Me and Britney

hidy ya'll
Well it's Friday....and I have tonight off so I think I’m heading down to Ithaca and check out
a rockabilly band that Al Hartland is drumming with tonight.
Al was the drummer for me last night in Syracuse....good guy, major whip on that snare drum too.

Anyway, about that Syracuse show.

we were booked cold into a place called downtown manhattans, so about 5:30 yesterday afternoon I de-camped from hall road and drove down to Harry Acetos place in Ithaca, where I connected with Eric, Harry, Chad, and al....we dumped the rented pa in Eric's van and took that and the rental car up to the gig.

The drive up took about an hour and a half, and it was still snowing pretty good and that lasted till at least 3:00 am.

Anyway we made the club and got set up...started our first set to maybe 4 people.
The bartender told she was expecting more later and the manager there said we had received a pretty good write-up in the previous week’s entertainment section of the local paper. All in all I was still fairly optimistic.......but I got past that.

The band sounded pretty good and we were starting to get our groove on in spite of 2 dead channels in the mixer which shorted our vocals a bit, and an occasional weird honking sound that emitted from the speakers.

We got fired up ,and ran the show top to bottom and there were some people coming in, but we weren't having very much in the way of impact ( I kept thinking about that Asleep at the Wheel video, where the band is playing at a motel conference room, and there are like 2 people in the house kind of staring blankly at the band, Ray Benson wraps the song up and looks around and says "man, who booked this gig" )

I t all came home to me in a blinding flash when we took our first break. The house sound system starts pumping out Britney spears and all the young dudes and dudettes start grooving to it. I was vaguely reminded of the time I was playing a gig down in the warehouse district and the back stage door wasn't marked...I accidentally walked into the young gay bull riders for Jesus support group (no offense to any young gay bull riders out there)

I felt as out of place as a station wagon on a NASCAR track.
anyway we muddled on thru it, and the bar staff was nice, as were the young dudes and dudettes....they didn't get us, but they were nice about it...we started our last set and I tried to swamp it up a bit, but sadly I just don't have lots of pop like tricks in my bag...anyway we still had a pretty good time so a great big thanks goes out to Peter at the club and the guys at Hollerback Productions (thanks anyway guys, and the 50 bucks is in the mail).

well it's still snowing a bit here so I think I’ll head on into town.
I’ll try to catch up Sunday or Monday....we're playing the Rongo tomorrow night
so I won't have far to crawl.

Till next time, adios