Prelude to a Kiss of Death:
I played trombone from middle school all the way through college, including jazz band in high school and college. Then I didn't do anything musically for almost 20 years. 5 years ago, I started taking drum lessons. For the last 3 years, I've been working pretty regularly as a drummer, including the last 2 years as part of a cover band that formed when I joined and has been working a fair bit.
Last March, I started working on learning to play bass. In August, I responded to a CL ad and joined a new originals band that was formed by a singer/songwriter/guitard who had already written a bunch of original material. I like his material, his singing, and his playing. At the same time I joined, he recruited a female singer/songwriter/keys player and a drummer. The keys player/singer is a former Nashville recording artist that has some huge credentials. She is really great.
Within a couple of weeks of forming and starting to work on learning the first set worth of his material, he books us a gig, for Oct 22nd (last Friday). The gig was to play in the bar that is in the basement of a local seafood restaurant. He got another local band signed on to play 1 set before us, then we would play 1 set and that would be the whole show. He told us the bar had recently re-done their setup and had nice new PA gear and they would provide a sound guy to run it. The deal he agreed to with the bar was that the 2 bands would each get 100 tickets to sell in advance ($5 each). The bands would keep any money they got from advanced ticket sales. The bar would charge $5 at the door on the night of the show (for anybody that didn't already have a ticket), and the bar would keep all that. Basically, the ONLY thing the bands would get would be the advance sale money.
The keys player and I both thought the whole thing stunk to high heaven. But, it was a new band and he had just "hired" us, so we didn't feel like there was much we could do about it. So I said "fine, let's sell every ticket they give us. That'll make sure that, next time, they want to do the deal differently." And so we did. We actually sold 108 tickets in advance. Nice, right?! And I found out after selling all these tickets that the bar's Fire Marshal capacity is 97. But the Bar Manager told me, "it's okay. We've had 200 people in here before. If it gets too crowded down here, we'll open up the upstairs." The upstairs is not connected to the downstairs at all (except by going outside and around to the front), but they apparently think that still allows them to add the FM capacity of the upstairs to the downstairs and then let that many people into the downstairs.
In the meantime, we start asking the guitard questions like "how many monitor channels will they be able to give us?" And "will they be able to mic the guitar cab and take DI from my bass rig?" And "will I be able to have a feed from the board into my digital recorder so we can have a recording of the performance?" And "what time will the sound guy be there so we can know when we need to be done with load-in and ready to start a sound check?" And "how are we going to handle the changeover from the opening band to our band?" The guitard's response to all these questions progressed from "I don't know" and "trust me" and "they [the venue and their sound guy] know what they're doing" to being pissy about it and telling me the sound guy's name and that I should call him myself. These questions are all partly with the thought in mind that I have my own pretty kick-ass PA setup, that I use for my cover band, and that I could bring that, if we needed to. And the guitard knew that, too, as it's the same system we use at rehearsal.
About 2 weeks before the show I gave up and told the keys player that I was not going to worry about it any more. I was going to let the guitard have as much rope as he wanted and then just wait to see what happened.
I played trombone from middle school all the way through college, including jazz band in high school and college. Then I didn't do anything musically for almost 20 years. 5 years ago, I started taking drum lessons. For the last 3 years, I've been working pretty regularly as a drummer, including the last 2 years as part of a cover band that formed when I joined and has been working a fair bit.
Last March, I started working on learning to play bass. In August, I responded to a CL ad and joined a new originals band that was formed by a singer/songwriter/guitard who had already written a bunch of original material. I like his material, his singing, and his playing. At the same time I joined, he recruited a female singer/songwriter/keys player and a drummer. The keys player/singer is a former Nashville recording artist that has some huge credentials. She is really great.
Within a couple of weeks of forming and starting to work on learning the first set worth of his material, he books us a gig, for Oct 22nd (last Friday). The gig was to play in the bar that is in the basement of a local seafood restaurant. He got another local band signed on to play 1 set before us, then we would play 1 set and that would be the whole show. He told us the bar had recently re-done their setup and had nice new PA gear and they would provide a sound guy to run it. The deal he agreed to with the bar was that the 2 bands would each get 100 tickets to sell in advance ($5 each). The bands would keep any money they got from advanced ticket sales. The bar would charge $5 at the door on the night of the show (for anybody that didn't already have a ticket), and the bar would keep all that. Basically, the ONLY thing the bands would get would be the advance sale money.
The keys player and I both thought the whole thing stunk to high heaven. But, it was a new band and he had just "hired" us, so we didn't feel like there was much we could do about it. So I said "fine, let's sell every ticket they give us. That'll make sure that, next time, they want to do the deal differently." And so we did. We actually sold 108 tickets in advance. Nice, right?! And I found out after selling all these tickets that the bar's Fire Marshal capacity is 97. But the Bar Manager told me, "it's okay. We've had 200 people in here before. If it gets too crowded down here, we'll open up the upstairs." The upstairs is not connected to the downstairs at all (except by going outside and around to the front), but they apparently think that still allows them to add the FM capacity of the upstairs to the downstairs and then let that many people into the downstairs.
In the meantime, we start asking the guitard questions like "how many monitor channels will they be able to give us?" And "will they be able to mic the guitar cab and take DI from my bass rig?" And "will I be able to have a feed from the board into my digital recorder so we can have a recording of the performance?" And "what time will the sound guy be there so we can know when we need to be done with load-in and ready to start a sound check?" And "how are we going to handle the changeover from the opening band to our band?" The guitard's response to all these questions progressed from "I don't know" and "trust me" and "they [the venue and their sound guy] know what they're doing" to being pissy about it and telling me the sound guy's name and that I should call him myself. These questions are all partly with the thought in mind that I have my own pretty kick-ass PA setup, that I use for my cover band, and that I could bring that, if we needed to. And the guitard knew that, too, as it's the same system we use at rehearsal.
About 2 weeks before the show I gave up and told the keys player that I was not going to worry about it any more. I was going to let the guitard have as much rope as he wanted and then just wait to see what happened.
