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Double Bass Didja ever........

christ andronis

christ andronis

Nov 14, 2001
759
12
Chicago
#1
So I had a big band gig tonite...it's in my book and on my calendar for 4-6pm. For some reason I've had it in my head all week that it was 6-8pm. Has anyone else ever gotten fixated like that and just completely blown it? Fortunately, as I was going downstairs to print out a map, I noticed the correct time for the gig (this was at about 3:45) so I minimized the damage by showing up about five tunes into the first set. The bass trombone player was covering my part.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste!!! :rollno:
 
#4
Had been doing a lot of Friday and Sunday only weeks and showed up on a Friday for, you guessed it, a Saturday gig!

Without going into all the details of it taking a year to get paid, I did end up with two nights out of it and they tried to pay me more than I wanted! Blew their mind when I told them the check they were writing was higher than what I was owed! :)
 
#5
I did basically the same thing... it was a big band concert at the bandshell. I drove like hell and ducked in on the 3rd tune or so. I apologized like crazy to the leader and told the truth...I spaced out and wrote the wrong time on my calendar.

The kicker was that it was booked by the bass trombone player. Years later, I hired a brass quintet to play at my wedding ceremony, and the bass bone player was the tuba player in that group, and his wife was the hornist. They didn't show up, so it turned out to be a brass trio instead. I ran into him later and he said, "Sorry, I spaced out and wrote the wrong time on my calendar."

Sheesh.
 
#6
I once showed up on the 4th of the month for a gig scheduled for the 8th.

Here in Japan, the 4th of the month is called yokka, and the 8th is called yo-o-ka. Hard to write the pronounciations, but the o is just extra long for the latter, and the former has a little stop of sorts between the yo and the ka. When people talk fast, I can't always tell. Now I always confirm by using the non-ordinal forms ie "do you mean 4 (yon) or 8(hatchi)?"

Of course, I also once intended to ask a bus driver to let me off the bus when I realized I was about to miss my stop (oro****e kudasai), but instead I asked him to kill me (koro****e kudasai). Ahh life.
 
#7
Wow I wasn't aware that you couldn't write a word with certain four letter groupings in them. The asterisks (not inserted by me) stand in for 4 letters you apparently can't use in a row here. Let me try it this way:

"oro shi te kudasai" and
"koro shi te kudasai"
 
#9
Fun with language. I remember reading a Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos comic in my misspent Ute; they wanted to write "Don't shoot" in German (Nicht schiessen) but instead wrote "Don't ****" (Nicht scheissen).

I generally am early for gigs, I think I've only been late to one gig. although I did show up at a gig (about 20 years ago) without a cord to connect to an old Polytone pickup and spent a set driving back to Augusta to pick it up.
 
#11
I'm glad to know I'm in good company with this ***. What bothers me is that although the right time was written in my book, I, for some reason, was convinced it was 2 hours later. I'm wondering if all those bongs from my crazy days are finally catching up with me.... :cool:
 
#12
I was a few weeks into and way over my head into fixing up my fixer-upper house, happily sanding some trim when I get a call from the pianist...., "where are you?"..... I gasped, I had totally forgotten about a gig. I said, "I'll be right there", raced back to my apartment, changed and headed out the door for the gig, showed up at the end of the first set. Rest of the gig was fine, he never called me again.

There was another recently when I showed up at the right restaurant according to the band website, but venue had been changed and website wasn't updated. I had my wife mapquest and guide me via cell phone to the right location. That one wasn't my fault so it was cool.
 
#13
Aside from having a flat on the way to a gig that caused me to be late, my worst was last year (this will be funny to those of you from DFW.

I had a gig in Ardmore, OK at a country club. Ardmore is about 2 hours south of OKC and a little over an hour N. of Dallas. I took off early, dropped my stuff off at the country club and headed to Dallas to take care of some business. I finished about 2.5 hours to go before the gig, so I decided to stop at a liquor store and pick up some Belgian beers not available in Oklahoma.

The part of town I was in was about midway between Dallas and Ft. Worth, so I asked the proprietor the fastest way out of town during rush hour. I didn't have a map, and the guy told me to head east on the hwy I was parked off of and it would take me right to I-35.

Unfortunately, he had to have meant west, because this hwy went more south than east and when I hit 1-35 E. I was 21 miles south :crying:

I hit horrible traffic, got a ticket between Denton and Gainesville, and after driving Autobahn speeds in the Volvo I pulled up right at downbeat time. I ran in and grabbed my bass and started playing acoustic as I had no time to set up an amp.

BTW, a good bass can be heard acoustically in a big band.... :D
 
#14
We had a gig in Cordova, Alaska and thought we were doing fine in getting there until about a couple hundred miles out someone asked if we had checked the ferry schedule.
We hadn't. Well, it turns out that there had been an earthquake off of Yakutat earlier in the spring and it had caused the egines in the ferry to shift, which was causing vibrations.
So, a couple months later, they decide to take the ferry out of commission for one day only, to rectify the problem. Why did they have to choose the first day of our gig?
Unfortunately, in fixing one problem, they made another, even though it only affected us!

So there we are on the first day of our gig trying to find the back roads into Cordova.
There aren't any, unless you want to drive down a one lane dirt road for about 10 miles, which brings you to one of the silliest sign postings I've ever seen in my life.
There the road ends, at the raging Uranatina River, and on the other side is a sign saying not to cross! Duh!
And even if you could cross, it would just be more of the single lane road, which is actually the old railroad bed, only to end at the broken bridge across the Copper River! No way across that!

Anyway, we started a day late, but they sure liked razzing us about if we had checked the ferry schedules lately!
 

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