FastCounter by bCentral
Last Updated: July 2, 2007
One of the things that musicians have to get used to is the travel. A true musician will go anywhere to play and be heard.
Probably the most traveled band I belonged to was Saddle Boogie. We rarely played the same place two weeks in a row, so we were constantly setting up and tearing down. For a musician, that is an interesting time. You commiserate with your compadres. Drink beer. Tell jokes. Drink beer. Do sound checks. Drink beer. You get the point.
We played all around Salt Lake and Provo counties in Utah, but we also did gigs in Coalville, Utah, and even played for the National Rodeo Junior Finals in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Imagine. Driving for 10 hours one way just to spend two hours setting up so we could play for a couple of hours. I don't remember how much we made, but it must have been worth it.
One of the most troublesome aspects of traveling is packing and unpacking. There is always somebody who sluffs off his share of moving the heavy stuff. In Saddle Boogie, it was Marlow. Once, while unloading at the Barbwire in Salt Lake, Marlow and I were the first two there. He helped me carry in his piano and then promptly disappeared. I unpacked almost all of the trailer and was seething with anger as well as soaked with sweat. I was getting the last thing out of my car which was my Peavey Mace combo amp, and Marlow came strolling up asking what he could help with. I told him nothing. He turned and headed into the club and I took my 60 pound amp and slammed it down on the ground on its wheels. I did it so hard that the transformer broke free and fell to the bottom of the speaker cabinet. Talk about a reality check! Here I was getting ready to play a new club and I had just trashed my amp. I called my wife and had her bring my practice amp, an old black, transistor 100-watt Silvertone amp. She did and I played through the worst setup I ever used my entire time playing pedal steel guitar.
Another traveled band was one I was in which featured one Joe Jeffs. Joe had been brought into Saddle Boogie to replace the replaceable Jerry Hardeman.
Hardeman was a showman and the frontman for Saddle Boogie. He played a Gretsch DouJet solid-body guitar and knew all the tricks—playing behind the back, playing behind his head—to make him look like the star of the show. He sang well, but not great. He had a great stage presence and was an ideal frontman. When I came on board, Hardeman stayed on for a couple of months and then left the band, taking drummer Merlin Bone along with him, to move back to St. Louis (or somehere else Midwest) to work a club there. I would love to have learned more frontman stuff from him, but in truth, I don't think I was ever cut out to spout out that much drivel to the crowd. I prefer to let my playing and singing do that for me. You might say that I hide behind my talents, such as they are.
With Hardeman and Bone gone, we needed a drummer and guitar player fast. We picked up Gary Kopinsky and a guitar player that I struggled and worked with for a couple of years, Joe Jeffs.
Jeffs was a long-haired, pot-smoking, mushroom eating cowboy type who played a beat up old Stratocaster and fancied himself the immediate star of the show. He had some of the qualities that a good frontman needed. He didn't mind talking to the crowd even though he didn't have anything to say. He played guitar well. He sang songs that most people had not heard, and he sang them on key.
Joe had one talent that amazed me. He could take the lighting of a cigarette and turn it into a part of the show. He would look like he was getting ready to launch into the next song and then pause, reach into his shirt pocket, pull out a Marlboro, and take about two minutes to light it and take his first puff. Then he would look at the crowd and say, "Smoke 'em if ya got 'em." To my amazement, the crowd put up with this nonsense. It was part of the act and they accepted and respected that. Joe would smoke about half the cigarette while he talked about the next song (while we all stood around in numb surprise even after he had been doing it for months), then he would stick it in between two of the strings on the head of his Strat and we would commence playing the song.
For a brief time after the collapse of Saddle Boogie, Joe and I played in a band together which also included a paraplegic bass player named Steve. I can't recall his last name, but he played a Fender Precision bass (Isn't that a perverted way to remember people?). While playing with Jeff, and in respect I'll call it the Joe Jeffs and his Band, we played some pretty weird places. Two come to mind: The Beaver Creek Salloon and a beautiful place in Jackson Hole, Wyoming right on a reservoir.
The Beaver Creek Salloon was a few miles up one of the canyons that snaked up into the Wasatch Mountains and was a rather picturesque setting for a club, but a strange club. The stage stuck out into the barroom and was narrow. Steve faced the door, I faced the corner with the restrooms and Joe faced the crowd. We played two nights there. The first night, a Friday, was uneventful. Joe did his schtick and we played pretty well. I felt this was the makings of a fairly decent band although I always had a slightly disjointed feeling in this band. It was at some point in this band that Joe told me that when he first met me in Saddle Boogie, he couldn't imagine anyone looking less like a musician than myself. I didn't know how to take that, and still don't. I don't know if it was that I didn't have long, unkempt hair or that I didn't carry myself with a swagger like he and many other musicians did. I attribute my carriage to my military training, something I try to keep even today.
The following Saturday night was different. We were cocky. We had played well the night before and were gelling as a band. We played more confidently on Saturday and things were going well until one of the breaks. Joe went outside, presumably to do some kind of drug, and while walking through the parking lot, some guy stopped him and pointed a sawed off shotgun at his face. Joe was not the same for the rest of the night. Nor were any of us. These people were carrying guns! What if they didn't like Joe's cigarette lighting ceremony? Would they shoot him for it?
Fortunately, no. But we never played there again—by choice.
Another place we traveled to was Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We played at a wonderful lodge there that was north of Jackson Hole on a reservoir. The drive there was about six hours from Salt Lake City, and they put us up in some fishing cabins on the edge of the reservoir. It was the dead of winter and the reservoir was frozen over. The water to the lodges was frozen over too.
On the way there from Salt Lake, Joe demonstrated another talent that would go far on StarSearch, Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, or maybe even The Gong Show. Joe was sitting in the middle behind the two front seats of Steve's van. "You wanna hear my impression of a twin engine airplane crank its engines, taxi down the runway and take off?" he asked.
"Sure," Steve said. What followed is nearly nondescribeable, but I'll try.
Out of one side of his mouth, Joe made a noise like a propeller engine trying to start. It sputtered a couple of times, began to idle roughly, and then smoothed out at what I'll describe as about 800 rpm. "Nice," I thought. "But where's the second engine?" About that time, he repeated the cranking, rough idle and trimming of the second engine from the other side of his mouth. At this point, Steve and I were laughing so hard we had tears coming down. Joe proceeded to taxi his bilabial aircraft down the runway, stopped at the end of the runway, revved up each engine individually, then went full throttle down the runway until he lifted off. We were hysterical by this point. Probably the most amazing thing about this whole episode is that I don't recall Joe stopping for air at any time.
I'll bet he would have been awesome with two trumpets.
The table area of the lodge had at least three levels and the stage was in the center of one side. It was the most exotic place I ever played. the playing part was rather uneventful. At the end of the evening, we retired to the fishing cabins for a good night's rest before we broke everything down and headed back to Salt Lake.
We didn't get much sleep that night.
We finished playing about 1 a.m. Steve and I were sharing a cabin and about 2:30 a.m., Joe was yelling outside our cabin for us to get up. I was sleeping in my clothes, something that was wrong in the first place because the smokey clothes were keeping me awake. To this day, when I am finished playing and get home, I have to shower to get the smoke smell off of me so I can sleep. I went to the door and opened it and a blast of realy cold air hit Steve and me. There was Joe with his jacket on pointing to the reservoir saying "Let's walk across the reservoir! It's frozen solid!" I respectfully declined and both Steve and I commenced mumbling things about Joe's sanity. Steve also mentioned something about some mushrooms Joe had been eating.
About 4 a.m., we were again awakened, this time because every snowmobile in Jackson Hole was zipping this way and that way across the frozen reservoir. Guys were screaming, whooping it up and generally carrying on from that point until I decided to get up at about 6 a.m. I had to go to the restroom of which there was not one in the cabin, so I headed outdoors. It didn't seem quite as cold and the snowmobilers had apparently moved on to other frozen pastures, but as I looked across the reservoir, I saw Joe making his way towards the cabins. He told me he had walked mostly across the reservoir but decided to come back because he feared he might step into someone's fishing hole in the ice. Without a flashlight, he was really walking blind. He was probably fortunate he didn't get hit by a snowmobiler. Joe slept all the way back to Salt Lake City.
I did travel some with The Full House Band, but it was mostly after I had left Salt Lake City and just got together sporadically with John, Doug and Jon. We made a wonderful trip to Bicknel, Utah to play for a reunion. The entire time we traveled down there, which took several hours, we talked about music, harmonies and just stuff. I regretted leaving Salt Lake City the entire trip.