WORKING (UNKNOWINGLY) FOR THE MOB

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

OK, Trump is no longer President and I’ve gotten my first Covid jab, so a lot of my anxieties of the past few months are alleviated. While I’m still in Lockdown, I plan to use some of this time to reflect on things that I’m amazed I can still remember from 20, 30, 40, and in this case FIFTY years ago. I have many stories to tell, now it’s just a matter of finding the discipline and impetus to actually put them in writing. So here goes.

This story takes place in the town of Belmont, California, about 25 miles south of San Francisco, in late January, 1971. The dream that I and my U. of Redlands colleagues had was to some extent falling apart, and we had to face the reality that making a living doing what we want to do is not always going to be glamorous. Our manager was another U of R friend who jumped at the chance to have us working a single venue for a whole month, 5 nights a week, at a decent pay. On the surface, it looked workable. From the first night of the first week, with 19 more gigs to go, it was plain this was going to be anything but.

The club was a dinner house with a seating capacity of about 50, but with very dim lighting. We prided ourselves on being a visual act, as our 50s Grease look helped define what the heck we were doing up there. The visual aspect was put on the back burner. There were 6 people to greet our debut, two of them actual fans. Hard to be very showy in those circumstances, but we gave it our all. It was a very tough four hours (3 hour-long sets with about 20 minutes break), and the whole first week was that way, with a slight reprieve on the weekend, when we had as many as 20. We were hating every minute.

And so it went for two weeks, compounded by getting hassled by a musicians union rube who was there to tell us we were in violation of union rules by not being members. This same asshole, with slicked back white hair and repulsive breath, actually stepped on stage one night as we started another horrendous foray into show business hell, and put his hand on my guitar, trying to stop us performing. Our drummer took the initiative that night and said to him, “Look, we’ll talk to you at our break.” He left, but he succeeded in making us feel we were breaking some law. And just to make things suck even more, our sax player’s jacket was stolen from our “dressing room,” which was actually a very cold wine storage room.

Our reprieve, though we didn’t recognise it as that at the time, came just before we were going to start our third week, when we were unceremoniously fired from the gig, with no compensation for the cancelled dates. We tried to weigh the plusses and minuses of this gig being over prematurely, but couldn’t deny that we were sort of depending on that pay check, and weren’t in the position where we could easily find another venue.

We did the only thing we thought we could do: We took the club owner to small claims court. This would turn out to be a course in Justice 101. We had a contract that was clearly broken, but the club owner, who was well connected in Belmont, claimed in response to our suit that his business “had been damaged irreparably” by our use of 4-letter words on stage. We let our manager represent us, and one of the first things the judge said to him was, “Were not the words, shit, fuck, and bullshit used by the performers?” He couldn’t deny that, and yes, we had been cautioned about it, and yes, we used the f-word after the cautioning, but to the only decent crowd we had the entire run, who laughed at the word’s use. Our manager was the only one present at these court hearings, so it was a losing battle from the get-go. The one person who could have helped us was the club’s manager, who liked us, and had been summarily fired. Had we summoned him, we might have had a chance, but that’s hindsight. The judge’s verdict was quickly delivered against us.

About a year later, we found out the whole story behind that club. The band had broken up, and Rick & Ruby was in the nascent phase of our career. Someone came up to us after a gig, telling us how much he liked us, and had also been a fan of the band. Turned out he was a cousin of the club owner, and that his cousin was the Black Sheep of a notorious crime family. It was a noticeable name, but he had changed it ever so slightly, for the sake of distancing himself. (I’m keeping that name anonymous, because, hey, you never know..) Turns out the man had fingered his own family to the authorities in one of their covert operations, but rather than kill him, they just decided to make sure every business venture he ever got into would fail on a grand scale. Maybe that explains why the club had to deal with a stink bomb, whose residue permeated the club for most of the second week. It’s anyone’s guess as to how soon or whether he ever actually figured out what was going on.

Oddly, Rick & Ruby worked that same venue (with the same name) a couple years later, and I truly didn’t recognise the look of the room, but it was clear the would-be mobster was not in charge. Maybe that explains why the gig was lovely, and a total antithesis of what had gone before.

January 26th, 2021



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