Gasman

I handed in my notice to my current band back in May this year when our guitarist walked out due to a row over which PA to use. I scanned JMB and BAndmix diligently for a couple of weeks, realised that there was absolutely NO opportunities in my part of the world so withdrew my withdrawal just to keep playing and looking at the wanted lists until something better turned up. And you know what? Since then there has still been sod-all on those sites within 40 miles of me, the band has recovered from the loss of the best gitrist I've ever had the privilege of playing with, and is making steady progress with new gigs and numbers. What did I learn from this? If you're going to jump ship from a band but want to continue playing, find and join the new band first! (actually, the same approach is essential for any job-change; resign in haste, repent at leisure!)

Addendum to my post above - just received a pic of me being a saxonob again, complete with hat and shades, band's playing 'Geno'. Our gitrist is a teacher, and obviously agrees that 'academic inspiration, I gave him none..."

Have you ever been to Marnhull? Have you even heard of it? Before I joined this band I hadn’t, but there’s an RBL club there in deepest North Dorset, and we’ve gigged there regularly, most recently being last Saturday. Its location is down a country back-road in the middle of nowhere so there aren’t any noise problems, but this time there were many ‘road’ (eg lane) closures for repair, and rumours of severe flooding in the area were rife. Anyway, I got there with no trouble and we set up in good time for a band chat and a few bevies before kick-off at 8.30. At this point the club organiser decided to alter our timings from 8.30-9.30 + 10.00- 11.00 to 8.30 – 10.00 and 10:15 – 11:30 so more raffle tickets could be sold, I think. After an exchange of views (especially as it’s the lowest-paying gig we do) we agreed to shift everything to the right by 15 minutes as a compromise, sticking to 2 x 1 hour sets. That said, the club is in a very up-together building with great acoustics, enthusiastic dancers and (amazingly) a nice green-room right next to the stage area, letting me change into my ska hat and shades out of sight before my sax set. I’m currently using the Squier Mustang bass procured from @WoodinBlack of this parish for the first set, replete with flats, changing to my H-B Mustang-a-like with rounds for the stompy second set; amp is AG700 with a Darkglass 212N 1000w cab and Nux radio link. For the saxoholics, I use my least-valuable but ear-splitting 1969 Conn 10m Tenor with Nux radio mic to ponce about with out on the dance-floor. In the end it was an enjoyable evening, with our drummer’s young teenage grandson playing ‘Wipeout’ with us to open the second set. It was his first ever public performance and that’s a real drum workout – kudos to him! My Satnav has an obsession with back-roads, so it decided to send me home via lord-knows-where to get onto a main road. This is bandit country, total darkness, no houses, and as it happened some prodigious flooding lurking around 90-degree bends, which had drowned several small saloon cars. Fortunately, the Jeep Cherokee once again justified its £710 road tax and got me through, no problem! Pix are of the stage setup pre-start with our lady singist checking the set-list, and then a long view of the hall with our promo poster!

My covers band will have played 25 this year, about right for me. However, there are crazy weekends where we've had three jobs in two days, so the distribution can be very uneven.

It's a good job I like the number and enjoy playing a slightly funky bass line to it - my band is named... Mustang Sally! We kick off every gig with "Hi folks, great to be back here in the [insert name] Club, we're Mustang Sally, let's start the party with our theme tune!" Cheesy, yes, but we're guaranteed some dance floor action right from the get-go.

Saturday night we played at the RBL (Royal British Legion) Club in Gillingham for the town’s annual Carnival night. As usual for these carnival-type gigs we had to be there by 6pm at which time all the roads were closed, for the procession to muster safely and the crowds to get cidered-up and ready to cheer along the narrow streets! I left home at 16:45 and just squeaked in before the border was shut. Still, looking on the plus side, I then had plenty of time to recover from the field hockey match I’d just finished umpiring at 15:40 and the 45 mile drive – our start time wasn’t until 20:30! Dep guitarist (#2 this time) had had a similar journey from the Dorset coast, but the dead time after setting-up and sound checking passed fairly quickly as we traded covers-band war stories and had a few bevies until 20:25, when the parade outside ended and the punters flocked in to refuel and get warm. We did a couple of good sets, our dep added a third harmony to those numbers that needed it and cranked out a great 2-4-6-8 Motorway as lead singer. We chanted “No More Songs!” back at the crowd after three encores, I was packed up faster than a fast thing, gone by 23:30 and home at 00:45. Our cat was waiting as usual for a food refill after leaving me the obligatory present in his litter-box – it’s all part of my enviable Rock’n’Roll lifestyle!

I stumbled across this short oh-so-true sock-puppet video that explains the above - well worth a look!

Funny how many folk nowadays don't have (or don't admit to having!) a printer, but are quite happy for mugs like me to do all the work on sets, spend time and pay for the ink and paper. Admittedly the ink thing is so much cheaper now I've converted to an Epson ink-tank printer (first black fill has lasted over a year) compared with the HP ink cartridge rip-off...

Our covers band finds that 2x60 minutes is the standard gig here in Dorset at pubs, clubs and events. We've got about two and a half hours worth of material with more being added next week, so no need to recycle numbers from the first half to fill up the time!

I wouldn't be surprised if the 'journos' producing the drivel above were actually using Chat-GPT to generate their articles... it's already happening elsewhere!

A gig I’ll never forget! A tale of disaster and a moral question… The venue was the Turnpike Showground near Shaftesbury in Dorset, and the event was a ‘Tractor Run’ over a Sunday lunchtime. This raised a smidgeon of alarm, but a gig’s a gig – so the organisers booked our band to play from 13:30 to 16:00 to entertain the multitude of attendees they were expecting. Now, the showground extents to 39 acres, it’s flat and exposed to the wind from nearly all directions and can accommodate 10,000 people at a time for big annual shows (we’d played there for one of those back in May). However, tractor runs are really meant for the owners and die-hard enthusiasts of agricultural machinery, giving them a chance to watch and drive their pride and joy in procession around the back-roads via as many pubs as possible – the general public aren’t very interested and don’t usually attend unless it’s held in a town-centre or as part of a bigger event (e.g. county show). Add into the mix the truly awful weather forecast (gales all day and heavy rain from around 15:00 til midnight) and you get the picture. We turned up at noon – no rain yet - only to find that the gazebo they’d promised as the band shelter wasn’t there – it had apparently been blow away overnight and ended up half a mile away in a hedge, completely wrecked. There were thirty security staff but just 17 other punters sitting miserably on a few straw bales in the biting wind. Would we play out in the open air, pretty please, the organisers asked? After a band huddle we said OK, but at the first drop of rain we’d be packed up and gone. The pix below give some idea of the vastness of the field but it can’t tell you that we were playing directly into a Force 5-6 gale – no need for foldback, I thought sardonically. There were no tractors there when we arrived. They were away on their run, leaving us to set up next to the burger tent and raffle stall. The tractors (about 20 of them) returned at 13:00 and we started playing early, all of us wearing a motley collection of whatever warm hats and coats we could beg or borrow. The tractor chaps collected their souvenir plaques, and ignored us (as well they might – we didn’t have three-point hitches or turbochargers!) At halftime, the organisers tried to hold an auction for the colossal amount of bacon, baps and burgers that were never going to sell – they virtually gave away most of it (to the tractor guys) for token amounts. They then embarked upon a lengthy raffle draw, where most of the ticket holders had long gone home so the same prizes were re-drawn again and again. At this point the first drops of rain began to fall – our well-oiled band-emergency-packing-up machine swung into operation, as it had to – we needed to get the gear into our cars asap as there was no other shelter! End of gig for us… So this is where the moral issue arose – your thoughts are welcome on whether we dealt with it in the best way. Should we have insisted upon being paid the whole fee? On the minus side we only did one set, not two, but that was after agreeing to risk our gear in inclement weather so as not to disappoint the organisers who hadn’t (through force majeure) been able to provide the agreed shelter – and before playing we had insisted upon a rider that if it rained we stopped. I had a lot of sympathy for the organisers as I’ve been on their side of the fenceas an organiser of similar events myself. However, experience had rapidly told me that they’d been wildly over-optimistic about public attendance, had invested far too much money in the wrong venue, over-catered for food drink, security etc, and were entirely at the mercy of the weather – they should have at the very least cancelled the band to save money but they didn’t. Anyway, as always it was about money… · I said I’d be happy with token diesel money to help out · Our dep guitarist (yet another!) made the valid point that he’d made a 100-mile round trip, played under difficult circumstances, fulfilled his commitment and so wanted the full fee · The other three thought that accepting half-pay would help the organisers while recovering something for a partly-wasted afternoon After a fairly heated discussion (without me, I was making the long trek to the Gents 150 yard away!) they’d agreed that we should take the full fee, but individually we could then donate whatever we thought appropriate back to the event… fair enough or not? My goodness, what a shambles, and what rain came down yesterday after we left!

Mustang Sally were booked in the George pub, Mere in Wiltshire again (well, three of the band do live there) and it was Carnival night once more on the Saturday just gone. The roads through the centre are closed at 18:00 to protect the crowds on the street and let the floats lumber their way through to the parade starting-point. Very sensible of course, but for me living nearly 50 miles away it meant leaving home at 16:45 and even then only just getting through the barricades with two minutes to spare. Setting up in the pub was very relaxed as our first set was only due to start at the end of the parade (about 20:30), so sound-checks were actually possible. Unfortunately those checks were early doors in a quiet corner of the main bar that later filled to bursting point with a crazy scrum of singing, dancing and somewhat leathered punters, so my sax set ended up with my lungs turned up to 11 even with the radio mic - see video... Time went quickly, we managed to finish at exactly 23:00 as per the pub’s licence, the landlord immediately booked us for the same gig next year and I was actually home by 00:30, happy to slurp a post-match cup of tea, but not so impressed with the sturdy welcome-home present my cat had left for me in his litter box… WhatsApp Video 2024-09-15 at 18.22.44_ff42baf4.mp4

Thank you Doc - I will persevere using your advice!

It's Sergio Mendes and Brazil -1 now, I guess...

Oh dear, have I killed another thread stone dead? Sorry, didn't mean to!