Oorgo

Chaos in Cowtown

Well my holiday (such as it was) is over, back at work, grind grind grind.

Quite the interesting weekend though, one of the bands I play in was opening for a big named (not to be named) merengue (pronounced mair-en-gay) bands from New York both Friday and Saturday night. I was fairly excited, even though I'm not a big merengue fan, because they were billed as an 18 piece band, that's gotta be good.

Friday's gig went fairly poorly, we didn't play at our best, it was kind of loose etc. Saturday on the way to Calgary I heard there were a few complaints about the friday gig, but not about OUR band, about the big NY band. Turns out they showed up with 7 singers, a set of congas and a turntable. They went from a cool big live band to a karaoke show.

Saturday we played at the latin festival and it was lots of fun other than the sweltering heat, later that night was our second night opening for the NY band. Everything seemed to be going ok, the crowd was really enjoying what we were doing, my chops felt good, and I wasn't screwing up very often (always good).

The big NY band comes on stage about 45 minutes or more after we get off. It was just as I feared, bad. These 6 guys and 1 girl were up on the stage singing, or some extremely loose definition of the word; it sounded more like a lame dj, not an exciting show worth the $35 admission.

The lady that had organized the event was not happy at all, after their first set she apparently had a conversation with them saying something like "I'm not paying you the 20 some THOUSAND we agreed, as you are not the band that you portrayed yourself to be". Over twenty freaking thousand dollars USD. They asked us to get up and play another set, offering us more money to do so, of course we agreed. As soon as we were ready to play, the dj music went down and one of the putzes who organized the event got on the mike saying how the NY band wouldn't be playing again tonight bla bla bla bla, it didn't sound too flattering even though my Spanish is not that hot. The crowd started yelling and booing and chanting the other bands name. We started playing and they continued for a little bit until they realized how good the music was. In between tunes we still had the odd straggler yelling moronities, but all in all they settled down.

We only were on stage for about 15 minutes when the organizer came up and asked us to stop as there was an incident, the police were there and they were shutting the party down. We stopped, the dj came back on for about 10 minutes, then the lights came up and about 5 police approached the dj, he shut down the music and they announced the party was over because there was an "incident" with the other band in the hallway. You thought they were upset before! Now they started chanting "REFUND! REFUND!" and other obscenities, and 1/2 hour later after 50% of the people STILL hadn't left, we had drunken fucks banging merengue rhythms on the stage, getting up and playing the congas and just being pains in the ass.

I found out later that a member of the other band pushed the organizer lady when she told them she wasn't honoring their contract, so she called the cops and they shut the place down. What kind of cocaine haze were these guys in when they decided that they could get away with a scam like this? Did they actually believe Albertans were so gullible and naive that they wouldn't notice the missing band or the general lack of quality of the music? Maybe they thought there were no latin bands in Alberta and we would worship them like gods when they arrived in their huge Hummer limo. Maybe it was delusions of grandeur for the singers, thinking that THEY were all that mattered in the band. But really, for 20+ K they could ship out at least 4 horn players, percussionists, bass and piano.

The brighter side to all of this, the pressure must have lit a fire in us because we performed better than we have ever before. I had chops I haven't seen before, everything was tight and the rhythm section rocked.

Posted by Oorgo at August 29, 2005 08:01 PM Permalink - Category: Music | TrackBack