ANOTHER HELLISH GIG, WHICH WE DIDN’T EVEN DO

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

This is not an anniversary of anything, just a remembrance of the stamina I used to have in my younger days while pursuing that dream. My partner and I spent the better part of the mid-1970s working in Lake Tahoe, where we met lots of people that thought they could do something for/with us. One of the people we met in Tahoe was working a lounge act at Harvey’s Casino, but was based in Vegas, where he had his own booking agency and management company. He wanted to work with us, and we should have learned our lesson by now. We wound up going on the wildest goose chase of our career, driving a total of about 1300 miles, and persuaded three musician friends, who drove even further, to join us for this folly.

I would mention this guy by name, except that as of 2019, he was still around at age 92, running a successful music shop in the LA suburb of Claremont with his sons. I would have thought by his terrible way of doing business that he would have been disposed of long ago. This man had already ripped us off for one gig where he booked us at $1500 for a week at Nellis Air Force Base in late 1975, then took a 10% booking fee from our total while the venue paid him $2000. Basically he pocketed $650, while five of us had to divvy up the remaining $1350. I’ve talked many times about this common practice, and don’t know why we gave him a second chance after we had found out his true colours.

So the man calls us in spring of 1976 with a full-week gig in Salt Lake City, Utah that would start on a Monday. We were just finishing up a month-long stint in Tahoe, so we rounded up our favourite musicians, who drove up from San Francisco on the Sunday to meet us. The plan was we’d make an overnight drive of the 550 miles to Utah, find lodging, then have a nap before starting the gig. It was a nice plan, and we arrived there at about 8:00 in the morning. We found a cheap motel, got a bit of sleep, then called the venue in the early afternoon. We identified ourselves, and the man we talked to said, “That’s odd, cause there’s a band already setting up here!”

Turning the clock back a couple days, we last spoke to this guy in Vegas (Let’s call him “Ed”) on the previous Friday, and he assured us everything was ok and we could tell our backup band that the gig was on. There was no way to reach Ed over the weekend, which put us in an even more precarious situation, but we never thought to make a long distance call to Salt Lake City and make certain the gig was happening. We trusted humanity a bit too much.

The first call I made after getting the news from the venue was to the musicians. Joe Crane, one of the most brilliant musicians I ever met, answered the phone, and when I told him what was going on, in his heavy Texas drawl, he only exclaimed, “Bra-a-ahhn,” a couple times, followed by a nervous giggle. He had been ripped off in so many ways in his short life (he died in 1980 of Leukemia at age 34), so to him it was just another experience he could add to his tote board.

A few minutes later I went to the room the band was staying in and called Ed collect (remember that option?), and he accepted the charges. He said, “Oh didn’t I tell you? The venue passed on your act.” I got indignant, screaming at him, “Isn’t it your responsibility to let us know that before we have three musicians drive 750 miles?” He kept insisting it was my fault, and there was no apology. How I managed to avoid saying “Fuck you” was an amazing amount of self control. Thankfully that was the last conversation I would ever have with him. Ruby gave the guys $100 to help them drive home. We would all spend the night in Salt Lake, then begin the laborious drive back to San Francisco the next day.

Our nightmare should have been over, but the poor guys in the band had trouble with their truck along the way back, and didn’t get back to SF until a day later than they hoped. Ruby and I meanwhile went all the way along Interstate 80, and passing through Nevada, she decided she wanted to gamble in one of the roadside casinos near the California border. It was already well after midnight, and I thought maybe I’d catch a bit of sleep in the casino while she did that. As it turned out, I didn’t sleep at all until I was back in the car driving two hours later!

We still had four hours drive back to SF, and she fell asleep right away. I was groggy but kept saying to myself, “Oh I’ll be fine, just keep the radio on, sing along with the tunes, maybe do a little dance in my seat.” Then I woke up just in time to see the car was only a few feet away from hitting one of the highway reflectors on the shoulder. I manoeuvred back into my lane, but stubbornly refused to pull over and instead just kept driving, not telling Ruby about my luck, such as it was. I felt myself nodding off several times during that drive, but was actually happy when we arrived in San Francisco during morning rush hour, a wake up call if there ever was one.

As for Ed, I never bothered him again, and we let our two year contract with him expire, during which time we started getting well known in our home city. I jokingly said to Ruby during our success run, “Do you think I should call Ed and see if he’s got any gigs for us?” She said no, that he might take me seriously. She was probably right.

July 29th, 2023



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