Crash

Back in the 80's I played guitar in a bar band and quite honestly we sucked.

But at 22 years old I thought I'd stumbled into the greatest thing since Moses parted the Red Sea. I got to combine the three things I loved the most at that time...playing guitar, free booze, and drunk women of questionable virtue throwing themselves at me. In short, I was in heaven.

One of the mistakes the bars made in our contracts was the free booze. It's usually pretty standard in agreements with the band that the bar will provide all the booze the band wants while they're performing.

In our case, that was a huge, huge mistake on the bar owners part.

We never once hit the stage even remotely sober and by the third set someone was likely to fall off the stage. We were like a bunch of fucked up monkeys that were fed booze and given instruments. And who on this Earth isn't entertained by monkeys? Especially drunk ones.

We weren't very good, but by God we were entertaining, in a fucked up, drunk monkey sort of way.

We hardly ever kept to the playlist and did whatever the hell we individually felt like doing. One night I started playing the opening riff from "Don't Fear the Reaper" just for shits and giggles and the rest of the band joined in. Then people got up and started dancing.

The sad thing is none of us knew the damn song and by the time our singer tried to think of what the hell the lyrics might be the whole thing fell apart and he had to announce "We don't actually know this song."

The band wouldn't allow me to have my own mic because, and I quote "We can't afford it." I offered to buy my own my mic but was told "No, we can't afford what might come out of your mouth." This coming from a bunch of stumbling drunks and they were afraid of what might come out of my mouth? Jesus, did they think I was going to blurt out that I saw the Pope fucking a dog in the parking lot? (Actually I would've said it if the thought had occurred to me because the whole visual is pretty damn funny. How would he have kept that big Pope hat on while rocking a German Shepard's world?)

In a roundabout way I've been leading up to the story of how we are probably the only band in history to be 86'd from a bar.

We were up to our usual shit in some crappy bar in Bum Fuck, Montana. Our drummer was very fond of whiskey and he was drinking heavily that night, much more then the rest of us. As we finished the next to last set he fell over his drum set with a resounding crash. He was done for the night.

The problem was we still had one more set to play and now we had no drummer. We retreated to a table to ponder our situation and I told the waitress to bring two pitchers of beer. I have no idea what the other guys ordered for themselves.

Somehow it was apparently decided that our lead guitarist would play drums and I would play all the guitar parts. I have no memory of agreeing to this as I was trying to down as much booze as I could in an attempt to kill my brain and not be part of the forthcoming train wreck.

I almost succeeded.

According to people who witnessed the event I gamely took the stage and almost immediately fell over like a tree knock down by Paul Bunyon. I went straight down off the stage onto the hardwood dance floor with my beloved Les Paul strapped firmly to my body.

My Les Paul did not survive. I however had a huge bruise on my chest where she met her demise.

The next morning we were awakened in the motel room by a very angry bar owner telling us we were fired. On a Saturday. Who the hells fires a band after a show like that?