Published Wednesday, March 02, 2011 12:00 PM
Updated Tuesday, March 01, 2011 5:30 PM
A sell out, you say? Hardly. Age brings many rewards, but the ability to stay up all night long is not one of them. A wedding band is a logical semi-retirement from the bar circuit.
I have played thousands of gigs all over the Southeast for the last two and a half decades. From rootin’ tootin’ rumbles to third-rate romances, I’ve seen it all.
I once played a place so rowdy I couldn’t tell if it was a bar or the running of the bulls. Rugby players are right energetic that way.
At the end of the night, the bartender tipped us an extra hundred bucks.
“Man, ya’ll were great – they really loved you,” he said.
“How could you tell?” I asked, as all I had seen was a horde of drunken, toothless giants cheerfully smashing glass pitchers and articles of furniture over each other’s heads.
“Well, put it this way,” he said. “They didn’t like the band last week, so they grabbed the singer and ran his head through the cigarette machine.”
Another night I was playing a tiny joint up in the Georgia hills. Euphemistically labeled a sports bar, it was more of a telephone booth with beer taps. Yet hundreds came out of the woodwork to see the band – and they paid well.
At one point during the night, we were playing a slow song, a good old belly rubber, and the dance floor was filled. It was then that the rhythm guitarist whispered a comment that will always stay with me, no matter how much I drink.
“Dang, I hate it when ugly people kiss,” he said.
Of course, the one constant in every bar band’s career is the inevitable request for a Lynyrd Skynyrd song. In fact, I’m not sure when Congress actually did this – it may have been part of the New Deal -- but there seems to be a federal law that requires every bar to have at least one besotted, permanently out-of-work comedian who shouts “Free Bird” every time a musician, whether Goth rocker or karaoke star, takes the stage.
Somewhere in that same piece of legislation is a requirement that a majority of musicians onstage be utterly scornful of “Free Bird,” and of Skynyrd.
This is ridiculous, of course -- but then again, so is Congress -- Skynyrd is a great band and Free Bird a great song. But that’s the law.
I suppose when it comes right down to it most of the places I have played over the years were frequented by people who consider Skynyrd songs to be missing Bible verses. They take their Skynyrd seriously, and you have to be careful how you respond, no matter what you’re feeling.
By far the scariest moment ever was this time I was running sound for a blues band in a place so classy, as the movie line goes, that there was a sign above the men’s room urinal that said, “Don’t eat the big white mint.”
Why I was running sound I don’t know -- after 20 years I still don’t know a fader from a flange.
The band was sort of artsy -- it was during the ’90s blues revival, when overweight, middle-aged white guys were seriously trying to sing Lightnin' Hopkins songs in every fern bar in Atlanta. These guys were okay as far as that went, but they had little tolerance for requests.
Throughout the night, one parolee kept screaming for Lynyrd Skynyrd. Finally, after about the millionth "PLY SUMM LINNERD GOTT DANG SKINNERD!" the drummer had enough.
I won’t reproduce his reply, but those three words hung in the air like skywriting. The silence was immediate. As the quaint saying goes, you could have heard a field mouse wee-weeing on a cotton ball.
“We are going to die,” I muttered. Then the rhythm guitarist – and I never knew he was such a master of improvisation -- got on the mike.
“Okay, then, we got a request. This is a song off Lynyrd Skynyrd’s, uh, Live in Europe ’65 album.” Then he broke into another Muddy Waters song.
It worked. The crowd yeehawed and hit the dance floor – see the above comment from the sports bar -- and stayed there for the rest of the night.
A couple of sweet young things bought me beers and tried to dance with me, but I was able to hang onto the soundboard as though my life depended on it, which in fact, it did.
But the crowning moment came at the end of the night. The guy who had been screaming for Skynyrd all night wanted to book the band for some party he was having, because, “That’s the best Gott Dang Skynerd I ever heard!”