Gig Report: Jerry James Band opening for Blackhawk, 1 June

Ill start off by apologizing for the cell phone pics, my cellphone’s camera function stinks.

This last Saturday we opened for Blackhawk at Greek Bros, a showcase club in El Campo, Texas, a small town between Victoria and Houston. It’s a very interesting old place smack dab in the middle of a geographical area occupied by big farms and big oil.

So we got underway for a sixty-mile run from Victoria to El Campo at 1pm. Drummer, silver-haired BL/lead singer/guitars/harmonica player, and me packed into BLs van along with drums, a small kickback Hartke bass amp, and our fiddles. View attachment 3435382

We get there @ 2pm and the Blackhawk tour bus was already in place out front.

A quick window reflection shot showing my load-in attire (not for onstage use). South Texas heat and humidity... gotta love it

So we go inside and the Blackhawk crew is running a little late getting everything ready for a 3pm soundcheck. Really good in-house sound system, with gigantic subs that extended across the entire stage front. In-house lights.

Blackhawk members during soundcheck. Henry Paul, founding member, to left, bassist Randy Threet on right playing a a white Mexican Precision 50s bass:


So we mulled around until we were cleared for soundcheck, which slid all the way to 6pm. There’s a partial glimpse of my latest acquisition, a 2000 American Deluxe in teal.

BL Jerry James and Nolan Derosia during check
Got soundcheck out of the way and sat down for some freebie fabulous Greek Bros food. Sorry, no food shots but I’m here to tell you these guys know steaks like none other. Of course they have great lobster, oysters, crawfish, catfish, the list goes on. We had free reign for ordering anything we wanted... NICE.

So once we stuffed ourselves, we made our way to the upstairs backstage dressing rooms and general hangout area. Multiple rooms, really nice areas to hang out and chill. But by 7pm the crowd started filling up downstairs and I was finding it a bit hard to stay settled, so invited the other guys to dispatch me at the pool table, which they did with ease


Back down on the stage I snapped a couple of photos showing their interesting back line with double drummers with an Ampeg SVT-Classic and some four by ten cab. This was not a small stage by my standards but two drum kits really take up space. And one design flaw was the big support pole in the frigging dead center of the stage that my drummer said he saw their frontman Henry Paul smack into prior to spinning around and catching a second impact from his mic:




My drummer shows off his perpetually serious attitude toward gigging

We hit the stage from 9 to 10. Really fired up audience made it a short hour. Unfortunately our band was on its own for this show so I didn’t capture any photos of us live. But suffice it to say our well-seasoned BL had the crowd locked up tight in between his song stories and our tunes... one heck of a good time! I’m used to four-hour gigs so this was like manna from heaven. And Lawdy it was hard to stay focused with those South Texas girls on the floor in their “sprayed-on” jeans.

Well, we ended at ten and thirty minutes later Blackhawk came on and just dominated the audience. Possibly the most surreal part for me was listening to their opening number from their 1994 debut album, a tune called Down in Flames. My brother Jeff Stevens (jeffstevensmusic.com) wrote that tune for them 25 years ago. Small world. We chatted with them for awhile and they were like, “hey, how’s Jeff doing, etc”. Several of them worked with Jeff at Warner Bros in Nashville, which is where my brother makes his home and where they were headed back to (their home city as well) for a few days prior to heading out to Nebraska late this week.


We hung out for about five of their numbers then made our way out the door for a nice relaxing ride home, still in time to party when we got there.

Edit: I had the photos arranged per the comments, for some reason they didn’t all stick where they belonged and therefore show up as attachments-sorry about that!

 

Yeah, it was amazing! This was my first gig at this place and I was totally surprised at the size and number of rooms. I don’t believe I showed it, but there were rooms with bars, tables, and booths to either side of the main room, which itself had a three-sided balcony seating area above the main floor seating and dance area. A really nice place.