Category: Band

My band, Rock Machine, has finally reached the stage where the marketing juggernaut is going full-bore. Thus, I'd like to point you to our MySpace and Facebook fan pages, where I invite you to become our friend and/or fan so I can spam you mercilessly about our upcoming shows.

I'm extra excited about our logo, which was designed by Kennon James, whom I can't seem to stop name-dropping lately. I love his cartoon style and was quite giddy when he agreed to do our band logo. It's pretty cool, don't you think?

Our next gig (that I know of) is going to be Friday, February 26th at Howell's Bar & Grille in Gladstone, MO. From the online reviews I've read, I get the impression that their food is a cut above most bars, so you may want to make an evening of it.

I look forward to singing for you sometime soon.

I woke up at the crack of dawn yesterday to go to yoga class, which necessitated my taking a 3-and-a-half hour nap in the afternoon.

When I woke up, I heard my phone ringing and it was my bass player. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in playing a gig that night. I couldn't see any reason why not, so I readily agreed. It turned out that our drummer couldn't make it on such short notice, but we found a fill-in guy and met up at the club around 7 p.m.

The bar was called Hawg Wild, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about it. While we were setting up, a bartender came over to introduce himself. He said his name was Rattlesnake, and this was emphasized by his leather biker vest which not only had a rattlesnake embroidered on the back, but had an actual, taxidermied rattlesnake head attached to the front.

Rattlesnake perused our set list and expressed some doubt about our song selection. I told him not to worry – we were going to rock.

The fill-in drummer was obviously a pro and he did a pretty decent job of following along. A few songs were a little too fast, but that's actually fine in a bar setting.

The only bad part about the evening was that I had a splitting headache that would not go away and no Tylenol with me. You can imagine how much fun it is to sing with a loud rock band all night long when your head feels like it's going to explode.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, my friends @socreepy (Happy Birthday again!) and @ms_nene came out and stayed for all three sets. I'd like to think it was because the band was so awesome, but even I have to admit that they really stuck around for the priceless people-watching.

The bar patrons who were there when we got there were already hammered. Needless to say, this made them highly entertaining to observe. Keep in mind, this is a bar that owns a portable stripper pole, which they thoughtfully set up next to the dance floor before we started playing.

A guy who was there from the beginning eventually passed out in one of the booths. He was still there, snoring away, while we loaded our gear out the door after 1:00 a.m. and did our best not to bump his motorcycle-booted feet every time we went by.

At first there weren't many people in the bar, but over time more groups showed up. I thought that was rather surprising considering that we were in the midst of a relatively heavy snowstorm.

We never got many people dancing, but the people there seemed to like us. We obviously won Rattlesnake over because he came up to the stage in the middle of a song and handed me a red rose with a rather dramatic flourish.

Oh, and during the last song, a woman lifted her shirt and flashed her bare breasts at us. That's always delightful. Later on while we were breaking down our gear, she came over and told us how much she loved the band. "You know I'm serious," she said, "because I don't flash my boobs for just anyone."

I'm doubtful if that's actually true, but I appreciated the sentiment.

Once we'd packed the trailer, we all headed to IHOP and finished the night with multiple cups of coffee and syrup-covered carbs.

It wasn't the best gig I've ever played, but it felt like redemption for our New Year's Eve disaster. I'm looking forward to completing our set list and keeping our momentum going. It can only keep getting better.

A couple of days after Christmas, my bass player called and asked if I'd be interested in playing a New Year's Eve gig at a bar where my last band had played fairly often. They'd scheduled a DJ who cancelled at the last minute, so we could step in as the entertainment.

Of course I said yes, because my husband had a gig that night with a country band at a biker bar and there was no way I was going with him either way.

We arrived in the late morning for setup so we wouldn't disturb the bar's dinner shift by dragging equipment past the diners. Our guitarist had to work, but the rest of us got the PA going and did a sound check. The bar owners recognized me from my previous band and were very nice.

We were scheduled to play three sets between 9:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. That was good because so far we only have three sets of material worked up. It was also bad for reasons I'll get into shortly. Our drummer got lost on the way there, so he pretty much walked in the door at 9:29 and we began playing immediately.

Early on, we could tell we weren't meshing well with the crowd. Apparently none of them had turned on a radio since 1979, so anything we played that wasn't both old and relatively mellow was met with near-total silence.

Remember how I mentioned that my last band played this particular bar quite often? Well, this new band's set list is not substantially different from the old one. In fact, I think we actually have more classic rock and less new rock than the last band.

The low point of the evening was when we'd started a slow, newish song and the bar owner came up during the song and said, "If you guys don't switch up your playlist, we're going to go back to the jukebox."

I actually stopped the song and we skipped to the next one on the list, which happened to be the first in a stretch of more uptempo songs. Still, the newer ones failed to get any response from the crowd. I spent the rest of the set trying to ignore the fact that my mouth was dry and I was uncomfortably sweaty.

During the break, the band members all commiserated. We knew we were in a situation that we couldn't do anything about. You have no choice but to work with the material you have. For the final set, we nixed the Green Day song that we had planned to play and moved "Roadhouse Blues" by the Doors to the top of the list, figuring that we could do a super-duper long solo in the middle and keep people dancing, assuming that they were dancing in the first place.

The midnight countdown came and we managed to get the crowd back, thanks in no small part to their general drunkenness, I'm sure. They loved our Doors jam and we had dancers for almost every song up to the end. We packed up our gear, got paid (which had been a matter of some concern between us for a stretch there), and went our separate ways at least knowing that we'd started the year off a little better than we'd ended it.

I think it's worth mentioning that the crowd reaction at our last gig was almost the polar opposite of the one we got last night: they'd liked the harder, newer songs and weren't much into the older and poppier ones. You just never know how these things are going to go.

So that was my New Year's Eve. How was yours?

A couple weeks ago, one of the guys in my band had a couple of guests at practice. The first song we did while they were there was, "All Right Now" by Free. When the song ended, one of the visitors suggested, "You should change the words to, 'There he stood, in the street…'"

Then we did "Cold Hard Bitch" by Jet and I told him, "Now you know why there's no point in my changing any lyrics."

When you're a woman singing in a cover band, you quickly discover that you're spending a lot of time lyrically lusting after various fictional women. It's really impossible to avoid it. Like it or not, the majority of popular songs are written by men and a good percentage of them are laden with female pronouns.

A long time ago, I decided that it's way more trouble than it's worth to torturously rewrite every song to try to make it clear that I'm a straight woman. In fact, I have a column I wrote for a rock 'zine in the mid-1980s that's about this very subject. I'd already made up my mind by then.

Every song is written from the point of view of a character, and the singer's job is to embody that character for the 3-5 minutes that the song lasts. It shouldn't make any difference whether the character is a man, woman, animal or inanimate object.

Then again, maybe I'm just lazy…