My band's (GTA-Grand Theft Audio) latest gig was this past Saturday night at Doug's Rockhouse in Aurora IL, a bar about 45min outside of our home area. One of the bands (FHOD) who knows our bass player asked us to play and there was another band playing too (Hanna Ford Band). So we were told we were going to play last 11:30pm. Ok, load in time in the email sent to me was 7:30pm and I thought this was because we were going to set up first and everyone sets up in front of us. This was not the case. So I was the first of our band to arrive and I started talking to FHOD's bass player and he said that he talked to my bass player and my bass player wasn't planning to get there until 10:00-10:30pm since we were starting so late. Needless to say I was pretty pissed at this revelation since he was the contact person and now I will be sitting here for 4 hours before we go on. Then we didn't actually go on until 12:10am.
I was also told that each band was to get $300 for playing the show. A total of 16 people paid to get in...GTA brought in 11 of those people so each band only made $32 each... I was really expecting a much larger crowd from both bands seeing that they are much more established in the area than we are but who knows what happened there...
So we did our set and finished around 1:45am. The doorman said he loved GTA's energy, my guitar playing and our song selection and then asked us for our business card so he could recommend us to another club in the area which pays $600-$800. It turns out that Doug's Rockhouse is closing at the end of the year so we were the last show there, so I'm hoping that pans out for us. As a highlight we picked up 3 fans outside of our own group of friends that came out to support us so that was a plus too!!!
This week GTA is performing as the "house band" on 12/23/09 @ O'Malley's in Alsip. We are doing this to spark some interest in our NYE show there and again, putting business cards on all the tables, so hopefully this marketing technique works out for us.
I posted pics/video on my MySpace page from our demo recording @ Outer Planet Studio (Frankfort), our (12/13/09) gig at Cool Rivers (Homer Glen) & our gig at Doug's Rockhouse on 12/19/09:
Check 'em out @:
MySpace http://www.myspace.com/tommygunzguitarplayer
Ambition is the path to success...persistence is the vehicle you arrive in!!!
