[Dixielandjazz] Is this site dangerously famous?

[Tom Wood]

Hi All,

At the breakfast table two days ago and after quickly reading some OKOM e-mails I went into uncontrollable fits of laughter and my wife is worried that the site could be dangerous for my health.  What do you think?

After reading Stephen Barbone's fame comments about being recognised in the street and Jim Beebe's reply about women taking their children to the other side of the road when they saw the band, reminded me of an incident some years back where a colleague said:  if our band was going to be playing anywhere nearby he would lock up his wife, children and the family dog to keep them safe from us.  I was so disgusted at these comments that I now lead a much quieter life.  Two years later our trombone player who is a local legend (in his own mind) is finally recovering from being introduced to 21 year old twins by their mother to be told at a band gig that he was their father.  (We played I want a little Girl, on the stand after that).  He still manages to have a girlfriend in every country our band plays in.  We are notorious but alas, not famous.

I do agree with Stephen that OKOM is still alive and well.  Our band uses the barometer of CD sales to measure success/failure fame without fortune/notoriety or call it what you will.  We measure impulse buying from the stand and have found that the saturation level is about an average of one CD every minute if you have more than one CD to offer with sales on each side of the stage.   Sales of over 200 CDs in a 3 hour gig do not happen often but the last three times this occurred was Edinburgh IJF Mardi Gras (mainly tourist audience) Darling Harbour JF Sydney (mainly tourist audience) and Dusseldorf Jazz Rally (mainly jazz audience).   In Germany the band were jammed on stage and cornered for their CDs to be autographed.  In the middle of this one of the band turned to me and said "I now know how the Beatles felt" ! (our moment of glory) so OKOM is alive and well in some countries.  Although we actually sold all our CDs in USA last year we did not achieve these figures.  I believe the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee has sales of this order.  Maybe (Hint, Dig, Hint to Bob Ringwald and or Roger Krum) we can achieve an invite for Sacramento 2004?  Sorry that is a blatant plug for the Sydney-Zenith, I won't do it again.  We have this Sydney/Melbourne thing here as was Glasgow/Edinburgh for me in the old days but, wow! we are playing both places this year.  Perhaps Stephen can compare barometers so that we can find out how famous we are or could be? 
As Jerry from Norwich said, we are certainly not famous but we know how it feels.

Cheers
Tom Wood

_______________________________________________
Dixielandjazz mailing list
Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ml.islandnet.com/pipermail/dixielandjazz/attachments/20030228/63f4ce2e/attachment.html