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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Rags to riches
Rags to riches
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Rubes
341 posts
Jun 12, 2011
4:26 AM
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How's this....5 minutes before the gig, our P.A. Blows up! also, our lead singer has just about lost his voice with a throat infection.....:~{.
A call to our sound guy mate finds him not working tonight and armed with a new amp he turns up in 10 minutes and has us up and running! What a saviour!! Also, we had undersold ourselves a bit, but the venue owner was well impressed and pays us double the agree amount and the crowd was great!
What began as a possible catastrophe ended quite the opposite. We sell some CDs and this guy books us in for his wedding for a thousand bucks!!! Woo-hoo. :~}
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Tommy the Hat
37 posts
Jun 12, 2011
4:31 AM
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That's great Rubes...funny how things work out sometimes after an initial panic. One piece of information missing from the story though.....something I was waiting for (like the tension built from a great solo...lol). What did you do about a singer??
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Seven times down Eight times up
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Rubes
342 posts
Jun 12, 2011
4:48 AM
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We're actually a trio so he explained to the crowd the situation, and we know our stuff so us other two had to do a lot more singing. He had to carry on with a bit of lip syncing, a lot of Tom Waits type noises, and heaps of charm! :~)
Ps also we do originals so that's just how the songs were supposed to sound....right!
Last Edited by on Jun 12, 2011 4:50 AM
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Jehosaphat
60 posts
Jun 12, 2011
4:19 PM
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Funny how some guys can cope with all sorts of emergencies on the stage.
We were playing a gig one night and the drummer blew out his bass drum skin,no spares on hand so without any drama queen stuff he just flipped his Tom tom drum onto its side,put a couple of nails into the stage to hold it* and used that for the rest of the night as his kick drum.
Hey it was a bikers clubhouse,they supplied the nails.;-)
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eharp
1328 posts
Jun 12, 2011
4:30 PM
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it was a rental kit, too!
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Rubes
343 posts
Jun 12, 2011
4:57 PM
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My mate was getting a bit stressed as I was trying to placate him with,'Umm.....we'll just have to go unplugged!', but he wasn't listening! Here's where the dynamics of a tight trio helped us overcome that mental barrier, and we just did our stuff.
Actually we undersold ourselves a LOT, cause we've been together just three years, and are still really trying to work out how much we are actually WORTH.
I was going to title this thread 'Underselling yourself is easy', and rant on a bit in that direction cause I know a lot of us guys are at or about that stage, but Toxic Tone sorta covered that one.
The wedding guy is a friendly youngish quite business savvy bloke whom we've gotten to know, and after the gig at the band 'debrief', seemed quite keen to promote us.
Lets face it, your product is supposed to be as flawless as possible, but if it's not, you improv and smile a lot.....:~) :~) :~)
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jbone
548 posts
Jun 12, 2011
8:13 PM
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i thrive on improv. we had a weekend in clarksdale a few years ago where i had a bronchial infection and i was singing 2/3 of our material. at the end of a lot of lines of the verses i would have to cough, so i sort of incorporated it into the act that night, until i just couldn't even speak, which is when i leaned over to my wife and told her, it's your show, sing everything you can, and i just stuck to blowing harp.
another time a band i was with, i had booked 3 gigs in 2 days, a friday night which went well, a saturday afternoon at of all places the airport which also went well, and a saturday night which was a blowout. we were turned up quite a bit because it was a bigger place and we had quite a crowd. my voice was showing a lot of strain that night, but i put it all out there and we made the night. next day i could not utter a single word. my voice finally recovered about wednesday.
i learned to sing in the first place when the "good" singer quit a band in the 90's and we couldn't rely on the one guy who was left. so i began learning to sing 2 weeks before our next gig. it took me some years to get where i didn't blow my voice out before the end of the second set.
we also once were nearly set upwhen we realized- no brain for the p.a., and it was 35 minutes each way to get it. so the rhythm player took off and went to get it while the gal singer and i swapped off my green bullet/'62 princeton amp for vocals and harp. we did a set that way and most of another set.
playing live you never know what might happen. i've had amps blow up, fights break out, the power go off, the a/c crap out in 105 degrees, the heat quit when it was 25 out. cars breakdown. fender benders on the way to a gig or the studio.
i do love original songs because you can do what you need to in a situation.
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