Pearls before Swine

In the late-70’s I was playing out my string with a show band I’d led for about three years. Everybody was moving on. The bass player’s wife had their first kid and another was on the way and he needed to focus on his career (mechanical engineering). The drummer wanted to work a lot more, since he was a low-paid Nebraska high school teacher, and he’d found a 5-day-a-week supper club band he wanted to join. The first to leave, our keyboard player, had snagged a scholarship at Juilliard.and he was leaving for school in another month. I had started working with a kid who I’d eventually end up partnering with in the Wirebender studio and live sound. We all wanted it to end and we all had good reasons. We stayed friends and occasionally hung out after the last gig, but that was the end of our musical relationships.

When this band was a 4-piece, we covered most of the Top 40 and filled in spaces with originals and blues oddities and we played for money. We’d fired our management company a few months earlier, but the agency still wanted us to work some of the last scheduled gigs. We owned the band name, so it was either us or find someone else to sell the customer on. The 3-piece version was a lot more bluesy and original than the band the customers thought they were getting. There weren’t many complaints, but I suspect our rate would have gone down if we’d have done a 2nd round with that personnel and repretiour.

One of the last gigs we did was in a southeastern Nebraska town that had an actual 1920’s ballroom with a vintage 30’ foot bar and a round stage slightly off-centered in the room, toward the bar. The audience had room to maneuver behind the stage, between the bar and the stage, and there was a large dance floor (people used to dance, believe it!) to the front and side of the stage. There was a runway, about 5’ wide, that ran about15’ from the stage into the middle of the dance floor. There was a slight downward slope on the ramp, high at the stage and low at the end of the ramp, but it was still a 3’ drop from the end of the ramp to the dance floor. I setup the mains, six (we had eight) Altec Lansing 1207A columns, behind and to the side of the band and ran the show from a 12-channel board on a mic stand near my guitar amp. No monitors, we could all hear the mains and ourselves well enough that we didn’t need more crap to haul up and down staircases. I only used one small condenser on the drums, the three vocal mics were all RE18s, the bass went direct ino the board from the bass player’s amp, keys also went direct, and I had a Beyer M500 on my guitar amp; a modified 1956 Fender Harvard. The room held about 350 people and we always packed it. We were doing one of our last 4-piece gigs, so we pretty much went full-out.

In deference to the large turnout and the money we were getting paid, we pretty much played our old lineup with slightly more originals and less blues. The crowd was into it, the dance floor was constantly full, people were screaming their heads off at the oddest times, and the band was rockin’. Because I am a Townshend freak and we did “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” During the synth middle-break where the guitar comes crashing in and we added a short solo and I’d slide on my knees down the ramp while I played the solo; mildly Townshend-style. I didn’t realize that Pete used knee pads under those coveralls, so my style hurt more than his. On the way toward the ramp, the bass player turned into me and clipped the top of my guitar hard enough to break two tuners and take the whole guitar out of tune. As I slid down that ramp, I discovered nothing on my instrument was in any sort of European-shape of tune. So, I did the only thing a lead guitarist can do under any non-ideal conditions: I played as fast as my fingers would move and stayed as high on the neck as possible to mask the complete dysfunction of my guitar. I cut the slide and the solo short and twiddled trills, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and did pick-slide sound effects until we could end the song.

We took a break and I tuned up my back-up guitar. While I tuned the guitar, sitting on the edge of the stage, people crowded around me. I ignored them at first, but after a few moments I realize they were shouting at me but they weren’t mad. “That was the greatest guitar solo I’ve ever heard” and “Great guitar playing, man!” and and “Damn! That was incredible” and even nuttier stuff. It was not just tone-deaf guys, either. Twenty-or-so girls where in the pack squealing away like something good and true had happened. I, literally, didn’t spend a musical micro-second on that solo. Not one “note” was intended and I didn’t even waste much thought on what the rest of the band was doing. And nobody seemed to be laughing (other than the band guys) at my predicament?

As I was finishing up the work on my back-up guitar, in that moment I decided I’d had all of the “pearls before swine” experience I could stand for a lifetime. I spent hundreds, thousands of hours practicing my craft and all I had to do was wiggle my fingers fast and I’m “great?” I thought, “I quit. No more of this band-shit. I’m done.” When we played our last booked gig a few weeks later, that was it for me. Until a friend talked me into a gig doing his music in St. Paul in 2016, I hadn’t played in front of an audience since 1982. I did a lot of live sound tech work, some recording as a tech and as a guitarist, and lots of electrical audio design work, but for the next three decades I had no interest in being “a musician” for a live audience. To this day, there are a really limited number of places I’ll consider exposing myself to an audience. I’m not that fast anymore.