A HOLIDAY THAT BECAME A TWO-YEAR GIG

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

Things were not changing fast enough in Show Biz World. 50 years ago this month we were working a horrible underpaying gig that required us to drive from San Francisco to Cotati (about 70 miles each way) four nights a week, working from 9:00 to 1:30, so that when the time on the road was put into the equation, we were earning about $3.00 an hour. That was our base pay, not figuring in gasoline and the fact that the corrupt thug of a club owner was taking taxes out of our pay.

Something had to change, and we had a week in July 1975 where my parents were going up to Lake Tahoe. They invited me and my stage partner to come up and join them. They offered to pay for a motel room and to get us tickets for the headliner show at Harrah’s, more on that further along. We had by then decided that the onstage partnership was more solid than the offstage one, so we could stay in the same motel room as best friends, and that was fine. The whole trip would be four days, so we took a well-needed week off from our Cotati gig.

On speculation, we decided to bring my guitar and amplifier and a few props, allowing that just maybe there was a chance we could audition for a gig there. We found names of some of the venues, all on the California side (the city of South Lake Tahoe straddles the Nevada border), as well as the persons in charge. The first name we had on our list of three was a motel/restaurant/bar called The Waystation, which had a cabaret room that seated about 100. The manager of the venue was willing to give us an audition, and we found out later that their entertainment wasn’t drawing well and they were on the verge of discontinuing it.

I always did a few minutes to start our show, which continued for the duration. On this particular audition, I was left to do more than just a few minutes, as Ruby was having difficulty getting into her costume. After several fake intros for her with no response, I finally took initiative and did one more bit that ate up about three minutes. That turned out to be enough time for her to make a dazzling entrance and the rest of our half hour went smoothly. The owner was pleased and offered us five nights a week for an indefinite run, with lodging at the hotel, which had its own private beach on the lake, as well as a $20 a day food allotment from the coffee shop. I think our pay on top of that was $250 a week each, which, compared to the money we had been used to making, was a king’s ransom. We also had an unlimited bar tab whenever we worked.

Once the gig was certified, we were in a festive mood, and we would start our run three weeks later. We started around the second week of August, worked for eight weeks, went back to San Francisco for a month or so, then returned to Tahoe and worked from November until the end of the year. On the day we passed that audition, I remember returning to my car and mumbling to myself, “Damn, we’re working Tahoe.” It wasn’t as big as headlining in Vegas, but it was steady work in a single place, and we could pay all our bills back home rather comfortably.

On the same night after we had gotten the gig, we went with my parents to see the headliner show at Harrah’s. The big casinos still hired the mostly easy listening acts, though later in the year Tahoe would start presenting Rock shows in its casinos, beginning with Alice Cooper. The show we went to see with my parents was possibly the best show I’ve ever seen as far as having one delight after another in the 90 minutes we watched. The headliner was Liberace, who had a supporting cast of about 100, but the show was so dazzling for its time I could only assume that theatrical acts of the day like Cooper, Elton John, David Bowie, Bette Midler, and our San Francisco buddies The Tubes had probably all seen Liberace’s show in some form and got inspiration from it.

We were inspired by it as well, and we would also watch a lot of the acts in the casinos’ main showrooms (The Carpenters were sensational, and until I saw them, they bored the crap out of me!) as well as in the cabarets, looking forward to the time that we would work in those same venues. We had our chance in October 1979 at Harrah’s Cabaret and absolutely despised every freaking minute of the seven days we were there. I remember saying to myself during a particularly boring night “We don’t need this shit, we’ve opened for Robin Williams and Bill Cosby!” We had also signed with ICM, at the time the second biggest talent agency after William Morris Agency (who had also courted us). Harrah’s suddenly seemed small potatoes in comparison.

Our Waystation/Tahoe gig meanwhile lasted the better part of two years, but by the beginning of 1977, we started getting acknowledgements in our home town. It was a welcome change after all those thousands of miles driven on various cars over the space of nearly seven years. There was an artistic community in San Francisco that flourished during the late 1970’s, and we were honoured to be not just a part of it, but to become a significant and influential part as well. I like to think all those nights in Tahoe gave us an impetus to experiment with our stage time. Creatively, the gig was a godsend.

July 13th, 2025



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