So here I am 53. Never made a freakin dime in the music industry, but know I probably could have if someone just believed in me. You see artistic types tend to give up after they aren't taken seriously. Well it wasn't that way for me. We had great songs, we were tighter than a frog's pussy live and we were on a mission.
The only thing is, we weren't in the inner circle of Boston musicians, and I had no idea how to play that game. I mean, yeah we were the house band at the Rat in Kenmore Square for 2 months on Thursday night's in 1982!! Everyone loved us from the bouncer's to the waitresses to the roided out door guy, who was nuts!!! There was a sound guy named Granny that had been there forever, but the trick was, you had to get the levels right at sound check and make sure he had your name on the fader's because by the time your second set and the bottle of Dewar's set in, you would sound like the worst garageband ever. And that was on us man not him, shit he dealt with a bunch of shitheads on a daily basis!
I understood, believe me, I had seen all the pre-maddonnas and I knew he was a good guy. So before our second set, I'd sit there and make sure all the fader's he'd marked so attentively during our sound check were good. You know what, they always were. He was a hell of a nice guy.
In our minds if you weren't good live, you didn't matter so that was important, and we used to kill it! I mean it was was crazy, how well rehearsed we were. But, and there is always a but, we were young and wide eyed, but very inexperienced.
I remember one night we were absolutely killing it, and the club owner was there. We were the third band, headliner's I guess, but our second set wasn't supposed to start until 1 am. Well the second band did an extremely short set, for whatever reason and we had a great crowd!! I am thinking ok we are going to crush this place!! Well, it was like 12:30 and I said to Granny, we'll go on now, so we don't lose the crowd, after all it was a Thursday!! He says to me, oh no, you guys can't go on until 1:15, because you could play until 2 am back then. I was livid!!! I said we'll lose the crowd, even offered to play a double set, we'll just repeat the first set, because we only had maybe 23 songs. Half the people in there weren't there for the first set anyway, so what do we have to lose? I'll never forget Granny's face when he walked up to me and said, no the owner doesn't want you to go on until 1:15. My heart sunk, we had 200 people in a club ready to rock but by the time we went on after 45 minutes of waiting, we had maybe 20 people, and the club owner and Granny.
Well it was probably the best set we had ever played and no one saw it because of the owner of The Rat!! But he sat there with his girlfriend laughing and smiling!! I wanted to paste my Telecaster across his forehead, but hey, he was the boss. It was a shame, I still have a cassette tape of that performance recorded in the audience by my brother, who covered a cassette recorder with my jean jacket!!! It still to this day is riveting!! Too bad no one heard it. Life as a musician, with no juice is really tough. But we were far from through...........
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