The new Twist of Fate's first gig was at Sacramento's Back to Top .htm#Boardwalk">Boardwalk, second billed to the band Walking Tall. We were scheduled to hit the stage at about 10:30. But I ran into a few difficulties getting to the gig. First of all, I was in Vegas - to see Dokken play at that Hard Rock Hotel, and also hopefully get us gig opening for them at Reno (We'll see on that). At the Vegas airport we found at the fog had closed Sacramento International. We also found out that there was a 30 car pile up on the I-5 right in front of the Sac airport, which had closed down the freeway and aparently the pilots couldn't get to the planes. A tense couple of hours followed while we (my wife Robin and I) tried to figure out how to get home. (And of course - play the gig)

Eventually we decided to fly to Oakland, and take Amtrak from their to downtown Sacramento (a trip I've taken dozens of times). Once in Oakland, in order to get to the Amtrak station we used BART, and went all the way to the end of the line at Richmond.

When we arrived we found out that we'd missed the train by about 40 minutes, and the next one wasn't going to arrive until 5:30. It wouldn't get us home until 7:45 - and I was supposed to be at the show by 8:30.

This didn't look good.

So, we used Plan B. The city of Vallejo has a shuttle and Ferry that goes between San Francisco and Sacramento called Baylink, it also links with a bus stop that hooked up with BART at the next the last station. One station away from where we were. So we hopped back on BART, then took one Bus to Vallejo, and another to downtown Sacramento. Using Baylink we'd be back in Sac, before the next Amtrak train would even arrive to pick us up in Richmond.

Mission Accomplished.

Well, almost. When we got to the city of Davis, about ten miles west of Sacramento we hit a massive traffic jam that was a combination of the residue from the I-5 pileup, and a jacknifed truck on I-80. That added another hour to our trip, but we still made it by 6:45 - an hour ahead of Amtrak.

After we arrived at The Boardwalk. , we we're told that Twist of Fate's on stage time had been pushed back another hour...until 11:30 (Arrrrgh, all that effort to get their on early, for nothing).

On with the Show

Oh well, once we de-stressed from the trip - everything went pretty smooth. We had sent and mailed out nearly 150 tickets to friends, fans and family - but the turn-out was kind of light. (Although most of the people we're there to see us it seemed) We had a great crowd response and rocking time. The stage monitors weren't quite loud enough, so I wore out my voice trying to hear myself - I joked that I was missing notes that the audience didn't even know about - but even with those problems we had a lot of positive comments about the show overall, about Ron's bass playing and tone, about Dave's drumming. We only had 45 mins on stage and perormed 7 songs - (including, Burn your Bridges, The Hero-Inn, Shades of Grey, Run, Pay your Dues, and Feel the Pain. We cut 3 songs from the set, which means we can swap them with some of the ones we did do and create a completely different show next time) - still we had room for an extended keyboard solo by me, and an extended guitar solo by Darryl. It was extremely cool.

After the show we partied at our place with Darryl and some friends of his. It took nearly two days for my adrenaline rush to wear off.

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