Category: Gigs

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Boneheads Gigs Musicians

Pathetic coke whore

Sometimes I do studio work and quite often live gigs drumming for bands who either don’t have a drummer or whose drummer can’t make the gig for some reason.

One night I was doing a drum sub gig for a band that played what I’d call cool 70’s music. There’s cool 70’s and not cool 70’s. The guitar player had a “girlfriend” who was quite beautiful. In fact I honestly thought she was on another level than him. I couldn’t quite figure out why she was with this guy even though he seemed cool.

I later figured out later that she was with him because he was her sugar daddy. Turns out he was quite the coke dealer/user. This explained a few of his “mannerisms” that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I guess (I wouldn’t know) when you have your own personal coke whore that you supply coke to, you have to ration it out. During the gig she kept coming up to the stage and talking in his ear while we were playing. He kept giving her the brush off.

This stage was fairly high and small. The level of the stage was about 5 feet off the ground in this club. After being rejected, the coke whore left the dance floor and sneakingly crawled up the stage stairway. I watched her the whole time but the guitar player couldn’t see her. Keep in mind that at this point I still don’t know she is a coke whore and that he is a coke dealer. She watched him intensely and when he was playing a lead or doing some vocals she’d crawl ever closer to him on the stage. She crawled on hands and knees right behind my kit. I looked down at her and she looked up at me with a “sssshhh” look in her eyes. She finally found a spot behind the backline of the gear. She got right behind the guitar players amp stack completely out of view of the guitar player and the audience, but in my plain view.

She started digging in the back of his open back guitar amp. After throwning a few pairs of extra strings and a tuner on the floor she found what she was looking for….the coke. She opened up the baggie, put it in her hand and snorted the shit out of it. She emptied some more and did it again. Then she just kicked back and leaned against the amp and started to get “that look” on her face. She was high as a kite and pathetic as hell.

I wonder how many bucks worth she snorted there because later the guitar player was very pissed at her. Having already gotten her goods I wonder if the guitar player got his after the gig…

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Gigs Musicians

“Your bass player is too hard to watch”

Years ago a rock & roll band I was in took a little trek to Kemmerer Wyoming to do a gig. Playing a gig in the Twilight Zone would be normal compared to this gig.

Our bass player liked to jump around on stage while playing. He would even do the headbanger move and flip his very long hair all around. It was quite entertaining. He also wore his pajamas for the gig. Gee I can’t imagine why these hicks from Kemmerer thought this was out of the ordinary.

The people in the audience just kind of stood against the back wall of the venue and just watched in disbelief. They looked like deer in your headlights. When we went on break they literally came up and asked: “Can you tell your bass player to stop jumping around? He’s too hard to watch.”

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Boneheads Gigs Rants

Stolen SUB

Here’s a little salute to the asshole who broke into my bass player’s suv:

After a gig we hauled our gear into our respective vehicles and the bass player had the PA system in his suv. He had a bunch of stuff in his garage so he had to park outside overnight. When he went out to his truck in the morning he found a broken rear window and one of our JBL 18″ subs was missing. That part sucks.

Now for the “justice” part of the story:

At this particular gig we had some kind of problem with the PA. There was a bad cable or something which caused us to blow one of our 18″ JBL subs.

So the asshole crook has a 50/50 chance of getting a good 18″ sub for the pawn shop so he can go buy some crack. Well buddy, no crack for you. You stole the blown one you loser…

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Boneheads Gigs Musicians Recording

Board mix breaks up band

I do live sound gigs sometimes when someone wants to pony up a few bucks to pay me. When I do run sound it usually kicks ass.

There’s a heavy metal band I did some albums for and they hire me to do many live sound gigs as well. They have a big PA and it sounds killer.

The last gig I did for them was at a scary biker bar. The day after I did this gig a guy staggered into the bar with more than a dozen knife wounds…

This is a pretty easy gig. They set up the PA and I show up and twiddle some knobs. So for the hell of it I decided to bring my laptop, and an I/O (that’s soundman geek talk for input/output device) to capture some audio. I just ran a “board mix” straight into my laptop. If you know what a board mix is then you know they don’t necessarily sound very good. The issue is that POST mixer a ton of processing can take place in the PA. For these guys it’s namely thousands of watts of power with some EQ’s and compression blasting out of dozens of big speakers. So the sound coming out of the console may sound quite weak and out of balance if you don’t listen to it out of the PA.

Board mixes are almost always out of balance due to the stage volume of the players. The guitar player in this band for instance has quite a few Marshall amps which are loud as hell. So since his stage volume is very loud it’s not necessary to pump him out of the PA very much. The resulting recording of would then be lacking guitar because of this.

So what we ended up with was a mix that you would simply critique the band’s playing and tightness. I burned the band a CD of the gig (not from awedeals.com).

A couple of weeks later I get this crazy email from the drummer listing his $30,000 (supposedly) drum kit for sale. I later find out that after the drummer heard the board mix he got into a big fight with his bandmates. He thought the sound sucked and said that the singer sounded stupid when he talked to the audience inbetween songs. This singer has talked like this from day one. The only thing I can figure is that the drummer didn’t have as good of time since he was SOBER for the first time at a gig! Whatever the real reason is the band broke up. I felt a little guilty even though I clearly explained that the board mix wouldn’t sound all that great.

So in trying to do a favor for some guys, I produced the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ll think again before I do any more clients any “favors.”

Categories
Gigs

New Year’s Eve Gig Summary

It was a fun new year’s eve show at that same new club I played at last week. There was a good sized crowd but surprisingly not as big as I thought it would be. Tonight’s band configuration was basically two different bands with 3 guys in one band and the same 3+1 (accordian) in the other.


The Club


The Fans


The Feel


The bagpipe player wearing a University of Utah Footbal sweatshirt???

GO UTAH IN THE FIESTA BOWL JAN 1 2005!