Less Hellish But Still A Week-end...
Ok so that last one was pretty long. Sorry bout that. I'll try to rein myself in a bit from here on out. I'll also try to update this thing a little more frequently as well. I can be easily distracted at times. I sit down to write something here and end up reading someone else's blog or just surfing the Internet. (I discovered recently that you can find porn on the Internet. Who knew!) I also have resolved my little unemployment problem recently so that's been taking up a lot of prime blogging time. Anywho, on with the story...
This one also was back in the glory days of LagerHead, my first working band. We had been booked to play a week-end at JJ Shooters in Minnedosa, MB. Great, we thought, a paying gig close to home. That cuts down on gas costs. Of course this was around 10 or 12 years ago now when gas was close to .50/litre so I guess the real money saving gigs are more commonly referred to as "rehearsals" now. Nothing saves on gas money like not leaving the basement. But I digress....
We roll into the bar on Friday afternoon and get everything set up. After a good meal in the restaurant attached to the hotel and a quick shower and wardrobe change it's show time. The bar, much to our delight, is packed. There are people everywhere. This is normally a great thing for a band. Normally. It seems all two or three hundred people at this particular bar would really like to talk to each other on this night. We are bombarded with requests to turn it down through out the entire night Eventually we are playing just through our amps and monitors on stage. Our PA is pretty much off. No one danced at all, they barely acknowledged that we were there, except to ask us to turn it down. Oh well, maybe Saturday's crowd will be better.
We discover that we are the only guests in the entire hotel. We have the place to ourselves. The pool, the hot tub, everything. Since we had almost no fun playing the show we decide to hit the beer vendor before it closes and entertain ourselves in the pool. Not knowing there was a pool, none of us brought swimwear. It was also February and really cold so we never would have thought of it anyway. So there we were 7 guys, mostly overweight wanting to go for a swim in the beautiful heated indoor pool. All but 4 of us decided not to get wet with no swimwear. The rest of us said "what the hell? There's only us here anyway" and stripped down to our undies and went for a dip. At 3:00am, while drinking fairly heavily, we decided to roll the cover back out over the pool and swim under it for a while. I do not recommend this. Even if you're sober and not in your underwear. Long story short, you could almost drown while drinking and laughing so hard beer comes out your nose while swimming under a plastic tarp in your underwear at 3:00am. Fat guys look funny in their undies, especially when wet. The mere sight of each other was enough to drive us all into hysterical fits of drunken laughter. Add in the usual drunken stupid guy horseplay and I'm amazed I'm here to tell you this tale at all. Eventually we decide we've had enough and get out of the pool in favour of the hot tub. Picture if you will 3 fat guys in their undies lounging in a hotel hot tub built just big enough for 4 normal sized people. Our light man, himself quite large decides he would like to join us in said smallish hot tub. Fully clothed he jumps in. Maybe "jumps" is not the right word, more like flops and squeezes his way in rather violently. The ensuing torrent of water over the edge of the hot tub sent at least one freshly opened full pack of smokes to a wet and soggy grave. After about 5 minutes of this we are less than comfortable as you can imagine so we get out, taking most of the water with us. There was maybe an inch and a half left in the bottom of the hottub when we got out. We decide to beat a hasty retreat and head off to our respective rooms for the night. Maybe no-one will notice the empty hot tub and the beer bottles floating in the pool.
Morning breaks and we are up and ready for breakfast. Everyone but our drummer.
This will not do so we head in to wake him up. Six of us crash his room and jump on him in his bed. Wide awake now he starts screaming obscenities at us while we attempt to drag him out and toss him in the pool. He's a scrawny guy and dressed in the most fetching one piece long underwear. We get him out into the hallway where he latches onto the railing designed to keep you from falling into the pool. For a small guy he sure is strong. Fear will do that I'm told. Try as we might we can not get him into the pool. We give up and let him go back to his bed. After about ten minutes or so our rhythm guitar player and myself decide he's had long enough and go crashing back into his room. I guess he didn't know there were locks on the doors. At a combined weight of somewhere near 500lbs we both leap onto his bed. A loud crack is heard, followed by the entire bed dropping about a foot in height. Uh Oh. We get the hell out of there and leave him to his ruined bed, after turning the mattress over on top of him of course. The rest of the day is spent hiding from the housekeeping staff until showtime. The crowd is much better this night and really into the band. We had a blast. Refer back to my post about common misconceptions for more details. This was the show with the infamous cougar and her eight person hot tub. More pool shenanigans follow the gig while the scrawny drummer hooks up with two, yes two, ahem, healthy girls and disappears for a few hours. He returns to find out his key will not let him back into the building, only his room. He's not sure which room it is though and proceeds to spend the next hour going from window to window, banging loudly on the air conditioners and yelling until someone, our bass player I think, gets up and lets his near frozen scrawny ass back in the hotel. Sunday morning comes and we decide on one last swim before we pack up and head home. There we were again, a bunch of fat guys in their undies, playing under the tarp and cannonballing into the pool. In front of the big old glass french doors leading to the restaraunt, which has just opened for the Sunday morning breakfast smorg. I'm sure more than one patron lost their appetite that morning. After all was said and done I'm surprised we got paid at all that week-end. I'm sure we caused enough damage and hardship to warrant keeping our money. We did get paid though, and even got invited back to play there again. I guess were entertaining after all....except to the tow truck driver who had to unlock our car for us while it was running. He wasn't entertained at all....
This one also was back in the glory days of LagerHead, my first working band. We had been booked to play a week-end at JJ Shooters in Minnedosa, MB. Great, we thought, a paying gig close to home. That cuts down on gas costs. Of course this was around 10 or 12 years ago now when gas was close to .50/litre so I guess the real money saving gigs are more commonly referred to as "rehearsals" now. Nothing saves on gas money like not leaving the basement. But I digress....
We roll into the bar on Friday afternoon and get everything set up. After a good meal in the restaurant attached to the hotel and a quick shower and wardrobe change it's show time. The bar, much to our delight, is packed. There are people everywhere. This is normally a great thing for a band. Normally. It seems all two or three hundred people at this particular bar would really like to talk to each other on this night. We are bombarded with requests to turn it down through out the entire night Eventually we are playing just through our amps and monitors on stage. Our PA is pretty much off. No one danced at all, they barely acknowledged that we were there, except to ask us to turn it down. Oh well, maybe Saturday's crowd will be better.
We discover that we are the only guests in the entire hotel. We have the place to ourselves. The pool, the hot tub, everything. Since we had almost no fun playing the show we decide to hit the beer vendor before it closes and entertain ourselves in the pool. Not knowing there was a pool, none of us brought swimwear. It was also February and really cold so we never would have thought of it anyway. So there we were 7 guys, mostly overweight wanting to go for a swim in the beautiful heated indoor pool. All but 4 of us decided not to get wet with no swimwear. The rest of us said "what the hell? There's only us here anyway" and stripped down to our undies and went for a dip. At 3:00am, while drinking fairly heavily, we decided to roll the cover back out over the pool and swim under it for a while. I do not recommend this. Even if you're sober and not in your underwear. Long story short, you could almost drown while drinking and laughing so hard beer comes out your nose while swimming under a plastic tarp in your underwear at 3:00am. Fat guys look funny in their undies, especially when wet. The mere sight of each other was enough to drive us all into hysterical fits of drunken laughter. Add in the usual drunken stupid guy horseplay and I'm amazed I'm here to tell you this tale at all. Eventually we decide we've had enough and get out of the pool in favour of the hot tub. Picture if you will 3 fat guys in their undies lounging in a hotel hot tub built just big enough for 4 normal sized people. Our light man, himself quite large decides he would like to join us in said smallish hot tub. Fully clothed he jumps in. Maybe "jumps" is not the right word, more like flops and squeezes his way in rather violently. The ensuing torrent of water over the edge of the hot tub sent at least one freshly opened full pack of smokes to a wet and soggy grave. After about 5 minutes of this we are less than comfortable as you can imagine so we get out, taking most of the water with us. There was maybe an inch and a half left in the bottom of the hottub when we got out. We decide to beat a hasty retreat and head off to our respective rooms for the night. Maybe no-one will notice the empty hot tub and the beer bottles floating in the pool.
Morning breaks and we are up and ready for breakfast. Everyone but our drummer.
This will not do so we head in to wake him up. Six of us crash his room and jump on him in his bed. Wide awake now he starts screaming obscenities at us while we attempt to drag him out and toss him in the pool. He's a scrawny guy and dressed in the most fetching one piece long underwear. We get him out into the hallway where he latches onto the railing designed to keep you from falling into the pool. For a small guy he sure is strong. Fear will do that I'm told. Try as we might we can not get him into the pool. We give up and let him go back to his bed. After about ten minutes or so our rhythm guitar player and myself decide he's had long enough and go crashing back into his room. I guess he didn't know there were locks on the doors. At a combined weight of somewhere near 500lbs we both leap onto his bed. A loud crack is heard, followed by the entire bed dropping about a foot in height. Uh Oh. We get the hell out of there and leave him to his ruined bed, after turning the mattress over on top of him of course. The rest of the day is spent hiding from the housekeeping staff until showtime. The crowd is much better this night and really into the band. We had a blast. Refer back to my post about common misconceptions for more details. This was the show with the infamous cougar and her eight person hot tub. More pool shenanigans follow the gig while the scrawny drummer hooks up with two, yes two, ahem, healthy girls and disappears for a few hours. He returns to find out his key will not let him back into the building, only his room. He's not sure which room it is though and proceeds to spend the next hour going from window to window, banging loudly on the air conditioners and yelling until someone, our bass player I think, gets up and lets his near frozen scrawny ass back in the hotel. Sunday morning comes and we decide on one last swim before we pack up and head home. There we were again, a bunch of fat guys in their undies, playing under the tarp and cannonballing into the pool. In front of the big old glass french doors leading to the restaraunt, which has just opened for the Sunday morning breakfast smorg. I'm sure more than one patron lost their appetite that morning. After all was said and done I'm surprised we got paid at all that week-end. I'm sure we caused enough damage and hardship to warrant keeping our money. We did get paid though, and even got invited back to play there again. I guess were entertaining after all....except to the tow truck driver who had to unlock our car for us while it was running. He wasn't entertained at all....
posted by The Big FUGR at
7:32 PM
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