This was a nightmare of a gig.

I don't really even want to relive it as I type this -- but I have to.

Ok, as per usual at The Hogshead Pub, this was a B.Y.O.P.A. show, and since we had setup the show -- we brought the P.A. Also as usual, there were lineup changes. We had originally planned to play the show with Plate, but they decided not to do it. They already had another show the next night and they didn't think they'd be able to bring enough people to both shows.

Uh ok.

We spent the next couple of weeks looking for a replacement. Through our friends in the band Smarty, we got in contact with a band called 5-Parts. So we figured, everything was ok - right?

Wrong.

It turns out that when 5-Parts arrived, the guys at the Hogshead told them they were "too heavy" and wouldn't let them play. They were also under 21, so they wouldn't even let them in to the bar.

But they lucked out - big time. They went over to Scratch 8 which is just a block from the Hogshead and through the booker there, Mary, they were able to hook-up a gig and play immediately, in a slot before all of the bands that were scheduled to play that night. I arrived for the gig at 8:30 and they were already playing -- I could hear them down the block. They're manager was real confused when she arrived - but I took her over to Scratch 8 and showed her where the band was playing.

They were a little bummed, because they were really looking forward to playing with us -- but it worked out in the end. For them, that is.

Meanwhile, we were over at the Hogshead struggling with the P.A. gear.

We hadn't taken this particular P.A. gear out before and it really needed to be shaken down. Unfortunately, we didn't get to start doing that until after 8pm, about an hour after we'd planned to, and as we did we kept finding cords and cables that just didn't work.

The end result of all that - was stress, lots of it.

Darryl (who was primary person handling the P.A. with my help) was particularly at his wits end.

On top of this, on a big screen on the far wall - the Sacramento King's were in their forth play-off game with the L.A. Lakers and losing badly. I've mentioned it before -- but Sacto is a sports town, and the Hogshead is in many ways -- a sports bar. So the overall mood, was ugly.

We'd been through this kinda thing before, almost a year ago when the Lakers had knocked the King's out of the first round of play-offs on the night of one of our gigs. It was a disaster, and this one was headed the same way -- both the game and the gig.

On the one hand, since we were now the only band playing -- we had plenty of time to get the P.A. and cables all setup -- but on the other hand - we were missing a drummer. Treno had left the carpet he places under his drums at home, and had gone all the way back to get it.

This meant, no drum sound check.

Eventually about 10 or so - Treno came back, and we eliminated and re-routed around all the bad cable. Time to start the show, finally.

But now -- we were having tuning problems between the guitars. We've had this problem before, but it has *never* been this bad. Once we got everything right, we'd play a song and in all honesty, I think the songs sounded pretty good -- but then we had long delays between each one. Mostly it was Sammy's guitar going out.

So we resorted to coming up with a blues jam, while Sammy tuned.

That sort-of worked, except that we hadn't ever tried that before with Treno or Mike -- and I didn't have any real lyrics ready to sing, but I think it worked since both Darryl and I had done this many times with our old lineup and we could guide the others, ultimately we succeeded in killing about 7-8 minutes while Sammy got his gear together.

But when we finished Sammy's gear still wasn't together. Darryl was fit to be tied. I was running around trying to keep everybodies spirits up. It was a circus.

When we started playing "Leave it Alone", Darryl stopped us - and told Sammy not to play because his guitar was *still* out of tune. We did that one song without him, and he finally was able to get it together and join us for the last two songs, "Not Like U" and "Shame" - both of whom came of pretty well.

Fortunately -- and also rather strangely -- the crowd included less than a dozen people, possibly because of the King's game and possibly not, I don't know. But the result is that nobody really knows that any of this occured except for the us, the bartender and about ten people. Well, and now you too...but oh well, it's the truth - and was a very valuable lesson for us to learn. First and foremost among those lessons was the fact that Sammy needed a new guitar.

We didn't totally get away with this gig unnoticed, though. First of all it was broadcase live over the net at SacClubCams.com, and second of all two of the people in the audience were key members of the Sactopalooza committee, a show which we and Darryl had helped organize and which we were slated to play in a few months -- they had a *lot* to tell us about what we did wrong afterward.

And they were right too.