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Do you remember your first gig?
- Thread starter casualmadness
- Start date
Summer of '69. I was 16 and had been playing acoustic guitar for a year and a half.
Met two slightly older teens who played drums and guitar and needed a bass player.
I didn't know how to play a single lick or bass line on anything. Or have a bass.
I borrowed a Harmony Meteor guitar and we threw the two high strings away. Borrowed an amp too and turned all the treble controls on the guitar and amp off.
The guitar player through much anguish and frustration painfully showed me bass patterns to play.
Spent the summer rote learning a set. I had zero feel for rhythm or chord changes. Zip. Nada. Nothing.
Strictly memorized the required patterns. "Okay, four of these, two of these, back to the first patern, etc.
At the end of the summer we played a dance.
Met two slightly older teens who played drums and guitar and needed a bass player.
I didn't know how to play a single lick or bass line on anything. Or have a bass.
I borrowed a Harmony Meteor guitar and we threw the two high strings away. Borrowed an amp too and turned all the treble controls on the guitar and amp off.
The guitar player through much anguish and frustration painfully showed me bass patterns to play.
Spent the summer rote learning a set. I had zero feel for rhythm or chord changes. Zip. Nada. Nothing.
Strictly memorized the required patterns. "Okay, four of these, two of these, back to the first patern, etc.
At the end of the summer we played a dance.
1989 or 1990, in my college's dining hall. We set up and I remember playing bass and keys on Tom Sawyer doing hammer-ons for the low notes during the keyboard solo. The keyboard, as I recall, was an old Casio and the bass at the time was a used B.C. Rich Eagle.
so many years ago in coventry UK 
where have all the years gone it was the late 70s
Oh, do I ever! Early 2000's. I was on bass and (attempting) vocals, a guitarist, and a drum machine. I was horrible! Absolutely horrible. An old man at the bar said he'd pay us to stop playing. In retrospect I don't blame him. But if I hadn't jumped into that pool I would have never learned to swim. And I sucked so bad I believe it numbed me to stage fright in later years.
Okay, it was the early 80l's probably '82. My buddy(a randy rhoads prodigy) & i with a friend of a friend drummer(4 years older than us). were practicing in his apartment on a hot summer day! we played originals( 4-5 songs) then came a bang on the door!we thought cops! but it was his neighbor, he was having a barbeque and wanted live Music! he talked to the drummer and we agreed to play for food, beer & $5 each! but we had to play SuzieQ! we set up in the drive way and jammed out! I remember that drummer had a mish mash mixed set of drums, most of the hardware was broken or missing pieces, his drum were spray painted to match! his set would fall over on the uneven pavement of the driveway, after every drum roll/fill! we stood there holding up his drums & stands for 10 minutes! until his neighbor loaned us some sandbags to prop up his set. I thought we gotta get a New drummer with a sturdy set of drums,LOL! it was a joke, like if hit his tom too hard it would spin around& cause his bass drum to wooble! I cant really complain, I was playing through a tiny borrowed Junky 12"guitar amp! Ahh! to be so young dumb & broke! despite trying to keep the drumset from falling apart we did well, and got paid for the first time! His neighbor was real cool about it he sat through our Hacked versions of SuzieQ! I never even heard of that song beforeLOL(if it was VH it wasnt Sh*t)!
we later found out the drummer stiffed us he got $10 while me & my buddy got ony $5! he used the excuse "it's my electricity!"I drank my 1st beer!( like said we're real young & dumb, picture Homer giving Barney his 1st beer!) We got rid him shortly after, for a drummer with a real matched set of Ludwig drums! what a relief!..wont forget that 1st paying gig,LOL!
Hey! Tell a little more about that? How many bands played that day and so..!
In 1977 I was 12 years old and had been teaching myself to play guitar for a couple of years. A guitarist friend who was putting together a band and owned a bass, but had no bass player, asked me to play bass and sing in the annual junior high talent show. We did Sunshine of My Love and White Room. It sounded just OK, but I considered it a major success because there were some cute girls that were very impressed, and that was all that really mattered back then (and for the following 25 years or so 
). I went on to pursue singing and guitar, and had some real success for a number of years, but the next time I played a bass wasn’t until January of 2018!
). I went on to pursue singing and guitar, and had some real success for a number of years, but the next time I played a bass wasn’t until January of 2018!
“School Of Rock” is where all that has gravitated to. Otherwise, kids today are more interested in DJ battles.
- Oct 22, 2015
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Overheard: if you ever used the restrooms at CBGB's you are immune to every disease.
I was 14, in with with some older kids, and somehow we scored a slot playing at some Sunday night youth group social event, at a church that none of us had any connection to. I’d been at bass for about half a year(the most minimal guitar experience before that), playing was in terms of riffs, and if I tried any improv at all, it was pentatonic blues box stuff. I think we only knew five songs(can’t remember which ones), and at the end of the set, because we were in a mood, hating the nicey-nice scene there, launched into a screaching howl cacophony, similar to the Stooges’ “LA Blues”, which ironically had not come out yet. So, in a way, we were punk before the Stooges.
Yeah, about 1992, Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh, some sort of multi-band thing.
That's all I remember....... :-D
That's all I remember....... :-D
First gig was in 1966. I belonged to a group called "The Warlocks" that some friends from high school were putting together. I had a crap bass (Japanese bass before they were any good), but had a brand new 1966 Fender Bassman amp. We had learned about 4 or 5 songs and the local movie theater put on a "Battle of the Bands" event. I think we only played two songs. One of them was "Hey Joe" by the Leaves (Hendrix version wasn't out yet) and I think the other one was "Shapes" by the Yardbirds. Not sure about the other song(s). It is after all 54-years ago...
We didn't win but we had a good showing. Payment was 1 year of free movie tickets for two. So my girlfriend and I went to the movies every week for the next year! The really nice thing that came out of that though was an invitation from a well established high-school group, The St. James Infirmary, to come play bass for them. Their bass player, Craig, was switching to organ because their organist moved away. The really great thing about this is that Craig sold me his 1965 Fender Jazz for $150. It was only a year old and in great shape and he took payments on it too! I ended up paying him ~$175 because I felt so bad about being late on one of the payments. Loved that bass and used it until it was stolen from me in early 1976.
That first gig was a hoot!
Shame,few year later folks were paying good money for that stuff 
House party in the Netherlands (s’Hertogenbosch) circa 1981. This was early in our residency abroad, which ended the summer I turned 16, so I was probably 13 when this picture was taken. The rest of the band was basically the same age. We mostly played classic hard rock (AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Ted Nugent, Judas Priest, Status Quo) but threw at least one Kinks song in the mix for good measure. That’s not a real Fender, of course, but rather a cheap copycat that I played through my freshman year in college. Our lead guitarist actually had chops and knew enough music theory to get the rest of us up to speed; he flies commercial airplanes for KLM now.
Yes it was a terrible beginning for my first band The Second Coming from Butte, Montana in about 1965 at a dance at Butte Central High School. We were absolutely horrible and I didn't even know all of the chords on my guitar. I remember we attempted a butchered version of the Beatles song Nowhere Man and our vocals sucked so bad that the crowd went into a frenzy! Thankfully the booing was so loud that the singing was mostly drown out! It took me a long time to finally get pretty good, I wasn't one of those teenage virtuosos!
