.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}
Web 
Counters
SBC Yahoo Internet Access Provider

Progressive Travels

The haphazard chronicles of a professional musician and his relentless pursuit of an otherwise boring life.

My Photo
Name:
Location: St. Jacob, Illinois, United States

If it ain't Baroque, fix it!

06 April 2006

Horses and Hotties

Friday, 31 March 2006
One of the true joys of playing with BenWahBob is the summertime gigs at Fairmount Park. These are sponsored again this year by Anheuser-Busch, who provides the funding, food, and $1 bottles of their adult beverage products. I must admit, the scenery there isn’t too bad either. I arrived there Friday evening for our first one of the year, loaded in the small rig, and sat down with the rest of the band to a nice meal of hot wings and fish nuggets. Yummy.

The place filled up rather quickly. Greg, the guy who runs these events and – more importantly – pays us at the end of the night, was quite agitated by this. The facility officials had apparently decided to not open one of the lower level areas that often catches the overflow crowd. Their reasoning was that it was too early in the season for there to be a big enough crowd to necessitate the availability of that area. Oops. There was already over 1000 people there by 19:30. Add to that the fact that they only had two bartenders who also appeared to be responsible for keeping the bar stocked, and the lines were just plain stagnant.

We kicked into gear around 18:30, played for the first hour, and then stopped for the first race. After that, it was the standard operation of playing between the races (“Every 19 minutes, the band stops playing!”). It is sometimes difficult to find a groove like that, but we’re not really there for that anyway. We are the secondary entertainment in-between the primary entertainment of horse races. It’s a tough job, but…

We put the sets through the usual paces, with no real unusual occurrences of note. Well…except for the healthy-chested young lady who lost her battle with containment while jumping up and down on the dance floor. That must be the first time we’ve ever been flashed (albeit inadvertently) at one of these gigs. Then there was the Georgia Satellites tune on which Dale took off into his own tempo. This has on past occasions been a clusterf**k. This time, rather than try to get back together with him, we all just let him go and continued in our tempo. It was awful. From that point forward, it became Keep Your Timing to Yourself. We had fun with the rest of the song; inserting odd little ditties, playing out-of-key phrases, and breaking down into a drums-and-bass-funk-thing during the last verse. Dale just kept looking at us sideways, as if to say, “What are you guys doing?” I even drank a beer – well, part of a beer – between one of the sets, rather than waiting through the ridiculous lines at the front bar. Just when you think you know what to expect…

As the races seemed to go pretty quickly, with only one photo finish, we finished a little early. I didn’t mind this in the least bit. Dawna had planned on coming out after she got off work, but called to tell me that she had a headache and was instead going straight to my house and to bed. (The jokes about it being from her job were profuse.) Needless to say, I didn’t waste any time hanging around when we were done. I packed my gear and headed for the door.

Another nice bonus of these gigs is that they are close to home for me. Of course this also meant that I didn’t get to listen to too much of the fifth Spock’s Beard CD during the short drive home. Oh, well…a trade-off I am willing to make.


Saturday, 01 April 2006
Baha Rock Club in St. Charles MO was on the docket for this night…about once every six weeks…like clockwork. The weather had been pretty nice over the weekend and we were anticipating a decent turnout. We were not disappointed. The Club had pretty much filled up before we even began at 21:00. We’ve started to institute a revolving set list system to help us keep fresh the songs that sometimes get put on a back burner and forgotten. So, the sets are a bit more interesting now as we pull out stuff we don’t normally play. That Georgia Satellites tune was on there again, but try as we might, we couldn’t purposely throw Dale off tempo. Bobby tossed in some double 16th note kicks, and I stood right next to Dale stomping on the floor in an altogether different tempo and rhythm. No dice. He wasn’t to be shaken on this night. We all had a blast trying, though. Welcome to the world of live music.

I must say that the scenery this night was almost as good as the previous night at Fairmount. One young lady who danced in front of the stage all night had on a white tank top with the saying “F**k Off! I’m with the Band!” She wasn’t, of course, but it’s nice to know that those girls are still out there for the bar stars willing to indulge themselves.

The sets this night were more straight forward. We played from 21:00 to 01:00; four 45-minute sets with 20-minute breaks. As usual, we gave them our standard Baha Rock Club/BenWahBob “Big Rock Ending” at the end of the night. We whipped out Immigrant Song, then What You’re Doing, Paranoid, and War Pigs to close out the evening’s festivities. That was kind of fun.

When I went to the parking garage to retrieve my van, I couldn’t help but notice that the St. Charles Police were in full force on Main Street. They had one guy in a Jeep pulled over at the intersection in front of the bar, and another just a couple of blocks north. By the time I had my gear loaded into the van, the cop cars were gone and the Jeep was up on a tow truck. I didn’t stick around long this night either, as I was tired and just wanted to put behind me the long drive home. As I was sliding in a CD, Dale pulled up and asked if I was listening to Queensryche for the drive home. “Nope…Liquid Tension Experiment tonight,” was my response. Hmmm…I haven’t listened to Queensryche for quite some time. I believe I’m long overdue for a dose of Mindcrime.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home