Last Tuesday I was prepping for band practice (doing Crunches - Nestle, of course - and icing down a few PBR’s) when I got a frantic phone call from a buddy in San Antonio. He does booking for several places and said he was in a bind. The three-band lineup slated to play Saturday night at Hot Tin Roof (a well-known sports bar/live music venue off of I-10 with a fancy flashing neon sign and everything) had fallen through. They needed a band that met the following criteria:
1) Willing to play for 3 ½ hours
2) Available Saturday night
3) Having a Pulse
I knew instantly that we were that band. When the boys arrived for band practice, I pitched the idea, and we all agreed that this would be a perfect opportunity to take the band to “the next level.” Of course, “the next level” is an out of town gig in a major metropolitan area. Sure, we’ve played in Eastland. We’ve played in Clyde. Sure, we’ve played at my brother-in-law’s birthday party in his backyard. But this was different.
We loaded up on Saturday and hit the road. When we arrived, we found a pretty sizable crowd (maybe 100 people or so). We set up our gear and the sound man helped position our amps and mics onstage. He then mentioned that he had been double booked and needed to run down the street to another bar and get a different band setup… Not to worry though…. He would be right back.
We settled in and had a drink. After about an hour and a half, the crowd began to dwindle. Brian made friends with a guy at the bar and convinced him that we were actually the backing band for Lady Gaga, and that she would be arriving shortly – encased inside of a giant piñata; dangled by a cable through the skylight in the roof by a helicopter and smashed by her blindfolded backup dancers as part of a grand entrance. Brian will say anything to keep the people at the bar until we start playing… but the guy left (he either wasn’t a fan of LG, or just wasn’t very gullible).
Turns out, there were some technical difficulties down the road at the other bar. By the time the sound technician could get back, it had been almost 2 hours and the entire crowd had disappeared. At one point during our extended wait, we had considered picking up our instruments and roaming around from table to table - Mariachi-Style – but the jukebox was too loud and we knew there was no way we could sync up our sound to match perfectly with Ronnie Millsap.
By the time we got started, it was almost midnight. There was a pretty slow start to our set – there was a fairly small amount of cursing and insults directed our way and a few lightweight objects thrown at us… nothing major. But as the night went on, people continued to trickle in and our popularity grew. Apparently, there is a late crowd at the Hot Tin Roof. By the time we hit our stride, there were about 35 people in the place and we had become the most popular people in the bar (helped, I’m sure by the fact that we had microphones and a public address system and could not be easily ignored).
During our break, Robert and Brian buddied-up with a couple from S.A. who bought them tequila shots. Meanwhile, I convinced a group of newcomers to stay by promising to attempt to blend together Outkast’s “Mrs. Jackson” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On” during our next set.
By 2 AM, we wrapped up our last set and to our surprise… the crowd demanded an encore. I would love to say that this is pretty commonplace at our shows, but the truth is, it was our first encore ever... Or at least it was the first one that was not our idea, and forced on the people by us. We also sold quite a few T-shirts, made a bunch of new friends, and found a great new place to play. All in all, we had a great time and will definitely be returning to HTR soon!
We filmed our trip down to San Antonio and mixed in some of the road trip footage with footage from the gig.Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K6r1ijR8x8
