Re: Club owners

[wlgrogan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Chris et al.,
	My worst gig is probably older but not nearly as rough and tumble as 
Randy's.  Gotta go back to the late  60's for mine when I was in a college and
a "rock & roll band".  We had just lost our lead guitarist to the draft and
Vietnam and were pretty depressed and slowly loosing momentum and knew it was
all gonna end when the semester finished anyway.  A friend of our rythum   
guitarist from another group who played keyboards came to us with an offer for
us to play if he played with us.  The site was Gunnison, Utah (not the one in
Colorado) about an hour's drive S of Provo.  This gig turned out to be the
major stomp of the year for this town as most had never even seen a live band
before (some had probably never been as far away as SLC).  Anyway, it was at thehigh school on a Sat. night and nearly everyone from 12 to 80 showed up for the
dance.  Well when we did our gratuitous Monkees' "I'm not your steppin stone",
the crowd went absolutely wild as they all thought the Monkees were really cool
soon we had little teeny boppers coming up to me (lead singer) requesting MORE
songs by the MONKEES!  While trying to not vomit in front of them and also be
as polite as possible, I made up stories like "yeah, I think we're gonna do 
some more MONKEES stuff later".  Finally, just to get out of playing any more
MONKEES schlock, I started telling the folks that "gee I don't know those songs
that the MONKEES do are really kind of hard for us to play, they are really
complex and we haven't had time lately to practice them like we need to, sorry".Well, I can still see the sad look in the eyes of those poor kids (some verging
on tears) as they walked away without getting to hear more of their idols.  To
this day, in thinking about it, I probably should have told the other guys 
"look we've got to do Last Train to Clarksville, to make those kids happy", but
I didn't, cause I was 21 and depressed, and the thought of playing another tune
like that kind of made me ill.  I'm older and wiser now, and today I would
probably honor a similar request.  Such is the folly of the young!
	This story contains absolutely no violence, unless you consider the
broken heart of young teenager violence.
Bill Grogan