Gig Storiez- Episode 1

FIRST PROFFESSIONAL GIG - FIRST LESSON IN HUMILITY

There we were, my first band, about 30 minutes into our very first paying gig when a beautiful blonde woman gets up from the bar and starts walking directly toward me. She's carrying a cocktail napkin and looking right into my eyes in a seductive sort of way that makes me think ..."yea man, this rock and roll thing is gonna be COOL!"

The band was in-between songs and the sound of her heels echoed through the room as she dropped the napkin on the speaker next to me, shot one more look directly into my eyes, turned and strutted away slowly like Jessica Rabbit. I picked up the napkin and started to read as our lead singer Joel asked anxiously "so, what does it say?"

Now everyone in the whole room is hip to this situation, including my girlfriend who came to support my little "hobby" despite the fact that she was eighteen-going-on-thirty while I was twenty-going-on-about-fourteen. As I picked up the napkin I started to sweat from the pressure of it all. Of course it would be cool if the hot blonde were leaving me her phone number and thought I was some kind of smokin' hot guitar player, but with my girlfriend in the room it would probably be my last night with a penis. I thought, "Sorry, hot blonde woman, I'm taken. How cool am I?"

Maybe she was making a song request and the seductive look was just her way of making sure it gets played. Now, it took our little band a solid year of rehearsals, two or three times a week at Joel's parents' house to perFECT the twenty-seven-or-so songs we thought we could dazzle people with. Yea man we had the best CSN/Eagles style harmonies and no one else could touch us. Oh yea, we were THAT good...but I sure hoped she wanted to hear a song that we already knew because winging it on such an "important gig" was out of the question.

We had all decided music was our lives. Joel had a great tenor voice and we were fearless to tackle any song with high harmonies. Drummer Bob had the double-bass drum kit and was a tall, handsome "chick magnet". Just a few years earlier, Tom had been our high school band director and he had all that musical knowledge as well as being a talented singer, guitar player and TRUMPET player (It was much later I discovered that CHICKS DIG SAXOPHONE).

Our bass player was a tragic sort of fellow, though he would probably disagree with that statement. Three years earlier, Scott could play circles around the guitar player that I was now. I remembered watching him play the riff to the James Gang song Funk #49 and it was the most incredible thing I had ever heard. He really had a feel for the guitar that most of us never get to achieve. I looked up to him, not only as a guitar player but also as a human being. The guy had it all together and was surely destined for greatness.

Then he contracted a muscle disease that caused him to now be the two-fingered bass player in our band. It was tragic to me, but he ALWAYS had this big smile on his face. Sure, once in a while he would get frustrated that his fingers couldn't do what his well educated brain was telling them to do, but he would eventually snap out of his bout of self pity, make a whimsical statement about something, and move on.

Eventually he succumbed to his muscle disease but even the last time I saw him he was pulling wheelies in his wheelchair and seemed to be just fine with it. As I write this story I realize that bringing up his name makes this all worth documenting. Scott Redman, you were an inspiration.

So where were we? Oh yea, it's been thirty-three years and the scar is still indelibly etched on my soul. There was a hot blonde with a message on a napkin and it appeared to be a sign from the rock gods for just a moment until I read the words she wrote:

A LITTLE CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM: YOU GUYS NEED A LOT OF PRACTICE

It seemed like an eternity that I couldn't breathe or speak as the whole band waited to hear the words written on the mystery napkin and there was dead silence in the room as my girlfriend looked on and I'm still thinking that I 'm some kind of rock-star-in-the-making as the whole room wants to know what is written on the napkin and all the guys who had been sitting at the bar with the hot blonde when she wrote the napkin were looking on and snickering and....

"I'll tell you guys later" was all I could say.

Pretty much everything after that (and since then) is a blur.