Weddings are OK, once you can get over a few key items. Like you are definately the "hired help" at a wedding; although that is true to some degree in any paying gig at least in a bar YOU are the attraction but at a wedding the bride/groom /family is the attraction. So you are no more special than a good caterer or photographer, etc. Another thing is the pressure-say you have a female vocalist who does 50% of your songs and is the main reason you get gigs. Now say she gets laryngitis the day before a bar/club gig. You call the owner and tell him you can either cancel or do the job without her; maybe he is a little dissapointed but what the hell, it is only one night out so many his club has every year. Now try having the same conversation with a bride or wedding planner the day before the wedding and let me know how THAT goes.............
Slightly off topic, for those who have never played at a wedding before, I would advise being very, very careful about playing a wedding unless you either know both the bride and groom and they know the band, songlist, etc., and/or you are self aware enough to know that your band has the songlist and versatility needed for the average wedding. My last band played a semi-accoustic songlist (think Buffet, America, Eagles) and were hired once to play a wedding through our guitarist, who told me that the wedding party knew the band. Turns out that a guy whose girlfriend was a bridesmaid recommended us, the Bride and Groom had never heard of us. So we play the dinner set and everything is going good, then the "party" starts. A couple songs in, the bride, bride's mother, and various other female wedding-goers come up to the bandstand and ask us to play songs they can dance to. So we launch into "Brown-eyed girl" which is about as danceable as we get. Three minutes and zero dancers on the floor later, the same crowd comes up to say "No really, can you PLEASE play something we can dance to?". It went downhill from there. Got paid but still rather would have stayed home then dealt with that. FRom then on we had a rule: both bride and groom MUST come see the band at a bar gig before booking us for a wedding, and MUST be comfortable that what we were doing at the bar would be what we would be playing at their wedding.
