Part Two: Playing in the trenches.

My next foray into the music business was playing in the house band of a two bit dinner theater in the middle of nowhere Montana. The drummer from Vertigo recruited me to play at a place called Calamity Jane’s. We performed three live comedy musical revues a week and I earned a flat rate of $65 bucks a night. For a fifteen year old, $195 a week for six hours of “work” is a pretty good job. The only problem with it is that the three shows were Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.

We played 60’s and 70’s rock songs to accompany a bevy of small town theater folk as they put on a comedy show. The key to running a successful dinner theater, is to have upbeat music, at least one “wacky” comedy guy, and at least one hot female performer. Calamity Jane’s was better than most dinner theaters because they had managed to find probably the only Black female singer in the state of Montana. Ms. Williams could sing any of the great Motown songs of the sixties perfectly. You will never go broke in Montana charging Good Ole Boy Ranchers money to watch a good looking Black gal sing. Ms. Williams earned enough money to drive a red sports car with a vanity plate that said “SHO NUFF”.

Probably the strangest thing that happened to me while working at Calamity Jane’s happened on extremely busy Friday night. The place was packed with Ranchers and they were a pretty good crowd. The drinks were flowing fairly well, and by the third act, most of those cowpokes were pretty well in the bag. One of the characters in the show was a drunk, he would come on stage tell a few jokes and launch into a rendition of Bottle of Wine. It starts like this:

Bottle of wine,
Fruit of the vine,
When you going to let me get sober?

Anyway, at the end of the song, the actor goes on to tell a few more jokes. At one point, he is telling a story, and as he approaches the punch line, the cowboy sitting right in front of me takes a big swig of his beer. As the actor gives the punch line to the joke, the cowboys spits an entire mouth full of beer all over me, he’s laughing so hard.

I worked this job for the summer but quit to play football once school started. I learned two things about audiences with this job; first, if the audience is drunk enough, they will not notice mistakes, and two, accountants are the worst audience in the world. Never, ever, play for a CPA conference.

The next phase in my evolution into the best bass guitarist that you know encompasses the four years playing in various school sponsored bands. In high school, I played in the pep band, concert band, and the Jazz band. Each of these bands was led by the same music director, who had been my band director since the fifth grade.
Anyone who has ever attended a high school sporting event is familiar with the curse of the Pep Band. High School Pep bands range in competence from excruciatingly crappy to merely sub par. Our pep band was somewhere in the middle.

I was eased into the Pep band due to the fact that one of my older brothers played the bass and was three years ahead of me in school. I basically was forced by my brother to serve as his roadie for the year, hauling his crap around and making sure that all of the equipment was operational. I was able to play during a few football games because my brother on the football team, but basically I sat and listened until the final basketball game of the year.
For the final basketball game of the year, the senior in both basketball and the pep band were “honored”. This basically means that you walked arm and arm with your parents across the court and were introduced to the crowd. My brother decided to participate in the “honor” getting drunk and wearing a full gorilla suit. Due to the difficulty of playing the bass wearing gorilla gloves, I was able to play the entire game by default.

The key to maintaining a merely crappy High School Pep band is song selection. If your school has money, they can do a pretty decent job of purchasing music each year and staying only about 15 to 18 months behind the time. On the other hand, if your school is poor like mine was, you get stuck playing weird disco music from twenty years ago, or you get stuck with bargain basement contemporary tunes. Here is a list of the songs we played:

Hot Stuff (pretty cool disco song)
The Rubber Band Man (so-so disco song)
The Tide is High (Disco masquerading as Reggae, can be cool, but not when we played it)
La Bamba (Horrible)
Conga (Anything by Miami Sound Machine makes me shudder)
Danger Zone (off the Top Gun soundtrack, definitely not one of Kenny Login’s best)
The Final Countdown (The band was Europe. Always distrust popular music sung in English by people who don’t speak English.)

We played those same songs over and over again through the four years I attended school. My brothers played the exact same song in the four years they were in Pep band, and I would bet almost anything that those same songs are still being played at that school.

What I learned from Pep band is that everything that has ever been said about band geeks is true. Playing in a pep band will not get you noticed by girls, it will not get you a record deal, and it will not even impress your mother. If you like playing in Pep band, you probably play dungeons and dragons when you aren’t practicing for Pep band.
My concert band experience was utterly forgettable. When I got into high school, my band director who had looked the other way when I played electric bass suddenly changed his mind and required that I play a “real” concert band instrument. I was forced to take up the trombone.

The dirty little secret about trombone players, is that they grow up to be CPAs. The trombone is a moronic instrument for morons. If you ever want to impress your non musical friends, here is how you play:

Pick up trombone
Blow into mouth piece
Move slide back and forth.

That’s it. That is all you have to do. Trombone players spend the majority of their time arguing amongst themselves about whose spit valve has the largest volume. These are definitely not the guys in the band you want to party with.

After a year of playing trombone I used the excuse of braces to switch over to percussion, specifically the Glockenspiel. Only the top 1% of percussionists can play the Glockenspiel due to the fact that it has notes. Percussionists are people, (typically male), who beat on things with sticks. When they are not beating on percussion instruments with sticks, they beat on each other with sticks. If you take away their sticks, they beat on each other with fists. If you cut off their arms, they would head butt each other.

The percussionists didn’t beat on me with sticks, due to the fact that I had the magical ability to pay notes on the Glockenspiel. The percussionists viewed me as some sort of wizard, and as such they stayed their distance.