IT WAS HELL, OR WARM ENOUGH TO QUALIFY

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

As I sit here sweltering in the London summer with the temperature slightly over 20 Celsius after 9:00 PM, it’s still nothing like all those years I lived in Arizona. It was only some seven years after our family had left Tucson and I was now living in San Francisco, where summer usually held off until late August or September, but anywhere inland and you felt the full wrath of summer. The subject of today’s reminiscence was a gig almost exactly 50 years ago this week, about 40 miles east of San Fran, at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. Already sounds menacing, don’t it?

We were booked for a Saturday afternoon at this particular military base for some celebration of a boatload of soldiers docking after several months on the water. At least I think that’s what the celebration was, but then we were told very little, and would find out everything after the gig was over, or at least when WE thought it was over.

We had a manager who wasn’t great at his job, but he had integrity, and that let us stay with him until our two-year contract with him expired. Sadly, he was dealing with a lot of people to whom the word integrity only meant a word that almost rhymed with titties. One such horrible person was the responsible party for this debacle.

The booker was an unscrupulous man who preached to our manager about how great this business was that you can book an act, ask them if they’ll work for $1000 a week, and if they say yes, demand maybe $2000 from the venue and pocket the difference. He was trying to explain to our manager that this was common practice. Our manager related the conversation back to us, how after the guy insisted that pocketing cash was common practice, his first words were, “OK Frank (I’m pretty sure that was his name), let’s assume for a moment that you’re an honourable man…” He wasn’t.

We were performing in the open air with the outside temperature 104 Fahrenheit (40 C), or in other words, freaking hot! We managed to survive an hour-long set with the promise that we could take an hour break between sets and use the swimming pool. Thankfully, we were told beforehand that we should bring swimming gear, and this may have been the only promise that was kept. Frank was there for our first set, and congratulated us on a job well done, then said we could get by with one more set, but if we wanted to swim and have some food, we were more than welcome. He left shortly after our set, with the promise of plenty of work for later on. Of course, we didn’t know about the conversation he’d had with our manager, who unfortunately wasn’t there that day. We would most certainly need him there later.

Frank had assured us several times that one more set would be fine, and even though we’d taken an hour between sets to swim and eat, there was still a very receptive audience hanging around. We had, all things considered, a really fun second set and got a pretty sustained applause at what we thought was the final number. We thanked the audience for braving the heat and started to pack up our instruments. Then up came some sort of events manager who hit me with the interjection, “Wait a minute, you guys owe us five more hours!” I said I knew nothing of such an arrangement, and wasn’t going to budge from it because it was still over 100 degrees. To top it off, our drummer was throwing up from being out in the heat all that time.

The events manager then produced a contract signed by Frank but not by our manager saying that we were to perform for NINE HOURS! Our manager would have never agreed to such a contract. We could also see that the amount of money paid to Frank was considerably more than we were promised, and I was impressed by my partner saying to them in so many words, “You guys got ripped off, and we won’t accept the blame for any of this.” That would all have been fine if we didn’t have to deal with drunk military assholes asserting such pearls of wisdom as “I didn’t spend two years on a boat so these pussies can rip us off!” They really threw their vitriol on our poor drummer, suffering from fatigue and heat prostration, at one point making threatening gestures. It may have been because he had the longest hair of any of us, Ruby included. I don’t even remember how we got out of there without being physically attacked, but I’m pretty sure that if my partner hadn’t been female we would have had a much more difficult route to our cars.

We did get our money, didn’t have to do additional sets, and happily never dealt with Frank again. I do hope he got his just desserts. We would do quite a few military gigs over the years, and quite a few of them were awful, but at least no incidents or threats happened at any of them. Hope you enjoy your summer wherever you are.

June 22nd, 2023



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