I’ve done a lot of crazy things in my life and this one was a cookie. One day I just thought that maybe my band ought to host a concert in our backyard and, oh I don’t know, let’s invite like 100 people.
It was the summer of 1998. We lived on the river with a boat and two cats. I had been playing with the guys in the band Aggressive Pedestrians for a couple of years now and we were beginning to develop our own sound. It was a fun time. I wrote music feverishly and brought new songs and ideas into the studio every time we got together.
The idea of a concert came from thin air. But once I embraced it, it grew and grew. We hired a guy to bring a whole smoked pig, barbeque style for the concert. The band members arrived early that morning with their spouses. We had a mini-jam session and felt the familiar sound come back naturally. We were ready. However the weather was not.
People began arriving while the band was moving all of the equipment outside on the back deck. It was long with only one step. It would serve as a stage just fine. The umbrella on the pier went up and guests started gathering underneath. Coolers of beer and wine arrived from both sides of the yard. Concert day baby!
I smelled the wonderful smell of fresh smoked barbeque pork. It caught my nose and pulled me back to the street side where he was cooking the pig in my driveway. I was three steps to turning the corner and bringing him into view when I heard it. The sound was like dropping a bowling ball into an empty metal garbage can. As I turned and looked, I felt my appetite leave in concert.
“Well, the heads off!” the cook declared while pushing up the glasses on his nose, which, by the way, contained more pig grease on the lenses than you can imagine. Yep, I wasn’t eating any pork today.
Mark Twain said, “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get” and that’s what we got, a surprise microburst of weather. It didn’t last fifteen minutes, but the damage to the stage and our guests was not our best moment of the day.
I was caught off guard when it blew in. My first instincts were to help our guests. I should have covered my keyboard…
First issue to deal with was the band. The guys were soaked, in a poor attempt to protect our equipment. Carrie, my loving and devoted wife, found replacement clothes for the band. Yes, everyone was wearing my clothes. The new boy band?
When we began to start a concert, I found my keyboards sounding very WRONG!
Mark, the lead guitarist, walked over and tipped my keyboard. It poured water right out and it was full. I had to abandon the keyboard for another.
We were off to a rough start. I was not happy with the first two songs. But The Show Must Go On, as they say. We settled in to some good tunes and relaxed into a good set. More people came, but the weather was done playing games with us for the day. The pier was full and the backyard was jammed. The party began spilling out into the next two yards. We were a hit.
It has been more than a quarter of a century since that day, and yet I remember it like it was yesterday. I knew we would eventually become a studio band and focus on complex song development that would not translate well with the stages of our world. But for a time, a day anyway, I was playing live to friends and family who smiled in the sunlit summer day alongside a slow flowing river that had nothing but time.
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Ha! All’s well that ends well – sounds like a blast!!
What a fabulous event. Glad it all turned out after the down pour. So glad everyone one had such an awesome time. It was great to see you all play live in your clothes as all the band member clothes were soaking wet and your instruments as well.
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