I was looking for you, but figured something must've come up. Sorry you couldn't make it.
It went really well. It was weird, a Saturday night in a small town, a political fundraiser at 7:00, and we start playing at 8:00. We were there about 4:00, figured two hours to set up, sound check at 6:00, get out of the way, have something to eat, festivites start at 7:00. That all went according to schedule, except that come 7:00, no sign of any "festivities" starting. There were a lot of people there, however, and there was one guy in a blue sport coat and tie and great hair passing out business cards, so we figured he was The Man. He was. He came by our table maybe quarter after 7.
By this time, everyone's met Mike and Diane, the owners, and they're great, really nice people. After The Man wandered off to kiss some more asses, I asked Mike if he still wanted us to start at 8:00, because I thought things were gonna start at 7:00 and I couldn't tell if they had or not. He said he wasn't really sure about how this works, having never done it before, but yeah, we should start playing at 8:00. I said that that meant we'd be finishing up before 11:00, so how does that work? He said the place usually starts clearing out by Midnight. This is not a huge place, and it's a tiny town. No crazy headbanging until 2:00 AM here. So okay.
Five minutes to 8:00, we start gathering, doing some final checks on stuff, and The Man asks if he can just say a few words before we start playing. Sure, we figured that was the deal. He introduces himself, some buddy of his running for Commissioner of something, and some other buddy running for Circuit Court Judge or something like that. Asks everyone for their support, then introduces the band. That was the extent of the political activities during the night.
We totally killed 'em. I mean come on, this is Huntley, Illinois. We were the best thing they'd seen/heard in a long time. We played a little over an hour, took a break, came back and played our second set, by this time it was pushing 10:30. Diane asked if we could play a little more. We told her that that was actually all we knew; we've only practiced together four times. "Four times!" She was blown away. But we whipped out Johnny B. Goode in A, stretched it out, everyone took solos, then we repeated Born to be Wild, and did Come Sail Away again (even better than the first time) which is Diane's favorite song. I did my piano solo thing leading into the intro, John did the Tommy Shaw solo at the end and took it a bit farther, then the big ending. It was actually a really good rendition. Diane looked like she was gonna cry. She said we're definitely invited to come back. So that's cool. I'm not a fan of the hour drive out there, and playing two counties away doesn't do a lot to build a local following, but a gig's a gig. They like us and are willing to pay us, and it's good practice for when we start doing more high-profile stuff hopefully not too long from now.
Now we just gotta get a third set together and we'll be ready to go.