Re: attitude/"free" publicity

[David Gans <david@trufun.com>]

At 7:38 AM -0700 4/12/08, samba - wrote:
>
>    Yeah people will say free publicity,then fail to put the 
>musician's name on any of the promo for the event. At the gig, as 
>soon as you have the crowd warmed up, some attention seeker, will 
>grab a mic and  say "Is this thing on?  ( translation: Listen to how 
>big my voice sounds)We're going to do the raffle now." Which ,if 
>you're foolish enough to allow it ,will drag on and on.

Oh man, ain't it the truth.

A couple of years ago I was invited to perform at a benefit in a 
beautiful crunchy liberal town north of San Francisco.  I was VERY 
happy to oblige, since I love the town and support the cause 
wholeheartedly.

I got there well before my scheduled start time, only to discover 
that a couple of other acts had been inserted into the program ahead 
of me.  High school kids from the community, that sort of thing.  My 
start time was pushed back by an hour or so, by which time the event 
had been going for several hours and the crowd had thinned 
considerably.

I finally got up there and started to play.  Every every time I 
opened my mouth to sing, my guitar faded away.  Mysterious!  It 
happened again and again.  I thought it might have had to do with the 
batteries in the preamp of my Renaissance.  I replaced them, right 
there on stage with the dwindling audience looking on, and then - 
same problem.

The young guy running the PA acted as though I was some combination 
of stupid and self-important.

Eventually I discovered that the sound system had some sort of "host" 
feature that potted all the other channels down whenever signal was 
present in the main channel.

By then I was too pissed off to continue and most of the audience had 
gone home anyway.

So that's one benefit that wound up costing me something beyond dollars.




-- 

David Gans - david@trufun.com or david@gdhour.com
Truth and Fun, Inc., 484 Lake Park Ave. #102, Oakland CA 94610-2730
Blog:  http://cloudsurfing.gdhour.com
Web site: http://www.dgans.com