert with the astonishing Buddy Guy; the proudly self-proclaimed “best bar band in the world” George Thorogood and the Destroyers; and the fund-raising fun-raising side project of ESPN sportswriter & Baseball Hall of Fame honoree Peter Gammons with help from some guy named Theo Epstein. You might have heard of him ’round here; he manages some kind of socks team that I hear has been pretty successful … or something like that.

In the spirit of the concert’s philanthropic purpose, the Red Sox Foundation along with the Foundation To Be Named Later (which was founded by Theo Epstein and his twin brother Paul) auctioned off several pieces of Sox memorabilia, one of which was a jersey signed by the team including Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz. It started at I think $100 and went to $3,500. Some guy made himself very happy with this tax deduction, and with the current state of the team it’s probably the last thing of Sox that Manny will ever sign, except for his trade contract.

I took more than 500 pictures and couldn’t go through them all last night. Click on “read the rest” below to get to the start of the gallery. I have more to put up later.

I’ll go over more of the tech specs later; most everything shot with either a 17-55 or a 24-70, with the exception of additional from-my-seat-shots with the 70-200 and a Canon G9. That is one really good P&S. I didn’t bring my Panasonic but it would have come in handy for the greater zoom. Interestingly, I never went over ISO 400 on the Canon and in fact got quite a few shots at ISO 200–from Row 31!

Huge thanks to Shaun Kelley at Iron Mountain, Allyce Najimy at the Red Sox & the Foundation To Be Named Later, Jonathan Fine at Elevate & especially Jay Anderson at Live Nation for arranging everything for me.