The afternoon before a performance is spent relaxing, watching a couple of concert DVDs, drinking lots of water, and warming up the singing voice. Sometime around 3 o’clock, I’ll pack my gear into my car, including the clothes I will wear on stage – three or four white cotton shirts, black dress pants, black vest and shoes. The band members and sound man arrive at the venue around three hours early, so we’ll meet at 6 for a 9 o'clock start. We haul speakers, string cables, tune our guitars, and complete a sound check, usually playing one or two warm up songs to make sure our levels and our mix are set properly for the room acoustics. Then, I find a quiet place to sit and calm my nerves.
Set up and tear down take nearly three hours, sometimes longer. We generally play from three to four hours per night. Add in travel time and expense, plus countless rehearsal hours, and it becomes obvious that we’re not in this for the few dollars we might take home at the end of the night.
We are doing this for the shear pleasure of making music we love and sharing that music with an appreciative audience. When we’re not attracting patrons and filling chairs or barstools, club owners are unhappy because they’re not making money, and we’re unhappy because we are denied the one thing that drives us as performers.
The lounge in the Number 5 Restaurant is the place to be on Friday and Saturday nights for young professionals. I have never been in there as a customer when the bar and the dance floor were not packed with people. As many as four bartenders are usually kept hustling all night. Yet for our first appearance there, we played for our wives and a handful of strangers scattered around a few tables and along the bar. Thankfully, I did not see the owner all night. We were scheduled to play until 1:30 a.m., but the manager stopped us a half hour early because the bar was deserted and the lights had been turned up. As my band mates were packing up, I approached one of the bartenders and apologized for the slow business. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You guys are good. It’s the weather. It’s always slow on the first nice Saturday of the year.”
There might have been some truth to what she was saying, but I had a feeling that the weather would not be blamed when liquor sales were tallied the next morning.
Our next job was to have taken place the following week, but it was postponed due to a communication breakdown. I had stopped into the Wine Cellar Tavern a few weeks earlier to see the owner, a long-time friend. “There’s someone here who wants to meet you,” she said as soon as I walked in the door. She led me to one of the men sitting at the bar and introduced him as the manager of a local American Legion Post. He told me that he was interested in hiring my band, so I referred him to Bob, our lead guitarist who also acts as our booking agent, and within days we were confirmed for a Friday night gig.
Three weeks later – just four days before we were scheduled to appear – Bob called the American Legion and asked for the manager. A woman’s voice said, “I’m the manager.” She was surprised to learn that our band was planning to perform there that weekend. She explained that the man who had hired us had stepped down as manager, and that she knew nothing about our arrangement with him. It was too late to stock up on food and liquor to cover the extra business our band would generate, she said. We agreed to postpone our appearance for two weeks.
As it turned out, the extra food and alcohol were not necessary.
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