On the subject of road gigs, there was that time we went to Cambria in July to play for MagWest 2005, the Morgans’ annual meet and greet. The band that week was me, Mark, Marcy, Scott, and Karen, and Karen’s Derek came with us because we liked him and because he booked the gig.
Beautiful drive up US101 and CA1. The whole road from Ventura to Santa Barbara seems to wind along the Pacific Ocean, and there are train tracks on the ocean side and cliffs on the other, or sometimes asparagus and lettuce fields, or, if you go farther north, vineyards with signs announcing the varietals growing therein. Even father north you get mountain hugging cliffside roads with drop-offs (drops-off?) to the west in the hundreds of feet onto rocks where the ocean does things to the shore – um – and where I learned what a magnificent road handling car a Mercedes-Benz 300SD is as Roommate soothed her motion sickness by controlling the motion from behind the wheel as the girls, unbelievably, calmly, slept in the back seat and I held on and enjoyed the ride because in the end I didn’t want to make her mad while there was nothing I could do to save my daughter from her anger if I criticized her driving. (It was my second longest episode of fearing for my life at her hands in 41 years.)
Cambria is before you get to the scary part of the road north when the psycho-spouse is driving.
I shared a motel room with Mark on that band trip.
I had come into Cambria from the inland side. I played golf at Hunter Ranch Golf Course Saturday (112 degrees, and I walked, and, oddly, I shot 112 – no, that’s a big ol’ lie; I shot 95) and at Morro Bay Golf Course the next day (91 in the Sunday morning coastal fog with a minor hangover.)
In between 18’s, we played a gig for people who expressed their passion for Morgan automobiles by joining a club for people who have a passion for Morgan automobiles (and lots of money) that gets together in remote coastal venues once a year and lines up their Morgans for viewing in an unused pasture and puts on massive barbecues and pays the band way too much.
Somewhere, there is a picture of us, before the music began but after setup was complete, the band sitting at the corner of the wooden lanai that would be tonight’s stage and Karen’s Derek holding Cheryl’s guitar. Karen’s pose looks like she is either pulling music from Derek’s guitar or pulling the prismatic splash of colored lights dancing out of a vase in the corner, and I think the light is winning. I will look for it, but I fear this picture – Yes, It Existed! – has got lost in the memory card of a Memorex digital camera that ceased functioning in 2006.
A couple of the Morgans asked if they could play a couple of songs, and, surprisingly, we said, “Yes.”
If you have ever been in a casual gig band, you know that some members of the audience always ask to play a song. Telling them no is a delicate but necessary task.
Once at a wedding in Downey, our fill-in drummer said, “No” when the bride’s cousin on her mother’s side, uncle Raymond’s boy, Richard, who had played snare in an area all-star high-school band that had marched in the Rose Parade in ’77, asked if he could play a song on the drums, because his sisters were egging him on, and the rest of us supported the fill-in and said, “No,” like he was regular band family, and then another member of the bride’s family berated us saying, “You’ll never play in Downey again!” like that was a bad thing. There wasn’t time to learn how the other member of the bride’s family was connected.
But we let these Morgan folks take over, and they spun out bangup versions of “Too Rolling Stoned” and “Raised on Robbery,” while Mark and I ate some Santa Maria Tri-Tip and slaw and drank craft beers.
Beautiful drive back home on CA1 and US101 after the round at Morro Bay, but the traffic from Santa Barbara to LA on a Sunday afternoon…Sheeesh!…almost as bad as the Sunday traffic back to LA from Vegas.
The Billy Pulpit 