I had a country band for a fairly short period of time. Actually a weird group which did a few different things.herodotus wrote:country bar with the chicken wire in front of the stage.
One was playing it completely straight, Hank Williams Lonesome Whistle Blow and like that*; another was progressive pop country arrangements; I had a beautiful arrangement of Wichita Lineman, which brought in another problem, its two-chord vamp where I would solo on guitar for a while. And we had other 'art' elements.
The drummer played standing up. Ok, so this before there was any trend of ironic country or anything of the sort. The drummer was married to Jill Olsen who started Red Meat a few yrs later. *We had a real-world pedal steel player who had I think only played C&W music. We cultivated an image and everything. The lead singer looked fantastic, nearly fully covered in tattoos and they were fantastic tattoos, done by Broadway Bill in SF.
But there is a point to the stupid story: a friend I worked with had a popular group locally, Short Dogs Grow (I actually saw that as the name of a wifi network in Oakland recently) so through that we got a gig opening for MENTORS. This was very wrong; but, this being a conceptual sort of project I decided ok maybe we can work with this. We did not expect to be received well by the MENTORS crowd. If youse do not know what that is... the leader was called El Duce, ok. This fvcking guy:
(Mentors' You Axed For It was released nationally in 1985 around the same time as the PMRC hearings in Washington. Senator Al Gore and his wife Tipper actually read the lyrics to the Mentors' "Anal Vapors" during the proceedings, giving them the notoriety they had been craving since their inception.)
We could not have been more wrong for this crowd. There is no way I can convey the reality of this situation, you had to be there. Google: El Duce on Jerry Springer.
We were actually working out how to get a chicken wire fence up for the gig. We expected real trouble. But something happened to me which put us out of business before the gig which is another story. A regret, I wish I could say we did this and lived. Gratitude!