Debbie Gibson Owes Me Fifty Bucks

Stories of the Road: Britney Spearses

2011-02-20T11:03:00.001-08:00

This really happened. The names of any bands and musicians involved here have been changed. Any celebrity names have not.

STORIES OF THE ROAD: BRITNEY SPEARSES

The point that I thought for years was my career apex came in San Diego, California, in the spring of 2000, at a good-sized club just off UCSD.

We had a pretty good thing going on: we’d head out for a couple of weeks, play a few frat parties, maybe a festival, maybe an opening gig at a university theater, and if we were lucky, we’d get an interview on a college radio station. I could tell you how I hooked that up, but then, I'd have to kill you.

The college circuit was treating us very well. Along the way, of course, we’d hit the local clubs for gigs and mid-week showcases, de rigueur for a traveling band.

I felt really bad for the touring bands we’d see at the off-campus bars when we’d play showcases and industry nights. Showcases are a real racket for the club owners, who will get four or five bands in one evening and then give them a fraction of the door receipts to split at the end of the night – a band might get out of there with $100 to split 4 or 5 ways if they’re lucky. All this for the chance to play at a club where there might, maybe -- just maybe -- be someone from a label or management company. Assuming, of course, that said industry person had nothing better to do on a Wednesday night then wander out to a club because said club had arbitrarily deemed that particular Wednesday to be "Industry Night."

Usually, on a night like this, we’d just give up our take and let the other bands work it out. More times than I can count, we’d give our share to the other band that was on the road if there was another touring act. A hundred bucks goes a long way when it’s twice what you expected.

Some of these touring acts were signed to majors. There was a dress code for the major-label baby bands, and in the year 2000 it involved a 15-passenger white rental van with bench seats, a U-haul trailer, and a hangdog expression that involved lots of sighing at the end of the night as we were splitting up the take.

Conversely, a frat party would typically pay us $2000. Usually this was for three sets, and we could play covers – other people’s songs – if we wanted to. It was light-hearted – we referred to it as “rehearsal” – as there were no industry types to impress. We sold a lot of T-shirts and a lot of CD’s. We built up a substantial mailing list. We got free alcohol, free food, and the attention of so many girls that after the first six months I’d hammered together a sponsorship proposal and submitted it to Trojan, going so far as to even suggest the slogan, “The Trojan Concert Series: Where the Rubber Meets the Road.”

They didn’t go for it. We got sponsored by Pabst, instead. For better or for worse.

And festivals? A thousand bucks for a 45-minute set. Ditto, opening gigs at campus halls and theaters. We had a day where we made a grand for 45 minutes’ work, and that same afternoon I got to play a song onstage with Lenny Kravitz.

This is why I am not bitter about never having been a rock star by any popular or convenient definition, nor my place now, living in the woods writing this all down. I had five glorious, self-indulgent years of this.

Best of all, we had a tourbus: The Beast, a tired but spirited magenta and black Bluebird custom with two million miles on her chassis and half that on her 300-horse Cummins. But she was a runner. She had four bunk beds, a leather couch, a TV with DVD player, a kickin’ stereo with headphone outlets throughout, and a real kitchen and a chemical toilet. The Beast looked sweet, and best of all, she was a real Goddamned tourbus. We’d leased her from Gypsy Jack’s U-Drive RV Rentals in Corvallis, Oregon. Not that we told other bands this. Nor did we tell them that she was only costing us $500 a month plus fuel on a friends and family discount. The Beast was our home half the year.

We would pull up at these aforementioned showcases in The Beast, making our presence known with a hiss of airbrakes and the coughing rumble of the Cummins nodding off. “’Sup,” we’d say, spilling out in sunglasses, black T-shirts, and chains with a bevy of giggling coeds on our heels. “Is this the gig?”

We were dicks.

So. It was a beautiful Southern California night. We were parked in front of the club, we had been inside for a sound check at around seven, and the opening band was going on. Since the club had no green room, we were hangin’ in the belly of The Beast, shooting the shit with a couple of guys from a local band who’d wanted to see the inside of a God-given, actual tourbus.

Yes, all this can be yours, with hard work. Have a Pabst.

One of the guys from the opening band had mentioned that a local radio station was doing a promo at the club that night, but he didn’t know what it was all about. Giving away tickets to some concert, or something.

Cool, we thought. Local radio involvement is a good thing. To a struggling band, just getting your gig mentioned on a pop radio station is as big a rush as hearing Kasey Kasem announce the title of your new hit. And Manson, our singer, was a charismatic fella; he could usually weasel his way into some kind of interview.

We were slated to be the second band, with a 10:30 start time. At 9:30 we started to saddle up, at which point Nicky the Ex-Marine Roadie came running onto the bus. Literally, running. Out of breath.

“Get dressed, and get in there,” he ordered. “Now. Right now.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“Are we up?” asked somebody.

“No. Just get in there. Now.”

“Dude, we’ve got time.”

“Get your clothes on!” he shouted. “Move! Now! Trust me! Move! Move!”

We dressed – which involved spiking our hair, throwing on an open black dress shirt over our black T-shirts, and a round of deodorant and a couple of extra necklaces --and charged out the door, Nicky behind the last of us and shoving, “Go! Go! Go!” as if we were a chalk of commandos rappelling from a Blackhawk.

A line of people extended from the door past the back end of the bus but we didn’t think much of it. Lines were good things. Lines meant money. More importantly, lines meant faces in front of the stage. We played many, many showcase gigs for very, very few people. We had come to like lines.

"Wow, that's quite a line."

In retrospect, I should have taken a better look at the line, for something had clearly gone amiss inside the club.

Not afoul, mind you. Amiss.

Spectacularly, beautifully, amiss.

We worked our way past security, got stamped, came around the corner, and stopped dead in our tracks.

The guys piled into me, and I held my hands up, arms out in a Christ pose, bringing us all to a halt. “Whoa-whoa-whoa! Just look,” I said, as they tried to swarm around me. “Appreciate the moment, gentlemen. Breathe.”

“Whoa,” Manson breathed, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head.

“By the power of Grayskull,” Chad intoned gravely.

Mick clenched his fists and bounced up and down, grinning like a kid on Christmas Morning. “Yes! Yes!”

“I told you,” said Nicky.

What our associate in the first band had neglected to remember was that the local pop radio station was holding a Britney Spears Look-Alike contest that night. At our gig. First prize: backstage passes to Britney Spears at Qualcomm Stadium. Keep in mind, this was back in the year 2000, when Britney Spears was at the top of her game and so ridiculously hot that she gave off shimmers like asphalt in the summer.

The club was packed -- no exaggeration, here: packed absolutely elbow-to-elbow -- with blonde, tanned, extremely-scantily-clad teenage girls. About four hundred of them. All sporting that early-Britney trademark of slutty and innocent blended on HIGH and thrown into a very, very hot oven.

I had never seen anything like it. I never have, since.

The band before us was having a blast. I mean, how could they not? The girls were loving it, even though the band's drummer sucked. Every time he did a fill he barely came out of it alive, so it was like watching a car taking corners on two wheels. Their singer overplayed to the crowd -- I can't really blame him on that count -- but he wasn't very skilled at it; he was flirting with one girl in particular, which in this case came off as creepy and desperate to the other 399 girls in the room.

The trick -- here's some of The Saint's stagecraft, by the way -- is to flirt with the whole room simultaneously. You unfocus your eyes and don't make any actual eye contact; you make all your winks, smiles, and suggestive moves into the spotlight. If you flirt to just one girl in the room from the stage, every other girl in the audience will think you're just another horny douchebag with a guitar. Flirt with the whole room, though, and the girls in the audience will compete for you.

I was sure that the view from up there was going to be something I’d tell my grandkids about, someday. I could not wait to get onstage. We were going to tear the roof off.

Of course, those fuckers played an encore.

We have never set up our gear so efficiently. We scrambled to help the first band load their gear off, and rolled ours up from backline with the crisp efficiency of a pit crew at the Indy 500. Having to set up both my sax and my keyboards, my gear took the longest.

Chad, normally quiet, reserved – the Mister Spock of our outfit – turned to look at me, a blushing, dopey grin on his lantern jaw as I blew a couple of quiet notes into my horn and waited for my sampler to load. “If there’s a heaven, and it doesn’t look just like this?” he said, motioning toward the sea of blonde with the neck of his black-cherry Paul Reed Smith, “I’m gonna be really disappointed.”

“Look alive,” Manson called out. “We may never see this again.”

“Un-fuckin’-believable,” Blake said to me, looking out at all the babes. “This is like. . . I don’t know.”

“Me either, buddy,” I said. The Akai sampler blinked blue in its rack. "Okay, I'm good. Let's make a joyous noise, gentlemen."

I took another look – a long, long look – across the crowd. I closed my eyes, trying to burn it into my retinas like a glance at the sun.

Our pre-gig ritual was to belt out a few choruses of Drift Away, usually backstage or outside, to warm up our voices and get our chi in sync – everyone in the band sang, and we prided ourselves on our harmonies, as it was one thing that separated us from the drop-tune barre-chord "we play, like, aggro but it's, like, melodic" dorks on the circuit – but tonight we had skipped it. We wanted to get going as soon as possible.

“Mike check?” asked the soundman. Manson started into Drift Away, his soulful, leather-lunged tenor grinding out, "Gimme the beat, boys, and free my soul. . . ." and we each joined in, and – my heart is racing as I type this – the girls started singing along with us.

That was power. The club held five hundred people and there must’ve been four hundred Britneys, all right there in sync with us. Certainly not in tune, but in sync. It was an electric moment.

“Got your levels,” came the soundman’s voice through the monitors. We gave the OK and kept singing, a couple more choruses, right up into our 10:30 start time.

They weren’t stopping; we weren’t stopping.

We sang “Drift Away” in G, and our first song started with a sample-and-hold keyboard riff in Em. I punched up the patch, took the moment of breath between choruses, and stabbed my finger down to launch the first song. God bless the relative minor; it flowed perfectly, darkly, ominously, into the set opener.

Mick clicked off four, the band exploded, the lights came up, and four hundred Britney Spearses rushed the stage.

Glory.

Who's Who

2011-02-13T10:43:00.000-08:00

And so it goes. My stint with Becki Sue & Her Big Rockin' Daddies comes screeching to a halt with the sudden breakup of the band just when it gets going again.

Of course, this may just be a ploy to get me to stop showing up to gigs with them. (This kind of ingrained paranoia is why I don't smoke pot: You know that point when the whole room is baked and everyone gets really quiet? They're not being quiet because they're stoned, too; they're quiet because secretly, they all hate me.)

I haven't really been playing at the top of my game since I got back. Of course, this hand injury isn't doing me any favors as far as that goes. What I've been lacking in brilliance I've been compensating for with muscle and flash.

I'm still playing with Hot Rod's Blues Revue, and that's a gig I was glad to come back to. Many years ago when I was cutting my teeth in the Seattle blues scene I would see these "All-Star" bands with guys like Dave Jetty, Mark Whitman, Skerik, and Keith Lowe throwing down and just killing it. This was back when I was barely old enough to get into a club, and played a 1921 King tenor in an alligator case held together with duct tape and hope. At the last gig, the waitress was explaining the band to a patron, and she called us a "Who's Who of the Blues Scene."

Wow, really?

Guess so.

So, now it's my turn. Now I'm that guy, in that band.

I couldn't tell you how I got here. I'd love to tell you that it's because I'm a brilliant musician who put his time in. But brilliance isn't my schtick. That's Scotty Harris's thing.

My teacher / mentor / Jedi Master Jeremy Smith showed me the path long ago, by instructing me to listen to Aretha, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, etc., and to cop the vocal lines. Not the solos. While other sax players -- much more technically-proficient, forward-thinking, and devoted sax players, might I add -- devote years to riffing on Coltrane and Bird and Monk and running scales, intervals, and extended-7ths and -9ths until their hands fly over the keys in effortless patterns, my practice time is spent in my living room with my vinyl or Pandora, sometimes without even taking out my horn. For placement of the blue notes: Ray Charles, Greg Allman, John Mayall, John Nemeth, Keb Mo; for inflection, caesura, and phrasing I turn to the great storytellers: Mark Knopfler, John Gorka, Tom Waits. Everything a sax player needs to know about the blues is in "The Great Gig in the Sky."

I'm up there because I come at it from a different angle. Different stuff goes in, so different stuff comes out.

And now I've got another month or so to work in new ideas. John Gorka's on Pandora as I type this. Time to hit the shed.

Ow.

2011-02-09T22:15:00.000-08:00

Son of a BITCH. Broke my finger. I'm having surgery tomorrow to get that chunk of bone reset and the tendon reattached. All this time off, I just started gigging again, and now I'm going to be out for another month.

Son. Of. A. Bitch. See you all in March.

Nobody I'd Rather Straighten It With

2009-09-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

So inspiration sometimes comes from the damnedest places. For me, of course, inspiration usually comes from the damnedest places.

I was humming a rockabilly ditty to myself a few days ago and thought, "Wait a minute. I know that song. What the hell is that song?"

Sherman, set the wayback machine.

It's moments like this when you realize just how far back your roots go. Joey the Saint's roots go back to 1984, and the movie Top Secret, starring Val Kilmer. Who, incidentally, sang all the songs in the soundtrack.

I loved this movie. I especially loved every minute of the concert footage. And I remember, because I had just started my first band, how hard people laughed at this scene, and thinking how great rock and roll and humor go together.

I also remember my mother explaining to me how damned dirty this song was. Which is why I brought it to the band at practice last night.

If Eddie Wilson was my first rock idol, Nick Rivers followed him closely. (Nigel Tufnel is running a distant third.) I like to think that, if I'm doing it right, Joey the Saint fuses the two. Admittedly, it's kind of weird that my major rock idols are fictional movie characters. Their impact on my fragile adolescent psyche should tell you something about the power of facade and the inherent duality of show business. But I digress. Of course.

"Straighten the Rug" is on the set list for the 19th. I'd better work on my backspin.

See you there.

Stage Dives

2009-08-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

The local blues magazines really need to get their shit together. I spend a great deal of time, it seems, going to jam sessions that no longer exist. Like tonight, for instance. It wouldn't be that hard for someone at the WBS and/or Blues To Do's to take an hour and just phone up every listed jam session and find out if it's still going on. I've shown up to jam sessions in Tacoma to find the club boarded up and the parking lot overgrown with weeds. Twice.

"No, no jam here," I was told tonight, at the North Point, which was at least still open. "Not for three months. We have karaoke, though. Do you sing?"

I ended up rolling past Dawson's. Stuck my head in the door. Different doorman. So far, so good.

Ah. Different jam host. Even better. Tim Hall, who lives in my neighborhood.

I played a set, and at the end I got to sing one tune. I kept it more or less clean; figuring it was a blues jam, I called the saddest blues song I've ever heard: Bo Carter's "My Pencil Won't Write No More." The crowd response was terrific. I'm still not going to push my luck at Dawson's, though.

The trick, at this point, will be finding venues where the material not only works, but where the owners have the requisite sense of humor.

It Starts. . . . Finally. . . .

2009-08-10T15:07:00.001-07:00

So it more or less went down like this:

I got 86'd from the jam at Dawson's, in Tacoma, earlier this year. January, I think. As I've mentioned, this creates a complication -- well, not so much a complication as an annoyance -- because the jam host at Dawson's also runs the local jam near my house; he doesn't allow me to sing at our local jam anymore as he fears for his job. Bear in mind, I didn't mutter a single obscenity onstage during the performance that got me kicked out. Someone complained to the management that my songs "weren't appropriate." Apparently, it's a class establishment and come on: like I knew that those were expensive peanut shells on the floor.

Then, a couple of months later, at a jam in an Army bar in Lakewood -- a bar that makes Dawson's look like Dimitriou's Jazz Alley -- I was delivering a rousing rendition of "She Won't Get Under Me Till I Get Over You," and this happened:

(and no, clicking on it does not make the CENSORED sign go away)

If you squint you can see my saxophone on the left side of the frame. Needless to say, the photographer wasn't focusing on me.

Joey The Saint got 86'd from that bar, too. I'm on a roll. On the plus side, I might get a spot on the next Girls Gone Wild video. And I handed out a TON of business cards.

Then we did the album, and things kind of dropped off. Which surprised me. I did get an email from the Washington Blues Society asking me to play a WBS function but, and I quote,

> If you have it together by 9/14 - how about doing an
> ELECTRIC Set at the WBS Monthly Blues Bash???
> I will caution you though - it is an ALL-AGES
> meeting....so no risque stuff....

I can safely assume that they didn't hear about the Lakewood gig.

I don't expect great things from the local scene. Frankly, I'm waiting for the Washington Blues Society to throw a brick through my window once this band takes off. But I would never do anything to purposefully screw over the WBS. They've been good to me. No, seriously. So I declined.

We did a set at Doug McGrew's jam at The Barrel a couple of months ago, didn't hear much about it, and frankly, I turned my attention back to my mundane, non-getting-kicked-out-of-bars-for-freaky-MILF-antics life.

Phone rings not long ago. It's the owner of The Barrel. He wants to book us. Immediately. He's been trying to reach me, apparently. People have been going bonkers over our appearance.

"Ricky," I said, "This is Joey the Saint. I'm the guy who sets my horn on fire and sings songs about hand jobs. Are you sure you don't want Scotty Harris? Nice guy, plays jazz, drives a late-model car. Flosses." I'm not making this up; Scotty Harris has a set of teeth to rival Donny Osmond.

"We love what you did," says Ricky. "They're still talking about it. Can you be in here the 19th of September?"

"Um, sure." (Like I'm booked, right?)

"Great!"

Then comes The Awkwardness.

"Ahem," I ahem'd. "You do understand, right, that we're not going to do Mustang Sally. Or Stormy Monday or, uh, Takin' Care of Business. And that fuckin' Tracy Chapman song. We come in there, we're doing three sets of originals, jump and shuffles, and a short set of encores. You understand this."

"Oh, yeah. It'll be great."

So. September 19th. Saturday. At The Barrel.

Bring your own CENSORED placards; I only have so many.

Googlin' Blues

2009-05-07T07:37:00.001-07:00

So it seems my brilliant idea of an entire set / night / album of dirty-but-not-too-dirty (read: Johnny Lang meets Chef) blues is meeting with polarized response. So far, the cornerstones of the A-Men's set have resulted in multiple standing ovations, and one demand by a club owner to "Play here, as soon as you can." Go, us. I should note that the owner of the studio where we recorded Old Whiskey in New Bottles offered to sign us to his label on our second day of tracking. We're in negotiations.

On the flip side, I was permanently 86'd from Dawson's in Tacoma a few months ago for singing "You Can Squeeze My Lemon, Baby, but Don't You Touch My Plums," and that jam host now refuses to let me on the mike at any of his subsequent jam nights for fear of losing his job. (Ironically, I was a hit at Dawson's; the crowd went batshit. It was the bar manager who got offended.)

I'm going to one of his jams tonight (he hosts the weekly jam 10 minutes from my house) where I'll stand downstage for a couple of sets, taking an obligatory solo on every tune while a procession of pudgy white guys in Hawaiian shirts pulls a train on The Allman Brothers. De rigeur.

Another jam I frequent features a Microsoft retiree, replete with pleated Dockers and a polo shirt, who will call "Big Boss Man." He's a regular, and he always does "Big Boss Man," not seeming to acknowledge the irony. I mean, anyone who made a cool few mil and retired early has presumably -- and hopefully -- already told his boss to shove it. Though that doesn't explain who's forcing him to wear those clothes. He also has no idea that I'm playing the horn line from "High Heel Sneakers." Among horn players, this is what passes for recalcitrance. Hey, it gets me out of the house.

So, related: what's interesting to me is this. I have, for the past week, been searching out bands that are doing what Joey the Saint & the A-Men are doing -- an entire schtick based around risque, mostly-original, not-too-dirty-but-funny-as-hell dirty blues. Actual blues. Not the mind-staggering geyser of effluvia that erupts when you open the manhole that is MySpace "Genre: Blues." Kill me. I'm talking 12-bar changes, walking bass lines with quick fours over competently-played double-shuffles. You know: blues. Bloooooze.

It is critical to find other bands that do what your band does. Find out who manages them, where they play, what labels signed them. Hell, hook up a tour. It is especially important to find bretheren bands if you have a niche. (BTW, if everyone in your band has a goatee and Celtic rings, you do not have a niche.)

A quick run through the Dirty Blues genres on CDBaby and iTunes yields a mere handful of bands, and the ones that recorded actual original risque blues of any sort seem to have kicked off this planet by 1965. And no, The Doors are not a fucking blues band. iTunes is particularly enlightening: an album titled "Down and Dirty Blues" yields such edgy numbers as "Walkin' the Dog," "Stagger Lee," and "The Thrill is Gone." I might as well go to the jam tonight as buy that record. Even if this band I found on iTunes does a SPECTACULAR motherfuckin' job on these songs, they are neither down, nor dirty.

A Google search for "Dirty Blues" brings up, on the first page, the Wikipedia entry on Dirty Blues artists (which I hope will mention me once this album comes out), a passing nod to the Stones' "Cocksucker Blues," and a YouTube video of the "Down and Dirty Blues Band" doing. . . .

. . . wait for it. . . .

. . . Big Boss Man.

I am not making this up.

Further down, we find the Asylum Street Spankers, who, if you squint, loosely resemble what I'm doing, though I still think it's a stretch to consider vulgarity-laden barbershop as Dirty Blues. It kind of loses the nudge-nudge wink-wink factor when you have songs like "Rotten Cocksucker's Ball," and "Shave 'em Dry." In fact, if you've recorded a song called "Rotten Cocksucker's Ball," you haven't just beaten subtlety to death; you've raped its corpse, enjoyed its braised heart and lungs over a warm bed of wilted arugula and julienned beets, and posted its head on a spear outside your rehearsal space as a warning.

Me, I'm shooting for subtle. Or at least trying to be erudite, here. English degree and all that.

And then approximately 13,000 hits for various "Dirty Blues" compilations dating from the 20's through the 50's. Bo Carter, Bull Moose Jackson, Dorothy Ellis. Memphis Slim.

Apparently, there hasn't been anyone doing what I'm doing -- attempting a whole evening of edgy, funny, double-entendre blues, most of which will go right over any young'uns' heads -- for about fifty years, now. Which is a bit disconcerting, because there are only two possible reasons for this.

1.) I am the only person to think of doing this;

or

2.) There is a very good, though as-yet-undiscovered, reason why no one is currently doing what I have done, or at least been successful enough at it to warrant coming up in the first page of a search on Google or the major DMP's.

Neither proposition strikes me as reassuring.

Paddle faster. I hear banjos.

Back in the Saddle Again

2009-05-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

The obligatory first blog post, wherein I tell you all either A.) how great it is to be back; B.) how much I've missed blogging; or C.) what in the holy hell happened to me in late 2001 that made me give this up on the brink of taking over the world.

Sure, hell. I've got time.

A.) Yeah. It's great to be back. Thanks to Mike Jasper for lighting a fire under my perfectly-formed, 6-minute-miling ass. This will be fun.

B.) No, I'd be bullshitting. Blogging is information pollution. My father has a blog. My nephew has a blog. He's four. No, I won't give you the link but I might post excerpts, here. Thanks to bloggers, trying to do any sort of actual research on the Internet (it is a research tool, people) is now the equivalent of going to the library and finding that high-school mash notes have been jammed between every page of every book. I know, I know: I gnashed my teeth and vowed never to become part of the problem again. And yet, here we are. Chalk up one more for the incorrigible capriciousness of purpose.

C.) Nope. Still a matter of national security until I'm advised otherwise. But I'm back, now. And I vow to not get into politics on this blog; you're gonna have to get me drunk. And that's all I'm gonna say on that.

So here it is, 2009. Pacific Northwest. It's raining sideways. My band has been offered a record deal. Not much has changed in all this time. See that? You missed nothing.