GIG MEMORIES #2

Mad Jack, our 30-year-old guitar quartet, opened with Foghat's "I Just Want to Make Love to You" as planned. We did a lot of soul-searching before making that bold, potentially disastrous decision. The song is long with a lot of parts. It's definitely a song that a band needs to "warm up" to -- not to mention, an audience. But we've been doing it since 1978, so we figured we've already had plenty of time to warm up to it. Anyway, it went off without a hitch. We sounded good, we played it with confidence and we got audience response at various points in the song. For me, opening with that song was the most magical part of the evening.

Fro (drums) wore his "Survivor" doo-rag. Voger (bass) said the only thing more -- I'll substitute the word "effeminate" here -- than a "Survivor" doo-rag would be a "Titanic" doo-rag, "Titanic" being Fro's favorite movie. Karch (guitar) sent away for a Splawn shirt, Splawn being the brand of his amp. If you ask me, "splawn" sounds like the past tense of some biological act. I wore my usual black ensemble (including eye-liner and fingernail polish). Voger, the Harley freak, wore a Harley-Davidson shirt.

I figured it would take two or three gigs for my wireless unit to pay for itself. Then -- during a soujorn that was only made possible thanks to my wireless -- a SUPERHOT BLOND CHICK, bless her superhot heart, treated me like a go-go bar patron on the floor in front of the stage. (This was during Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," of all songs.) The scene culminated in me playing my B.C. Rich Mockingbird between her superhot legs. Thank God, my sister-in-law captured the entire episode in photos. (The between-the-legs photo is now my screen saver at the office.) On the way home, I said to my brother, "Well, my wireless has already paid for itself." He said, "Yeah, no (expletive)."

I had a few technical problems. My guitar went seriously out of tune twice. So while playing, I had to figure out which string was bad, and THEN figure out how to play the song without using that string. Every club-seasoned guitarist has been through this many times, but since it happened on two of my showcase songs, which were close together in the set, it rattled me. Thankfully, I listened to my brother and practiced my digital tuning at every rehearsal. I got through it.