The Life of A Working Guitar Player

It must seem like I don’t play out that often, but really I usually have several dates per month.  It’s just that most of them are private so I don’t post them up here.

Private gigs are always funny. Tuesday night Laura and I happened to be on the same gig with the Crown Five band (I guess we were the Crown Six that night.)

First, we get to the Long Beach Hilton only to discover that we’re not in the International Ballroom (the big one) but the Catalina Room. We get there and the stage is the size of a postage stamp. The whole place maybe sat 100 people.

I can’t remember the name of the company we played for, but I usually can’t at this point in my life. I opened up my pedalboard case, took out my Keeley BD2, and put the rest of the toys away. There was barely enough room on the stage even for me. Laura’s horns had to reside off the stage on the floor. As did the monitors and mains.

I played through my Matchless Chieftain which should have been about right, but because of the shoebox we were in was waaaaayyy too loud. My knees enjoyed the sound, but my ears had no idea what was going on because I couldn’t tilt the cabinet or stand far enough in front of it to hear. I should have brought my 10 watt practice amp….

The first 30 minutes was cocktail jazz with some xmas tunes thrown in. Laura and I brought books with xmas tunes and they were fun. We took about a 30 minute break, then continued with cocktail hour standards and a couple of old motown tunes for about an hour.

At that point we got what are politely called “vendor meals.” These are the meals that the hotels arrange for the “vendors” (the band) instead of the buffet like the guests.

This is actually not the norm with most of our gigs. Most clients happily feed the band as well as everyone else. In fact, one of the gigs we did a couple of weeks back (Hunsaker and something I think) we actually got a table and a full spread like everyone else.

This particular vender meal was not fit for man or beast, so it was off to Del Taco on the way home. Good times.

The dance sets were pretty fun. These folks were ready to party and after our “dinner” and some raffles and awards, we played another hour of dance music for the folks and called it a night.

Not the best gig ever, but certainly not the worst.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

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If you came down to Java Joe’s last night, thank you, and we hope you had as much fun as we did.

Laura, myself, Mark Smith (bass), Jon Kubis (keys), Matt Tav (drums), Joe Harris (trumpet), and Jeff Slagle (trombone) burned through a bunch of tunes like The House Is Rockin’, Route 66, some blues stuff, and even a few dance tunes.

We went under the name Yardsale, and it looks like this will become a fairly regular thing in case you missed it.

For me, one of the highlights was Jon’s horn arrangement for my song, Louisiana Holiday, that Laura put him up to doing. I haven’t played that song in many months, and it was always a dream of mine to hear it done that way. Huge thanks to Jon for the work, and of course to my lovely wife for thinking to have him do it. I didn’t even know until we were up there playing that it was done… very cool.

Sorry we forgot the video camera (and the regular camera too for that matter.) But we’ll take pix next time and I’ll get them up on youtube or some such thing.

My next gig is at Harrah’s Rincon with Hello Cleveland on the 14th. I have a bunch of corporate and private functions through the rest of the year and then we’ll see what shapes up.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone….

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Well, the October 27th date seems to have fallen through.

They didn’t count on the fact that we would need electricity where we were going to play…..

The good news is, look for us playing under the name Yardsale at Java Joe’s in Yorba Linda starting in November/December.

I’ll post dates as I have them.

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