Strange gigs
st point sciencedept
>
>TWoodle
In 1983 my band played on an Indian reservation at a bar called the Mole
Hole. The bar was open 24 hours and we played from 11PM to 4AM to an
enthusiastic and drunken crowd during a blizzard.
Another time we played bluegrass on a pontoon boat with an electrical
generator, and the PA speakers pointed toward the lakeshore. The lakeshore
was the site of a large county fair with a water sports theme, so we played
as the boat moved up and down the shoreline. During our breaks, athletes
performed water skiing tricks.
One time we played a rough tavern in northern Wisconsin and a fight broke
out, which was apparently commonplace in this joint. The audience had been
unappreciative that night and my attitude was bad so I had the band strike
up "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" until the fight broke up.
We played at a college of natural resources field studies station in a
remote region of northern Wisconsin. It was raining so we played inside the
small cook shack. All the students packed in, along with several
half-barrels of beer. Soon, there was 1/2 inch of beer on the floor, and the
students began doing body slides through the beer on the "dance floor" in
front of the band. Then all of a sudden I realized a bed had been placed in
front of the band, with a person lying in it. A student who was bedridden
with the flu had been carried in by his pals! Apparently they had final
exams the next day; and since we played from 8 to 12 I don't know how they
made it.
I've played for two Harley biker club rallies in the late 1970's and will
never play another one. Rude behavior, people running the bikes in front of
the band, big tit contests, being forced to drink bad booze, and someone
pulling a pistol - this is just too much for me (although they liked the
bluegrass).
Let's hear about some more weird gigs! Art Stevenson
Steven R. Edelman
was the "FAST BROS." One night, I think it was a Friday, we were in our
second set. I looked down at the bar, which ran the length of the stage,
and thought I saw a guy take a bite out of his glass. When I took a second
look I saw that he not only took a bite, he chewed it up and swallowed it.
While we played a few tunes he proceeded to eat the glass right down to the
base. I guess it was too hard for him to bite. This guy, who I thought
should have been bleeding his ever-loving tongue off, just barely had any
blood dripping out of his mouth. When he got up to leave he almost fell
flat on his face! I often wonder how this all came out. Never saw him again.
Slim
Often retiring sideman and RN
Peter Fraissinet
Played for a lesbian wedding once. Banjo/fiddle duets, unmiked, outdoors in
a garden. Not so much strange as unusual, and we were very much appreciated.
Peter Fraissinet
West Danby, NY
the Crispin Household
July parade & could just picture the scene each time the truck came to a
stop. It all reminded me of the time several years ago the Southwest
Bluegrass Association (CA) decided to march in the Hullabaloo Days parade
at Calico.
We were complete with a band leader and banner carriers. We all lined up
in several rows, guitars first, banjos next, etc. and had one brave stand-
up bass player. The bass was placed on low wagon, pulled by a youngster,
while the bass player followed, thumping away. We played _Bile 'em Cabbage
Down_ over and over, marching with high steps to the beat. We continuously
got whistles, cheers, and applause from the viewers as we passed by. It
was sheer fun.
That night in a jam around the campfire I said, "Does anybody know _Bile
'em Cabbage Down_? and I was almost thrown out of the jam! Great memories!
*** Brenda ***
Milt Pappas
>
We were playing for 'Homecoming Day' at a country church, and right in the
middle of a rousing version of "Preaching Up A Storm", lightning struck the
steeple. The lightning knocked out all the power (no lights or PA juice),
ran down a thick grounding cable, ran across the dirt parking lot plowing a
furrow as it went! Each time it passed under a parked car, the heat blew the
tires. Honest!
A gentleman, obviously not a bluegrass fan, had snuck out to his car to have
a smoke...., and two of his tires were blown out. I don't know if this cured
his sneaking out of church, or his nicotine habit.
A dome light in my old pick-up that had not burned in years was brightly
shinning, and our fiddle player had the cruise and several instruments in
her car knocked out.
By the way, we finished the song without missing a beat!
*********************************
* Milt Pappas - Rural Hall, NC *
* Member IBMA *
*********************************
Mark Burda
represent them in the annual 4th of July parade. Not knowing how to march
and play at the same time, we opted for the back of a flat bed
semi-trailer truck lined with tumbleweeds. It wouldn't have been so bad,
except for the continuous starting and stopping of the parade. Every
time our driver put on the brakes, we would all go flying. We kept our
smiles on anyway, as proud representatives of the local American Legion.
Mark Burda
Purvis Jackson
may qualify a little. Back in the mid-70s, I played and danced in a
group called the Buck Swamp Stompers from down in Dillon County, S.C.,
and we got a gig playing a huge 4th O' July party in the outback of
Marion County on a 900 gazillion acre corporate farm. Loads of people
of all persuasions wound up there because the guys throwing the party
had put signs at key points on the highways to Myrtle Beach
advertizing the party (a refrigerated beer truck filled with kegs was
deployed for the weekend, and the barbeque included 800 chickens and
27 pigs). True to Pee Dee tradition, the cooks made about 10 big cast
iron washpots full of chicken bog (chicken, rice, onions, pepper,
sausage, salt, mushrooms), which they stirred with a small boat
paddle.
It was around midnight, I'd guess, when the party heated up. The
makeshift stage was no more than a half-dozen or so old shipping
crates with 3/4 inch plywood for the platform, which I also used for a
step-a-tune on a couple of hoedowns my nephew, Denny, could crank out
of his elbow. He had just burned up "Fire on the Mountain" with me
buck dancing like the fool I always wanted to be, a couple hundred
other fools making complete asses of themselves the while with the old
"instant clogging experts" paradigm fully evident, and we mopped
ourselves off and took a break. Denny set his fiddle on the
step-a-tune and went for beer; a drunk stumbled up to ask us to play
"You picked A Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille" and stepped jam on the
fiddle, cleanly separating the neck from the body.
Denny comes back over and freaks totally out, whereupon an argument
begins that results in a fight betwix the two of them. Denny grabs a
boat paddle from one of the chicken bog pots and swings at the guy,
slinging hot chicken bog onto everyone in the immediate vicinity.
This, in turn, led to what may well have been the biggest food fight
in the history of the planet. People were grabbing handfuls of bog and
stuffing the rice-and-chicken slime in one anothers' eyes, ears, hair,
and other orifices as available. We're talking a regular mess here,
folks, with a couple fools catapulting the bog high into the night air
by loading it onto the paddle and placing it on a rock so that they
could stomp on the handle and let fly the bog, which would disappear
up into the night air for a couple of seconds before plopping down on
the ground or some unlucky partygoer's head, the plop of which was not
exactly unlike the sound of a fat frog as it departs the edge of a
baseball bat, but that's another story.
Amazingly, no one was mad at each other after that fight. Denny
admitted it was a piece of crap fiddle anyway, and the guy who broke
it wrote him a check for $200, which Denny handed to me to cash for
him because he didn't have a bank account, you understand the
necessity of this because he was grossly underemployed for all the
years he insisted on trying to earn his living playing fiddle. You
cannot imagine the number of times I heard: "Purv, I hate to keep on
asking you for money like this, but I swear I'll pay you back every
dime of it when I get my break with Loretta Lynn or Conway Twitty or
whoever-the-hell-else it is that finally discovers me." This is where
he'd always get that distant look in his eyes and a mock-Elvis curl on
his lip, me thinking the usual yeah, yeah, yeah, knowing his fiddling
was a whole lot better than most of what the radio had to offer, but
knowing too that he had the personality of an ill rattlesnake in his
best moments. I'd fork over the dough, which to this day he hasn't
repayed, even though he got the fear of God in him 6 or 7 years ago
and has been working steady ever since.
Anyway, this particular farm had several thousand head of cattle, and
that meant thousands of mushrooms, and a particular kind of them had
been added to the chicken bog without the knowledge of the crowd at
large. I and quite a few others had eaten a big old hogchoking portion
prior to the food fight, and in a matter of minutes the texture (ahem)
of the evening had changed to involve much more color and something
akin to butterfly wings flapping about my ears. In this advanced
state of, er, conciousness, I drank 3 or so gallons of Old Milwaukee
to demonstrate to myself that I had achieved some strange state of
grace that made me virtually invincible, and this further fueled my
ascent into the new territory on the mental landscape. It seemed I
could recall every line, note, and nuance of every song I'd ever
heard, and people were handing me bills left and right to sing old
weird songs they thought I wouldn't know, and I'd peg them one after
another, dancing my fool ass off and swearing as to how me and Denny
were going to Nashville to get rich quick (we later accomplished part
1 of the oath, but that's another story). In a word folks, I was
loaded, fried, whapped, zapped, stinko.
But since all dreams have to end, I woke up with my head wedged
beneath the dashboard of a 1962 Studebaker Lark, as though I were
checking the fuse block. Somehow, I had my right foot jammed beneath
the seat on the passenger side, and my right arm twined through the
steering wheel. I struggled to free myself, pushed open the door, and
crawled into the powdery sand, which was nigh unto scorching hot there
in the July midafternoon sun. I not only realized I was in a
completely strange place, I discovered I was in someone else's car,
and it was bogged down to the axle in a fallow cotton field. I noticed
the trunk was open, and upon looking into it, I found a woman curled
up in it with her head on the spare tire wearing nairy a stitch but an
old army field jacket and a pair of worn-out black Coverse All Stars
that were way and yander too big for her feet. She was real still and
stiff looking, and I thought her to be dead. This was not a good thing
to think while the rest of reality was having such a tenuous
relationship with me.
I shook her. I noticed that her hair did not move when she did. She
cracked a crimson eye and peered at me. She raised her head, and the
blonde wig shifted to the side, exposing the short-cropped natty gray
hair and a dark line where the dust and sweat had caked against the
fabric of the wig. She smiled broadly, and I could see that she had
lost all of her teeth but three on the bottom left side. She pulled
back the coat and exposed what I took to be a young boy, fast asleep
between her thighs. She cleared her throat and spat an oyster onto
the spare tire. I could smell the odor of cavaties in her remaining
teeth, but I was somehow drawn by the tatoo on her neck: "It's the
life the bikers choose -- Bikes, Chicks, Drugs and Booze." I was
mesmorized by the way she constantly moved her tongue, flicking it
across the ridges of her gums, licking her lips after every draw she
would take off of the unfiltered Lucky Strikes she kept in her mouth
at all times. I knew this was real, honest-to-God white trash, and I
was loving every decadent minute of it, thinking how proud Marx would
be of me for having cast of the shackles of the oppressor to mingle
with these lumpenproletariats. Her name was Estelle and the boy,
who turned out to be a midget she had met in the carnival some days
earlier, was named Modine. We called him Mo; they called me Bo.
We couldn't get the Lark out of the sand, so we bided our time until
Bob, the guy who ran the farm, would come by to plow or whatever and
get us out of there. We were actually about a quarter mile from where
the party had been held. So, we lived in the Studebaker Lark there in
the cotton field for several days, taking turns walking the three
miles out to the paved road where the Shell station sold beer.
Bringing back Old Milwaukee and pork skins. Teaching the midget to
play mandolin and clog at the same time. And for a little while I
felt like we had achieved a great state, hanging out there and not
being pawns of society. Boy, they could do some funny tricks, the two
of them, and as long as I live, I'll never forget Mo dancing away on
the top of that little Studebaker, cha-changing away on the mandolin,
with Estelle singing the Cuckoo Bird, sounding for all the world like
she could've been Bobby Osborne in another life. With enough
mushrooms, I suppose anything is nigh unto possible in a head with a
lot of rooms and very little furniture. She spoke of somewhere in some
holler in Missouri; Mo talked of the sounds in the jungles of Costa
Rica, the rotten smell of the slums of Mexico City, the rainy glare
from the clean streets of Vancouver. I kept thinking of doors you can
only pass through once.
Neil Rossi
>Well, I've not done much in the way of strange things, but this one
>may qualify a little. Back in the mid-70s, I played and danced in a
>group called the Buck Swamp Stompers from down in Dillon County, S.C.,
(much levity deleted)
ROTFLMAO!!! Son, you ever think about publishing this stuff? This is prime
quality prose. More, please. Also the recipe for chicken bog (hold the
mushrooms).
--- Neil Rossi
Bo Parker
> Well, I've not done much in the way of strange things, but this one
> may qualify a little.
[snip]
> Rica, the rotten smell of the slums of Mexico City, the rainy glare
> from the clean streets of Vancouver. I kept thinking of doors you can
> only pass through once.
<stands. applauds.>
I hereby nominate Purvis Jackson for the 1996 BGRASS-L Prize in
Literature, Non-Fiction Division.
-Bo Parker
fbpa...@airnet.net
"And if one more person says to me, they can't stand the "twang," I think
I just might gingerly poke 'em in the eye. This is not like eating okra."
--Linda Ellis
Dan Mazer
You win! This is the stuff that BU should print, but doesn't have the GUTS!!!
John Wright
the Clinch Mountain Boys during their last set at a festival in Chillicothe,
Ohio, around eight years ago. At the time Ralph owed me some money for a
little banjo book I'd done for him. As soon as the set was over and we were
backstage Ralph pulled out his roll and said, "Ray, look at this," and
counted me out $200 in twenties. Curly Ray Cline, of course, knew nothing
about the banjo book debt.
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John Wright, 1137 Noyes, Evanston IL 60201, 708-475-1615, jhwr...@nwu.edu
Tom Woodle
That gig that I played in the bathtub on Main Street was in Clio, SC, about
15 clicks down the road from Dillon....and my granddaddy was a fiddle/
banjo player many years ago who lived about 5 miles out of Dillon toward
Latta. As a matter of fact, our bass player lives in Dillon now. Where the
heck are you, anyhow??
TWoodle
John Derry
"I saw a guy take a bite out of his glass. When I took a second
look I saw that he not only took a bite, he chewed it up and
swallowed it.
While we played a few tunes he proceeded to eat the glass right down
to the base. ......... When he got up to leave he almost fell flat
on his face!
>>>>> I often wonder how this all came out."<<<<<
========================================
PAINFULLY, I'D SAY.
Plink, Jack
Greg Lewis
good friend's sister's wedding. He was the bass player in our bluegrass
band, but also played guitar and sang, so his sister asked him to play
something during the ceremony (such as Lionel Richie, etc.). After a while,
he came to realize that he don't know any thing by Lionel Richie (or anyone
even remotely similar). Unfortunately, he didn't come to this realization
until about two or three hours before the ceremony!
Since I was already invited to the wedding as a guest, he asked for my
assistance. So we did what any good bluegrass players would do - we drank
two or three beers and tried to get down to business. We tossed around
several ideas by everyone from Hot Rize to John Prine to The Beatles, but
nothing seemed to make sense (or sound very good). Meanwhile the clock kept
ticking, and eventually we had to rush to the church with our guitars (but
still no song).
Once in the church, we continued to quietly discuss our options during the
procession and even after the service had begun. Finally about 5 minutes
before our slot in the service, we decided to remain within the general realm
of bluegrass and decided on 'I'll Never Love Any Body Butchew (Baby Baby)'.
The preacher pointed our direction, we stood up, I played a not- so-tidy
G-run, and we proceeded to move rapidly through the number (in 'tight' two
part harmonies). When we finished, the groom's younger brother let out with
a very loud 'alright!' (so he appeared to enjoy it) but everyone else in the
church was strangely quiet (although the preacher actually had a smile on his
face). Luckily it was a small wedding.
Believe it or not though, several people came up and commented on how much
they enjoyed it (but I don't think I recall anyone asking to hear more).
Just between you and me, I'm not sure if this was the best way to introduce
people to the bluegrass style.
Greg Lewis