Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

This is from another thread but thought it was a good idea for a separate thread:

I got one for you. I met a 16 YO female blues singer and guitar playing phenomenom about 5 years ago, I mean she was unbelievable for her age and playing blues at that. We started a band and our first gig was opening for Kenny Wayne Shepard at The Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, it holds about 2000-3000 people and was mobbed. I had just bought an SVT head with "new" (grrrr) tubes in it. I turned it on and left it on standby, later it was time to go on. I put the standby switch on and it blew a fuse. We were a three piece band, I played the whole set half originals and half covers with absolutely no bass sound, (it was in the moniters, but very softly) the drummer of course also got nothing. Right before the last song I asked the moniter guy to turn it up and it sounded like a bass amp right in front of me. Now that was a nerve wracking night, I have a CD of it and it sounds pretty good considering. They had us open again next time they came around so it couldn't have been that bad. The girl didn't even know it! I suggested to her that perhaps she ought to listen to the band a little more when we played.

I was 17, playing in a 3 piece folk outfit, two guitars and a tamborine. We played in a pub with a crowd that wasn't really interested - plenty of heckles - which was nice (not). This was in the early 80's - we tried starting the folk revival but I think Duran Duran and the like had other ideas! First song in the lead guitarist snapped a string, then I lost two in one song (I played 12 string so plenty of spares there), he then lost another - now 4 string lead guitar can be tricky - especially when the crowd are laughing! I then lost another. I'd never known a night like it for snapping strings! It all finally fell apart when the tamborine man hit it a little too hard , cracked the tamborine in half and showered the first row in tamborine bells!! I don't remember playing there again!! - beat that for a nerve wracking gig............

I was also 17...playing bass in a 'progressive rock' band in Mesa, Az...1975. It was probably our twelfth gig. We got booked somehow to play at a bar somewhere south of Chandler. I had a bad feeling about the deal, but we took it 'cause a gig's a gig, right? It turned out to be a cowboy bar. We decided during load-in that there was no way they were going to like us, so when it was time to go on, we blared a tape of the Overture from Two Hundred Motels through the p.a., took the stage and opened up with Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part 2. We played an abbreviated set of the heaviest s* we had and finished with J. Hendrix's Fire...grabbed the gear and literally ran out the door. There was some grousing later about not getting paid, but I considered us lucky still to have gear, much less life and limb.

The patrons must have been 'stunned'...

YES! Zappa to cowboys! The Master is laughing in his ashes right now! Divine retribution, etc. What I wanna know is this:

Have things gotten better or worse since then?

Uh, don't answer that...

You're right, I won't...

On with this thread! It should be a good one.

...(I think we did play some YES that evening...Five Percent For Nothing, probably)...

I played an Eagles or Lions club a few years ago ... even before we plugged in there were old geezers coming up and handing us sheets of paper that went on and on about not playing too loud ... I think they wanted a wedding type band or something ... also they have a rule you can't say the F word in their club ... well the young people loved us but the blue hairs hated us and were quite vocal telling us about it ... so for our last set we turned up our 6000 watt PA and got the subs thumping ... and we played "She F@$#ing hates me" by Puddle of Mud ... just to **** them off more ...

so the moral of the story is don't play modern rock for people who want to hear Benny Goodman ...

And vice versa.

I got another one.
I opened for a popular local band at an outside gig with again probably a couple of thousand people sometime during the mid 70's (who were not there for us), they were kind of a Greatful Dead type sounding band and we were a hard rock band, we had rehearsed a whole non-stop Who set including My Generation and lots of other Entwistle intricate stuff all run together like a big long medley.
I broke my brand new Rotosound D string during the 2nd song! haha! This was a three piece band. I don't remember much after that.