Lowest paying gig ...

[Jim Alfredson]

Recently my trio played a joint in K-zoo. We were supposed to get $300 for the night... $100 a piece. We play for four hours and at the end of the night the bartender gives us the door.

$60. A Jackson a piece. Ouch! The hour long drive home sucked on that one.

I guess that's why they invented contracts.

ps. I take total responsability for that one...

[jmjk]

We got a case of beer once. It was a relatively high-profile show, too. We opened up for the Prog Rock band Marillion on their Season's End tour.

We were psyched just to be doing it, as we were long-time Marillion fans, and I think the promoters could sense this. So after our set someone from the bar brought up (4) six packs of Miller Genuine Draft, and said, "Compliments of the house for doing a great show". Yeah, thanks. MGD!!

I also remember having a condom thrown on stage from the balcony, or somewhere. So, a case of beer and a Trojan. That was our compensation for the night. (Gave the condom away, too)

[JSngry]

I've worked so many "free" jazz gigs that almost actually WERE free to lose count of. When breaking double digits is cause for happiness...

Lowest paying "regular" gig since turning "pro"? $25 to do a blues gig in an Ethiopian restaurant. It was supposed to be $50 (WOW!), but the owner decided that "Just A Little Bit" was all he could stand and sent us packing after the first set. Why the hell he booked a blues band in there in the first place, I'll never know.

Then there was this gig I did in Albuquerque way back in 1982. Cat calls me up at 5 in the afternoon for a 6:00 hit. It's a wedding, and it's playing standards and what is now know as Tejano. $100.00. Cool. Get there, and the leader is this guy who plays keys with his left hand, and trumpet with his right. Each hand is less competent than the other. He's drunk at the beginning, and proceeds to get even more blasted as the night goes on. Apparently the alkyhol is hindering his hearing, because he's constantly turning himself up all night long. Spinal Tap goes to 11? This cat STARTED at 11 and went up to at least 53. By the end of the night he's putting his trumpet in his eye instead of on his lips, and more than once his keyboard nearly got knocked over when he went to paw at it to find a chord. ANY chord, maybe even the occasional right one. End of the night comes, and he's forgotten his checkbook, and he'll be right back. Yeah, right... Never even bothered pursuing the dough - I'd rather not get paid than to see him again and be reminded. Some scab gigs is cool, and some ain't. This one wasn't. Live and learn.

(B-3er - assuming that your original deal was at or above scale, this is an instance where the Union could have been of assistance had you had a signed AFM contract. Theoretically, anyway.... Just a thought.)

[Joe G]

B-3er,

Ouch! Don't remind me! You know what I'm talking about...

JSngry, Great story about the wedding gig. The evening would have been perfect if a great musician that you admire had shown up. I've been there, too: "Oh for God sakes, why is Randy Gillespie here, tonight of all nights??" The nice thing is, those people know the score, so the proper person gets the blame.

Edited March 13, 2003 by Joe G

[Soul Stream]

I actually made under $1 once. It was a 4 piece band playing for tips. At the end of the night we had made a grand total of three dollars in tips for the whole band.

But my worst gig....I once played a "company" party that was supposed to be a music festival open to the public. We were playing for FREE under the promise that the exposure was going to be great, 2000-3000 people were expected.

...well, we showed up. The gig was on a little stage on the grass next to a non-descript office building in Carrollton, Texas. One extension chord ran from the bulding to the stage. The drummer forgot his cymbals. The 2,000-3,000 people turned out to be... about 15 people! Mostly little kids under 4 years old. The whole time we played, McGruff The Crime Dog stood in front of the stage and played with the kids. Oh yeah, and it was about 100 degrees to boot. This is when I first started playing music, so I had invited my whole family to the BIG festival! They all came. They even videotaped the event so I have it forever.

[AfricaBrass]

Thanks for the funny stories!

It's bad enough playing for free or for peanuts, but how about paying to play. Back in the 80's, if you wanted to play in LA (rock music), a lot of the clubs would allow promoters to rent the club for the night and then the promoters would get bands for club. The rub was, the promoter would make the band buy a certain number of tickets and then the band would have to sell the tickets to make any money. Needless to say, being the piss-poor salesman that I was. I'd always end up on the losing end. I ended up quitting my band because I didn't want to keep playing these loser shows while they wanted to.

[bertrand]

Jim,

I have CD-Rs of the both the gigs you described (the Ethiopian blues night and the wedding gig). You still played some pretty cool shit!

[Joe G]

Jim and I did a gig straight out of the Blues Brothers. We subbed for a country band at a little watering hole called the Sportsmen's Tavern way out in a rural Mich. town called Mulliken (Mullet-kin). The dirt parking lot was filled with pickup trucks. The jukebox blared Garth Brooks. Scrawled on the wall in the men's room was, "If I'da known it was gonna be like this, I'da picked the cotton myself!" During the first set, a woman came up and requested " a song with words". (Okay, how about this one: Oh, The Lord loves a hangin', that's why he gave us necks!...) It was a dark night, my friends. At first we tried to appease them with shuffles, but that quickly grew tiresome, and by the second set we no longer cared one way or the other. At that point we were actually playing some pretty creative stuff in spite of it all. And there were a few sympathetic listeners, good folks who came out simply because they couldn't believe there would be jazz at the old S.T. It was one of those gigs that ultimately make you stronger for the sole reason that you survived it.

[Jim Alfredson]

Ah, the old Sportsmen Tavern.

One of my favorites is back when I first started playing gigs (I was about 17) and I was in this country cover band. We were playing a beer tent in Mason, the little town Joe and I grew up in. They had this tent set up next to a gas station. The ground was grass. The drummer checked out the site the day previous to the event and told the "promoter" that we couldn't play on grass. That we needed a stage. He said, "No problem! I'll take care of it."

So the drummer comes back the next afternoon to set up his drums and finds a big ass pile of dirt. The promoter says, "Yeah, we haven't spread it out yet, but it'll work great!" Dirt. So the drummer calls up his buddies and they all scrape together a measley amount of leftover wood and they actually build a semi-functional stage on top of this dirt.

So I get there with my M3 (a little Hammond) and the rest of the band sets up. It starts to rain like mad. All that dirt under the stage starts turning to mud. It seeps out underneath the stage making our shoes, cables, speakers, my poor little organ all muddy.

To top it off, there were two strictly divided camps of audience members. The "PLAY SOME SKYNYRD" rednecks and the "PLAY SOME SEGER" hillbillies. Funny thing is, we play "Beautiful Loser", get done with the tune, and instead of applause we hear, "PLAY SOME SEGER".

I think I got $40 for that one. I feel really bad for my dad. I didn't have a drivers license yet, so he drove 12 miles from our house to drop me off and pick me up and load the organ. Now that's parental support!

[Soul Stream]

People HATE stuff without words. It's a huge generalization, but hugely true. They don't even have to know the song, but it someone's singing, however badly, you're o.k. If you're playing organ trio stuff anywhere outside of a big northeast city, forget about' it! I get requests for ZZ TOP, Stevie Ray Vaughan, ect., still.... Let's not even start the bad gig horror stories. I'll never stop. Can I tell you about The Poodle Dog Lounge in North Austin or Pop The Coochie in South Dallas....

[Robert J]

When I first started out gigging at age 17, I was playing solo piano at a chinese restaurant. There was a dixie band on Saturdays, so the venue's not so strange. It's a strip club now.

I got $20 for three hours, plus beer and a plate of reheated chinese food leftovers. Awesome!

Mostly old timers who were there 14 hours, handing over their pension scheques to the barmaid. I did get to learn some tunes like "Sentimental Journey" "Melancholy Baby" etc

When I was 15 I actually played organ at my Catholic church. They needed a sub and I was too old to continue as the altar boy, and since the priest liked me .... I think I made $12.50 per mass. One day I brought in a Moog Prodigy, a little synth, and laid it on top of the orgfan. I used it for string pads. Sounded good. However, at the end of one mass I overheard an old lady berate the priest: "I've seen one of those things before [the keyboard] at the mall, and this woman was playing it nicely. But this guy [me] is ABSOLUTELY AWFUL". It could have been my long hair. I was asked to keep the Moog at home.

Too many other stupid freebies to mention.

[Jim Alfredson]

Do it! Start telling horror stories! I love em!

The guitarist in my R&B band calls the phenom of people not liking music without words the "AM Radio Syndrome". He thinks it started back in the days of AM radio, when DJs would talk over the beginning of a tune up until the singer started. It's even worse today. They talk at the beginning and the end of the tune. No words? TALK TALK TALK! Subconsciously, according to his theory, people think, "Hey, the music isn't important... he's talking over it."

Thus, we are where we are.

[Joe G]

Hey Jim, should we tell everybody about the gig we are going to play in just a couple of hours?

[Soul Stream]

I once played in an all-black R & B band in Dallas called Led & The Love Company. It was like a Temptations-sytle thing. The band was actually really good. We mostly played company functions and upscale black clubs.

However once we had a gig at "Pop The Coochie" in South Dallas. Another guy in the band, Karl, told me not to come since he was afraid for my safety being white. Actually, he wasn't going to make the gig either...black or white...it was too, too dangerous. I really didn't believe it would be that big of a deal, never had a problem before, and Led was adament that I do the gig. So I rode with Karl.

I had never been to this part of town. It was night, and we were driving through what looked like to be bombed-out housing projects. No windows, doors...but people still darting in and out. Very odd. Finally we made it to "Pop The Coochie" It looked like you'd think. Bright blue cinderblock rectangle with the name emblazoned on the side in pink. No airconditiong. Boiling hot, but with a single industrial-size fan at the back. When you walked in, you had to give them your gun. So I immediately noticed a foldout table full of handguns by the front door. Also the gangster were in two groups...the young rapper-type gangstas...and the ones who ran the club...the older gerry-curl crowd.

They had a cake in the center of the room. In the shape of a naked girl "we love you (whoever)" "Oh, a birthday. I thought." No, turns out it was a celebration for one of the crew that had been gunned down and murdered the week before.

We started to play and the crowd hated it. Surprisingly. They booed and yelled. Then we took a break. On the break, a guy got on the mic. Said he was a "comedian." But all he did was go on a vicious rant against white people. The whole time staring at me. Meantime, I tripped over the cord to the fan. It had been spliced together with tape, and came apart. The fan stopped! I scurried away. The place got hotter.

To make a long story short. We almost didn't get paid. We did, but there was almost bloodshed between Led and the Gerry-curl crew. We we did get the money...it was all in crack 1 dollar bills.

[mikeweil]

Well, the wierdest things I experienced was during my tenure with a 6-piece jazz-rock band in south-west Germany. Trombone, electric guitar & vocals, Fender Rhodes piano, electric bass, drums, percussion. We played a legendary disco/club in Heidelberg (perhaps you heard rumours 'bout this town) called the "Cave". A dark room 20 feet below the ground. The stage was the 7 x 15 feet steel plate used as the dancefloor on disco evenings. Six players on that small ground! The trombonist pulled out the slide between the heads of a couple in the front seats. It got even more crowded when three black guys from a befriended funk band sat in ... Strangely enough I played one of my best solos with that band on this particular evening, at the end of which the keyboarder almost broke his back when pulling the damn Rhodes up a tiny spiral staircase in the backroom exit. He swore he'd never play there again, not for a grand!

We played some schoolkids disco a few weeks later where we were finished at 9.00 pm as the kids had to go home to catch their sleep before school the nest day. The place was on the first floor of some shopping mall with an escalator as the only way to move the equipment. Again, the Rhodes almost went downhill pulling the poor pianist with him .... I almost crashed an amp when I put it on the stairs and someone started the escalator without warning.

One of the last gigs with that band was in a western saloon style country disco, where the late night routine included a fist fight of the owner with a guest.

Well, at least payment was okay with that band. My lowest paid gig was with a 10 piece jazzband when one of the saxophonists caught the flu and they had to hire some pro who could sightread all that stuff. He asked for so much that the rest of us got 20 Deutschmarks a piece.

But B-3er's mud story tops it all! I can see it as if it were a movie scene!

[Jim Alfredson]

Damn Soul Stream... that's some crazy shit!

Joe and I just did a gig tonight involving stairs and the B3.

My back is aching.

Plus the buildling we were playing in is 140 years old (no shit) and the power in it is atrocious. The organ was humming like mad. And for some reason my Leslie went poopoo. No switching from fast to slow. It just stayed on fast. So I had to unplug the motors and play like that all night.

Bummer.

But we did make $100 a piece.

[Soul Stream]

...well, you had to go upstairs, but at least you didn't have to play in the mud again!

[Harold_Z]

In a nutshell - today's bar gig scene (applies to any genre of music).

When the register is ringing everything is cool. You get the agreed upon bread without a hassle.

When things are slow all of a sudden you're a partner in the bar business.

Edited March 14, 2003 by Harold_Z

[JSngry]

Hey Soul Stream - you ever play at Sonny's Coctail Lounge on Grand in South Dallas? First time I played there, I came in through the back room, and there was a poker game in progress. The table was covered w/cards, $100 bills, and .45s. The owner looked at me to see if I was looking at the action, saw that I was, looked at his gun on the table and then back at me, smiled, and said, "Good to have you here. Go on through. And please use the front door from now on."

Never had a hassle at Sonny's, nosiree Bob. The money was always there.

Same thing playing Billy Ray Maddox's various clubs in Ft. Worth. The main one, Billy Ray's, was a nice place, very fancy and upscale. Denise LaSalle came in one night and sat in. Way cool. Talent show nights were a drag, though (another story entirely...). But Billy Ray ran this OTHER club, the name of which I forget, that was a front for a crack house. You'd be playing a set, and cats would come in w/TVs, VCRs, cartons of smokes, produce (really!), ANYTHING they could move to get a rock or two. I saw things in that parking lot that left me torn whether to laugh or cry. Cat tried to sell me half a PACK of cigarettes one night. HALF A PACK! He started the bidding at $5, no less!

Never had any problems there either. Billy Ray was feared by his customers, but loved by the community because he donated a lot of money for parks, rec centers, and stuff like that. Classic gangster dichotomy. When he got finally got busted and convicted, there was an uproar in the community, maybe because they feared that whoever moved in to take his place wouldn't run as tight an operation.

Sometimes it seems that a significant part of my career has taken place in a Dolemite movie...

Edited March 14, 2003 by JSngry

[Soul Stream]

Hey JSngry,

No, I never played that place. Matter of fact, I really haven't played in South Dallas much at all. Sounds like a great place.

But I did play Cousin Lenny's (KKDA legend) birthday party a few years back. I was again the lone vanilla suspect at the event. I was in the backup band. The line-up was @4 different Tyrone Davis influenced singers. They all had to out-tyrone each other....so by the last guy he was down in the audience about "making love" to some poor lady. Yikes. We played "Can I Change My Mind" 4 times that night along with all the other Davis tunes....

[JSngry]

South Dallas IS cool as long as you stay on the main streets. I've never had a problem in 20+ years. Now, the SIDE streets can bring trouble - some are totally benign, but others aren't, and unless you know the hood well enough to know which is which... But there used to be JAZZ in South Dallas. As recently as the late 70s, Sonny Stitt, Blue Mitchell/Harold Land, Jimmy Smith, and Abbey Lincoln performed in clubs down there. But that was then...

Now, Cousin Lennie - THERE'S a legend! I used to listen to him late nights in the late 60s on Gordon McLendon's KLIF, The Mighty 1190 (you AM radio buffs know what I mean, probably). I met him for the first time around 1984-85, and fell all over myself telling him how much I used to dig his show back in the day. He was graciously nonplussed and said, "Well, young man, I AM still on the air, you know!" Well, of COURSE he was - KKDA-AM (Soul 73, 730 AM) is one of the GREAT Deep Soul stations anywhere in the world, and Cousin Lennie doing drive time in the afternoon was a part of my daily listening ritual for many, MANY years. He's do a thing called "Round Up The Posse", replete w/it's own little tag song, where if you were mugged, or had your car stolen, or something like that, you'd call HIM on the air rather than the police, and responsible citizens (NOT vigilantes) would come to your assistance, help you out, and MAYBE go looking for the perp. He's also have call-in contestsin the summer/winter where the winner got their electric/gas bill paid for the month. It was commercial radio at the service of the community, and it still is.

But Cousin Lennie (Henderson) is no longer on the air - he took ill a few years ago and was unceremoniously replaced by a Millie Jackson show that she does from her home in, I think, Atlanta. Now, I love Millie, but Cousin Lennie she ain't. Bobby Patterson, the singer, does a mid-morning show now that has SOME Of the flavor, and Saturday nights feature a live broadcast from R.L. Griffin's House Of Blues (not a record-playing show, but a live weekly broadcast of the R.L. Griffin Revue in action!), but Cousin Lennie was in a class by himself. He's still alive, I think, still not in good health, and needing financial assistance from what I can gather.

The man deserves better.

[Ragu]

I played gigs as a musician, gigs as a comedian, gigs as both. On musician gigs when I couldn't cut it, other musician's probably thought I was being a comedian...anyway the thing about real comedy gigs is that you have to connect with the audience and get a certain kind of response (laughter) or you're not making it. As a musician at least you somtimes survive a horrible gig by locking into the tune and the other musicians when you can't connect with the audience. There were a lot of horrible paying gigs when starting out,but if you survive the money gets better. Notable gigs for weirdness:

1) Playing a prison where I literally got locked in the auditorium after everyone left...it was so foggy no one noticed I wasn't with the others til they were at the point of leaving.

2) Playing a nudist colony (they were, I wasn't)

3) Playing a day gig before my night gig for a bunch of people in Kentucky who'd seen my show and thought they'd hire me for a birthday party. First sign of trouble, one of the folks says on the way to the gig, "You'll have fun, we're all coal miners..." I ended up performing standing on top of the bar in a Holiday Inn while one guy held a flashlight on me.

4) Playing a club that had to be owned by the mob, because they kept paying decent money for me not to perform when the crowd was small. They wanted to prove to the city council they needed to have a strip show to draw customers.

5) Playing in between strippers in Alaska, all guys should see how bored and unsexy dancers are the second they are off stage.

Well, the list goes on, but it was fun while it lasted, or in retrospect, or a little of both.

[JSngry]

You, Sir, are my hero. Welcome to the board. Your first name isn't "Pete" by any chance, is it?

You ever play Gillette, Wyoming? I played a week there back in 1981, and the town was in the middle of an oil boom. The male-to-female ratio was, literally, 25-1. As travelling mistrels, er..., musicians, many of the local women were, shall we say, "interested" in some new blood, but you couldn't DO anything about it because they all had this squadron of horndogs surrounding them everywhere they went at every hour of the day (and night). You think a rendezvous at 4 AM in the local diner would be safe? Nope - the guardogs were camped out in full force. I think they had assigned shifts. Never has so much potential had so little opportunity to be realized.

Ah, the road. Something everybody should experience. If it doesn't kill you...

[Garrison]

Free doesn't count, eh? O.k. here is one. Ever do the Borders book store circut? Every once and awhile we would play at a Borders if we didn't have anything else lined up. I got a call over the summer to play at one on the MainLine in Philly. The payment. Gift Certificates for books and music! I but maybe 20% of my stuff from Borders so it wouldn't have been worth it, and I declined.

But don't get down about it. Even the greats got screwed with. When I was about 14 or 15, I was at Philly Joe's house for a lesson. This was around 1984.

Philly Joe got a phone call. I was in the living room , playing on a drum-pad, like many of the lessons went, so it wasn't very loud and I could hear the conversation.

The guy on the other end wanted him to play that night, for get this, $30! I distinctly remember Philly Joe saying, "I can't play for $30. Even I have my pride. I won't play for anything less than $45." The sad thing is I don't think he got it.

But what was really confusing to me was the KISS was playing at the Spectrum in Philly that night to a sold out show. I knew that the drummer, not even a shadow of Philly Joe's talent, was going to walk away clearing more than 45 dollars.

It was real weird. I remember feeling kind of sad about the whole thing during my ride home with my mom.

[Soul Stream]

Yeah....but on the other hand, how could you feel sad riding home from a Philly Joe Jones drum lesson!

...but seriously, that's some sad shit.