DLH Gig Report

Anyone bored enough to spend a few minutes here?

What a whirlwind experience. We just got done with a 4 gig two weekend travel fest.

Last weekend, Friday night, we played at the largest country bar in the Illinios Quad Cities. Just so you can grasp this, it was a converted skating rink. This was my first real experience with a line dance crowd. This was sort of a culture shock for me. I'm used to seeing people in cut-offs, blue jeans, T-shirts or fancy dress shirts. This group came with the cowboy boots, the big belt buckles, the cowboy hats and the trimmed tassles shirts. I'm not even going to mention what the guys were wearing. :wink: We played 9-1. The line dancers all left by 10:30. We were like :shock: . That basically left the non-line-dancers. At that point I could relate that to my old band Hap Hazard. That band had a knack to clean the place out by about the same time frame but that was because they were no good. :D To me I was used to that kind of crowd reaction. However, the rest of the band wasn't so they were sort of bummed. After we had finished playing and we figured we'd done bad and were playing our last gig here, they came up and praised us up and down. They actually stated that we had kept the line dancers well past their normal "early to home" habits. The owners were actually impressed that they'd stayed for an entire set. They are usually all nighters on Saturday night when the "big acts" come into town. So that worked out for us.

Saturday night we had to travel to Quincy Illinois which is 2.5 hours south of here or getting near St. Louis, Missouri. That was a private party given by a large motorcycle dealership called TNT. Now that was a party. Outdoors on about 10 acres of corn farm land. We got to set up on a moving stage. This is a flatbed semi trailer with a hydraulic roof and sides that "lift up" out of the way to create a stage and canopy. Rubber surface and completely flat as opposed to a regular semi flat bed with some built-in curve and rough wooden platform. This was really a nice stage. We were treated to an Hawaiian Luao (sp) theme with a full roast pig, an Hawaiian setting and every one dressed in Hawaiian garb. This was an expensive private party and I can assure you no expense was left to the imagination. They even brought in a 4 tapper beer trailer, a 100+person tent/covering area with tables and chair for all the guests. This was impressive and I'd played a lot of private parties. This was one of the nicest ones, I'd ever experienced.

This past weekend we had to travel to Wheatland IA (about an hour north) for their street festival days on Friday night. We were outside and a standard old run of the mill semi trailer flatbed. That was an 8 to 12 festival that held about 500 rowdy drunks. And of course the town supplied its own entertainment with the local fist fighters. Reminds me of the old days before everyone carried a gun. :D We were rebooked for next year already.

And last night we again drove north to a small town of Delmar IA for a private birthday party. Talk about a nice family....and large. The age group of this family similar in age to me had 9 children just in the family that had the party at their place. So there were many "elderly audience members", an age group near me, the generation that was about my kids age and then all their kids. This was a head count of about 200 people and this was all related family. Again, all food and beverages were available as needed so this party turned out to be another hit. I even let one of the 13 year old grand sons get up and play about 10 minutes of solos on my drums for all the doting relatives.

I have two more gigs to finish out this month and that is this coming Thursday at the I-80 Walcott truck stop annual jamboree. The next week we travel to central Iowa for an audition at the casino in Riverside Iowa. Then I'm off until the second weekend in August. If my plans with work align with the planets, I'm going to make an attempt to crash the GN Jam with David and the gang in a few weeks. :twisted: