Warning! Boring Bio! You don't know what you are getting into...
Unless you were a club patron in Miami, Jacksonville, some areas of rural Quebec, my home town of Sebring Florida, had seen one of the road bands I was in 'back in the day,' enjoy reading trivia bout the club music business from the 70's through the 90's, or happen to be me, you will almost certainly find this self centered drivel boring. Frankly, the only reason I'm putting this up on my site is to provide people who knew the band(s) 'back then' a few memories. If you don't fit one of the aforementioned categories, proceed at your own risk...
Unless you were a club patron in Miami, Jacksonville, some areas of rural Quebec, my home town of Sebring Florida, had seen one of the road bands I was in 'back in the day,' enjoy reading trivia bout the club music business from the 70's through the 90's, or happen to be me, you will almost certainly find this self centered drivel boring. Frankly, the only reason I'm putting this up on my site is to provide people who knew the band(s) 'back then' a few memories. If you don't fit one of the aforementioned categories, proceed at your own risk...
Music seems to run a couple of years late. It can be argued that the music most people classify as 1950's really starts about 1954, 60's starts about 1963, and 70's about 1973. Curiously, turning points in my life seem to follow the same pattern. Hmmmmmm...
To people who were not around during the bar band 'golden years' of the 1970s, some of this may sound incredible.
During that period of time,bars or 'cocktail lounges' were the main social gathering places of America. This was before driving while totally annihilated was considered on a par with child molestation, before 400 channels of TV, before anti smoking laws, before the national health craze, before aids, before karaoke, and even gasp, before the internet. Bars and lounges were well populated 6 or 7 nights a week.
New bars and lounges were opening up daily it seemed, and all a band, duo or single act had to be was relatively industrious, halfway decent, and have a small talent for self-promotion to keep working steadily. For those bands with no talent for self promotion, there were hundreds of 'booking agents ' around the country, who, with just the aid of a B/W 8X10 picture could keep you working on the fabled 'Holiday Inn Circuit' which was not really a circuit, or all (or even mostly) Holiday Inns.
There were long periods in my life that I did not keep a house or an apartment, I lived full time in the motel rooms of the lounges we played, and almost never had a gap of more than a week between gigs. Disco, which popularized DJs as an alternative form of entertainment, hurt the live music industry, but, there were still gigs...Then, the urban cowboy music craze came in and country was cool...
There were down sides , of course. The average full time gig was 5-6 hours a night, often 6 nights a week. You played the same songs night after night, were forced into close proximity with probably the most egocentric people in the world (your fellow musicians), and lived a lifestyle that encouraged the intake of alcohol and other mood altering substances on a daily basis...
During that period of time,bars or 'cocktail lounges' were the main social gathering places of America. This was before driving while totally annihilated was considered on a par with child molestation, before 400 channels of TV, before anti smoking laws, before the national health craze, before aids, before karaoke, and even gasp, before the internet. Bars and lounges were well populated 6 or 7 nights a week.
New bars and lounges were opening up daily it seemed, and all a band, duo or single act had to be was relatively industrious, halfway decent, and have a small talent for self-promotion to keep working steadily. For those bands with no talent for self promotion, there were hundreds of 'booking agents ' around the country, who, with just the aid of a B/W 8X10 picture could keep you working on the fabled 'Holiday Inn Circuit' which was not really a circuit, or all (or even mostly) Holiday Inns.
There were long periods in my life that I did not keep a house or an apartment, I lived full time in the motel rooms of the lounges we played, and almost never had a gap of more than a week between gigs. Disco, which popularized DJs as an alternative form of entertainment, hurt the live music industry, but, there were still gigs...Then, the urban cowboy music craze came in and country was cool...
There were down sides , of course. The average full time gig was 5-6 hours a night, often 6 nights a week. You played the same songs night after night, were forced into close proximity with probably the most egocentric people in the world (your fellow musicians), and lived a lifestyle that encouraged the intake of alcohol and other mood altering substances on a daily basis...
