This has nothing to do with the trip. But I needed to write a bit about it.
I think most of you know I'm in a classic rock band. That's "classic rock" band, not classic "rock band". Get it? We play in bars for next to no money, for fun. We played Saturday night. I don't think it qualified as fun.
There are six of us: two guitars, bass, drums, and male and female singers. Occasionally one of us can't make a gig, so we either go on without them if we can, or get a replacement. This week we knew our bassist couldn't come, so we arranged a sub. A very nice guy. Doesn't know the material. I was a little nervous, as we rehearse very hard, and having a bassist who doesn't just have it locked down can be a problem. So we rehearsed with him, he worked at it pretty hard, and I crossed my fingers.
I was so nervous about the gig that I didn't send my customary spam mail to everyone I know inviting them to come see us.
Saturday our drummer got himself admitted to the hospital. I'm not really sure what's wrong with him, but hope he gets better real soon. Our other guitarist spent hours on the phone and found a drummer who could play. Of course, he's never even met us and I was hoping he knew most of the songs.
So here we go, with our entire rhythm section having none, or almost no, experience with us. Not a good start. And the show turns out pretty rocky - missed cues, missed chords abound. We have gear problems, we're missing half the PA system from all the tumult during the afternoon, I forget the mic clip for my stand and resort to taping the mic to it, ... .
It gets better. Half way through the second of three sets, our male singer starts looking not so good. Because he's not feeling so good. After the set ends he takes off. So now we're sitting without the lead singer for 2/3 of our songs in addition to having a rhythm section that is valiantly faking it as they go along.
The third set was probably the worst set we've ever done in public. We did one song with only a few of the lyrics after we started it and realized no me actually knew the words. We repeated a bunch of songs from the first set (some of them were better as we had now played them together once, but not all of them were).
Trainwreck, indeed.
And here's the kicker - after we (finally) finish and start packing up, some of the people at the bar start yelling for more music! My first thought was that the bartender should be cutting these dudes off and calling them a cab, but I give in and play a few numbers unplugged and solo. Which I haven't practiced. To applause!
There's just no accounting for taste.
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