Man am I glad last week is over! Talk about screwed up schedules! First of all I think most everyone must have left Tampa on vacation or something. The crowd at Thursday nights jam at Barnacles was smaller than usual on the poarch and inside the restaraunt it was pretty dead. Usually it’s standing room only for the jam and the inside is always full still the music sounded great just not many jammers. I received a call while I was there from one of the managers saying that he had double booked the next night and forgot to tell me, Steve Arvery was coming in from Chicago to play that night while he was in the area. I called my partner Ed Wright and let him know we weren’t playing that next night and that they had accidentaly double booked with Steve, now Ed knows Steve and was O.K. with this (a little dissapointed because of loosing the pay but he ws OK). Later on that evening the manager that now handles the porch bookings came up to me wanting to know if I could find him someone for Saturday as he had someone cancel on him. I had taken Saturday off that week and told him I would cover for him as I wasn’t planning on playing that night. I called Kimo one of my partners, dragged him and his family in from the beach where they were staying to do the show with me. As i’m riding home on Thursday my phone rings it is another venue calling me in a panic about Saturday night also, I would have rather played at his place but told him I had just booked the night a few minutes ago as was sorry but I couldn’t call them up and cancel, he understood. So Saturday afternoon as I’m starting to unload the equipment a freind of mine Eric comes up to me and says Hi, whats going on, I told him what had happened and that I was doing the manager a favor and covering for someone who cancelled out on him. He then proceeded to tell me that he was booked that night and had been for a few weeks! We went in to see the manager who now handles the bookings and sure enough he had screwed up and double booked that day, it was the next Saturday that he needed someone! I let Eric have the gig since it wasn’t his fault and had to go out and tell my partner Kimo (who had come in from vacation on the beach to do the show with me) what was going on. He was very disappointed to say the least, I called the other venue that needed someone and he had already booked that night. So that was the 2nd gig lost at the last minute that week. Again someone else screwing up schedules, so that sucked! Next up last weekend was a Sunday show at Peggy’s Corral in Palmetto Fl. for a big Sunday Biker event. It was our fist time playing there and it was Hot as Hell! Middle of the Summer outside in Fla. what was I thinking when I booked this gig! The gig went great and the band played Awesome! It was packed out ( this was where everyone must have gone for the weekend) and everyone loved the band. All the vendors set up were giving us free stuff and telling us that we were the Best Band that they had ever heard there. The crowd loved the show, we met some of the nicest people there and besides nearly passing out from the heat it was a great show, one of our best! So we finish the show pack up all the equipment and get ready to leave, the heat was really brutal and I thought I was going down for awhile when packing up the stuff. So we get it all packed up and I go in to get paid and guess what the pay is $100. less than what was agreed on. Now the owner that booked me was not there as she was recovering from some type of surgery I was told so there was no one to talk to about the shorted pay. I was so beat I took what they gave me and left.I have a message into the owner to call me we’ll see what happens, hopefully it was just a mistake as we would like to play there again when it’s cooler. So I lost 2 gigs this weekend thanks to managers screwing things up and was shorted money on our Sunday gig. Ah, the life of a musician sometimes can be very frustrating sometimes, Thank God for the music and my freinds who play with me as they make it all worthwhile. Oh well today starts a brand new week see you at the shows (if some manager doesn’t screw things up!).
Charlie
