A Six-Month Nightmare in the World of Disco
In 1977 the country-rock band I was in, Fast Friends, broke up, and in a fit of pique and desperation I signed on with a disco band called Starfire. Yep, a disco band. It was the first time I had ever played in a band with total strangers. My cut per gig was to be $13.31 if I helped load equipment; $11.08 if I didn’t.
I was hired as a “chick” singer/percussionist — a bass player and I replaced a singing bassist who’d quit. The two rehearsals for my first gig consisted of a half-hour sing-along with the keyboard player (who was the boss) and Starfire’s resident chick singer (who was making plans to join the Navy) in her trailer out in the country somewhere, and a 15-minute run-through with the whole band in a Virginia Tech band practice room.
I didn’t know (or care for) any of the disco crap we were playing. Still, I’d agreed to join, so I went ahead and learned such classics as "Dis Go Dis Way, Dis Go Dat Way," "I'm Your Boogie Man," "I Will Survive," "Oh, What A Night," and my signature song, "Back In Love Again."
When I asked what I was supposed to wear, I was told just to "wear something disco." That might have meant something if we'd been in New York City, but this was southwest Virginia, and I was a 22-year-old clueless disco rookie. The getup I contrived for myself centered around a polyester dress shirt unbuttoned halfway to my waist, so I could show off the plastic rabbit I had dangling from a "gold" chain I'd found somewhere. (Yeah, most circa-1977 swingers had zodiac pendants; I had a plastic rabbit.)
The bass player was told that if he got lost in the song to fake it and the keyboard player would fill in on bass pedals. In fact, I remember the “boss” saying that if it weren’t for the disco stuff, we could get along without a bass player entirely.
We faked our way through our first gig at a local high school's homecoming dance. I thought we stunk, but the crowd loved us.
My last gig with the band was a 14-night stretch at the Blacksburg Marriott. The second night, the lounge manager showed up with a decibel meter and fined us $75 for playing too loud. A couple of nights later, he announced that we would be fined unless either we all wore ties (the guitar player always wore one) or none of us wore ties. (The chick singer improvised ties for the rest of us out of scarves and belts, but we got fined anyway.)
Finally, toward the end of the stand, our bass player got us fined because he was wearing jeans. (Never mind that they were $200 designer jeans from NYC.)
Another lowlight was my reluctant spotlight dance each night with the guitar player’s all-too-affectionate mother on all the slow songs I didn’t personally sing. And there were the misbegotten requests for some “Skynrd” from the only three people in the place on two separate occasions. I began to feel sorry for the next suckers on the schedule (some outfit from Williamsburg called the Bruce Hornsby Band).
Finally, I made a sleepless, nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching decision to quit; I just couldn’t take it any more.
“Can you stay ’til Friday?” I was asked.
“I’ll stay until you can find a replacement,” I tearfully replied.
“Oh, I’ve got one already,” said Starfire’s boss, “but he can’t make it until Saturday.”
It was business as usual.
And a Merry Christmas to You, Too
This gig was in December 1976. The band was Fast Friends; the place was the Christiansburg, Virginia Moose Lodge. The head Moose had hired us to play their Christmas Dance, having heard us play at a previous gig.
This band played all covers — everything from Bob Marley to Waylon & Willie. We tore into the gig with gusto, knowing that these people had heard us before, had liked what they'd heard, and had wanted to hear it again.
But just after our first set, a woman came up to me with tears in her eyes.
"Are you deliberately trying to ruin our Christmas party?" she asked.
As I stood there with my mouth hanging open, she gave me a handwritten list and asked plaintively whether we knew any of the songs on it. They were all country songs.
I handed her our set list and asked her if she knew any of the songs on IT. That made things worse.
To demonstrate their dissatisfaction with us, two-thirds of the crowd waited until we began our second set and then got up, made a great showing of putting on their coats, and left. (Fortunately, we’d already been paid in cash.)
Happily, those that remained got into the band and had a great time after all. Yet, after all these years, I still feel bad about "ruining" that party. But I know that even if we’d been a pure country band, we still wouldn’t have been able to pull more than a couple of the songs on that woman’s list out of our ass no matter how badly we might have wanted to please those people.
Just because you play covers doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re playing the RIGHT covers. It’s a guessing game at best, and most of the time you lose.
Valentine’s Day Debacle #1
This gig was in February 1975. The band was Common Bond; the place was Heth Ballroom on the campus of Radford College (now Radford University) in Virginia. The Radford Jaycees had hired us to play their Valentine’s Dance.
We were not the standard fare for this kind of gig; we were heavy on the ZZ Top, Allman Brothers, and Bad Company stuff. Still, the guarantee ($400 or so, I think) was too good to pass up.
Surprisingly, the big crowd dug us and everyone was having a grand time, particularly the wife of one of the Jaycees who was, in my opinion, getting just a little bit too friendly with me. Actually, I think her husband thought I was getting too friendly with her, judging by his "I seen the way you been lookin' at my wife, and if you don't cut it out I'm gonna kick your ass" remark to me during our first set break. Luckily, another Jaycee dragged him — and his wife — off into a corner somewhere before anybody could get any more wrought up.
Toward the end of our second set, our drummer stopped playing in mid-song. We were horrified to see blood all over the drum kit. He’d somehow smashed his thumb with his drumstick.
His thumb wasn’t all that was smashed; he then proceeded to fall off his drumstool in a dead faint. I’d seen him sneaking mixed drinks throughout the evening, but after a "trip to the car" (if you know what I mean) during our first set break, he was beyond pain.
We cut the set short, bandaged him up, and sent him home. I was furious. In fact, I quit the band right then and there. One of our guitar players talked me out of it.
Guess who wound up drumming (and still singing lead) during our third and final set? That’s right — me — but luckily, the crowd was so bombed by then that they didn’t notice how bad I was.
Ah, rock and roll.
Trash and Bottles and Pigeons — Oh, My!
This gig was in September of 1981. The band was called the Sneakers; the place was Hampden-Sydney College in Farmville, Virginia. It was yet another frat gig, and we were prepared for anything — or so we thought.
We arrived on a Saturday afternoon around the time the school's football game was ending. We were early so we sat in the stands and watched the game for a while. The festive crowd was dressed to the nines; many were dining from ritzy picnic sets with real silverware. Dogs with jeweled collars sported expensive sweaters in the school colors. We started to get the idea that this school was way too classy a place for a ragged New Wave-y cover band like us.
The frat house where we were to play was an impressive brick structure, with vines running up its weathered old walls. We were a little embarrassed about how cruddy our raggedy gear was going to look inside such a nifty place ... but then we got a load of the inside.
The oak-paneled walls were smoke-stained and even burned through in places. The only furniture was a scorched couch covered with a dirty blanket. We were surprised, but kind of relieved that we weren't going to be playing in some kind of luxurious environment. Then we learned that we were to set up in the basement.
A single 40-watt bulb illuminated the way down a set of rickety, cobwebby wooden stairs. I remember to this day what it felt like stumbling down those steps ... in the immortal words of Chico Marx, "I got a bad, bad feeling about this one, boss."
The basement floor was covered with at least a half-inch of broken glass, mostly beer bottles. There were bulging trash bags and several petrified mops and brooms scattered about.
In one corner, there was an old sink with three dead pigeons in it.
The geek in charge told us that it would be at least three hours until the brothers could start cleaning up. Since we had nowhere else to go or anything else to do, and since we were sure the frat boys' idea of cleaning up would be to shove everything — trash, broken glass, and dead pigeons — into a corner (probably the one we were set up in), we decided to clean the mess up ourselves.
It took the eight of us (five band members, our manager, our roadie, and our sound guy) an hour to swab out that disgusting place.
On the bright side, later that evening the place was absolutely packed with people dancing shoulder-to-shoulder. We played into the early hours of the morning. They even tipped us for our janitorial work. However, even with the happy ending, our enthusiasm for frat gigs was forever dampened.
The O.K. Corral, Southwest Virginia Style
The year was 1978; the band was Bad Sneakers; the place was the Holiday Inn in Wytheville, Virginia.
I got in trouble (not musical trouble; let's say it was more of a social thing) early in the first set, when some redneck decided that his girlfriend was giving me too much of the eye. (She WAS, all right, but what could I do about it?).
I got a little distracted during our poignant and soulful rendition of Smokey Robinson's "Ooh Baby Baby" when the girl slow-danced her boyfriend around so that his back was to me and then mouthed "Help Me" over his shoulder at me. All I can say after all these years is that I still don't know what she wanted me to do.
I hoped the night would improve after the boyfriend "escorted" (dragged is more like it) her out a side door.
The rest of the gig was uneventful, but the fun was just getting started.
When we finished playing and were packing up our gear, some drunk staggered up and intentionally dropped a water glass through one of our monitor speakers. (That son of a bitch; I can see him now.)
Without a word, our bass player followed the drunk into the bathroom, picked him up by the shirt, threw him against the wall, and demanded $35 to cover the damage. To our surprise, the drunk forked it over. (He even had the correct change.) We figured we were done with him, but apparently he wasn't done with us.
The S.O.B. ran out and told six of his buddies — and here they came, en masse — seven drunken muttering rednecks, elbow to elbow, staggering in slow motion across the parquet floor of the meeting room-slash-dance hall of the Wytheville Holiday Inn.
Bad Sneakers formed the famous Spartan inverted-V battle formation and made ready to rumble. What had been our musical equipment suddenly became deadly weapons in our sweat-slicked hands — our drummer hoisted a cymbal stand, the bass player armed himself with microphones, our rhythm guitarist grabbed a mic stand, the lead guitarist brandished his backup guitar, and I wielded the business end of a boom stand.
(Go ahead and whistle the theme song to "Hang 'Em High" here.)
We just stood there and stared at each other for a long minute. Finally I guess the look in our eyes made them decide to call it off. Muttering a few incoherent insults, they turned and lurched off through the exit.
That crisis averted, we continued packing up, only to be astonished by a whole new incident: the Holiday Inn waitresses and bus boys lost their freakin' minds.
We stood there watching with our mouths hanging open as these lunatics systematically trashed the entire place. They screamed with laughter as they turned over tables and chairs while flinging plates and glasses at the walls and at each other. (If anyone reading this was there that night and knows what this was all about, please e-mail me and let me know.)
The drunks wanting to fight hadn't been anywhere near as scary as this. Shaken, we packed up and got out of there fast.
But wild Wytheville wasn't done with us yet.
Outside in the parking lot, we were frozen in our tracks by the sight of a rifle barrel slowly emerging out of the driver’s side window of a pickup truck parked nearby.
We hit the ground and began crawling for cover. I heard a click, and remember thinking "maybe the rifle misfired." But the click was the sound of the truck's door unlatching.
S-l-o-w-l-y the door opened.
S-l-o-w-l-y I waited for the hideous searing pain of a bullet.
And then (s-l-o-w-l-y) the would-be shooter came tumbling out face-first onto the pavement, stone passed out. The rifle fell through the open window and landed harmlessly on top of our mystery assailant, our would-be assassin, our apparent non-fan.
Without further ado, we jumped into our cars and raced away.
The moral of this story? Well, maybe it's not so much a moral as sort of a personal motto of mine: When it comes to playing music, Stay the hell out of Wytheville, Virginia.