ONE OF MY MOST BIZARRE GIGS EVER, AND IT WAS A FREEBIE

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

This story doesn’t mark a banner year of any specific kind, but it was 49 years ago, which is close enough to 50, so let’s tell it! In 1973, we started working with backing musicians for the first time, as we agreed that the two of us with one guitar would have difficulty playing larger venues. Adding the musicians did work for us, in that we got to play a show at a venue then called The Village that became many names over the years. We played it when it was The Boarding House in the early 80’s, I played it as a DJ when it was a punk disco called X’s, and also played it in the 2000’s when it was Cobb’s Comedy Club.

At the 1973 Village gig, the other acts on the bill were gay-themed, thus the audience was about 90% gay. We discovered (and this was about the same time Bette Midler first hit) that gay audiences love trashy ladies, and Ruby filled that bill, so we did very well. So well in fact that we were invited to play a birthday party a couple weeks later for a 300-pound transvestite who went by the name Lady Divine. This is the same person who had already dropped the Lady in his name, and had developed a cult following from her first feature film, “Pink Flamingos.” I suppose if we had known then that this was the same person who ate dog shit on camera as a grand finale to that film, we might have had some second thoughts.

It wasn’t even Divine that booked us for the party, it was a friend we shared the bill with that night at The Village named Pristine Condition. Pristine also had a minor cult following, having been a member of The Cockettes, a satirical dance troupe of drag queens. Keith/Pristine thought we would be perfect for Divine’s party, and though there was no money available to pay us, we thought “Oh yeah, it’ll be great exposure.” We just didn’t have any idea what we’d be “exposed” to.

The venue was a private residence on Valencia Street in SF’s Mission District that had a huge front room where easily 100 people could fit. When we arrived, there were probably that many, maybe more, already there, already high on any number of substances, and in varying degrees of undress. There was nothing in terms of lighting that was going to give us any of the crowd’s focus. Then there was also the problem of finding a place where a five-piece band could actually set up and have enough room to perform, or for that matter, breathe! Oh, and of course the sound system was terribly distorted and not very well grounded, so we all got occasional shocks if we got too close to the microphones.

With all that was going on around us, and wondering how we were going to navigate through this chaos, we got another upstaging. A young woman was brought in, totally naked, on a crucifix! Thankfully, she wasn’t nailed to it, only tied, but still, how do you follow that? We were just a little band that played oldies and had some little comic sketches to pass the time between songs. I think we might have been just a bit too mainstream for this room.

While waiting for that little scene to acclimate itself to its surroundings, we were then told that a special guest, a singer named Kathi McDonald, who had toured and recorded as one of Leon Russell’s backing singers, and also sang on a Rolling Stones album, was going to sing “Happy Birthday.” She was clearly very drunk, and bluesed it up until the song was unrecognisable, expanding its length to nearly five minutes, while encouraging Ruby to sing along with her. Bless my partner for not completely losing it after Kathi had accidentally shoved the mic straight into Ruby’s mouth. Thankfully she wasn’t hurt, totally keeping her composure, and though we didn’t think too much of Ms. McDonald that night, she did become a friend soon after.

At that time, there were moments in our act where I was soloing while she prepared a costume change. Not that costuming really mattered in this instance, as just about everyone in the room was out-bizarring us. Still, it was during one of those moments when she was off the stage that we enlisted her to literally “pass the hat,” so our efforts wouldn’t go completely in vain. Back then I often wore a derby hat, which I really didn’t look that good in anyway. I had it this night, and Ruby started to pass it around to see if we could get any pocket change. She lost sight of where the hat had gone until she eventually saw a guy walking out the front door wearing it!

Losing that hat may have been a blessing in disguise, but for the moment, we were enduring a torturous 45 minutes where there was so much going on in the room that for our act to make any kind of impact was pressing the boundaries of reality. We were content to just lick our wounds and be thankful that even if we made no money that night, all that was lost was a derby hat and not a guitar or amplifier. But something good did come out of this debacle.

In spite of getting only courtesy applause from the few who were actually noticing us and liking it, we did manage to make a really good contact out of that gig. An eccentric artist named Wilfried Satty was greatly impressed, and over the years we played many a party in his North Beach house where he hosted many of the San Francisco Artistes, some of whom we admired and were tickled that they felt the same way about us. We never met Divine again, but that night, he was one of only a handful who acknowledged us and paid us compliments. For that I’m happy for his mainstream success, and that the dog shit thing became more of a footnote.

May 22nd, 2022



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