[Dixielandjazz] Another strange gig courtesy of the Sheik

[Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis]

I enjoyed that one.  About 1985 I was working with a band called Group 3. 
Basically a trio with a female vocalist.  We got a job at Lake of the Ozarks 
at a very posh resort.  If you have seen the movie "The Gig" you know 
exactly what we were doing.  It turns out that the owner who booked us 
through an agency had sold out.  The new bar manager had completely 
different ideas about music.

Again we had a contract and had to finish it out but the owner picked out 
about a dozen tunes from our list and that's all we could play.  When we 
finished the list we started at the beginning again.  His theory was a new 
crowd would come in every half hour or so.  The guests at the resort loved 
the band on the first night and hated us the rest of the week.  The people 
coming in on boats were looking for C & W and they hated us too.  The week 
was miserable and the resort staff must have been told they didn't have to 
do anything for us.  The first night was fun but we couldn't wait to get out 
of there after it all hit the fan.  The music we were playing at the time 
was a mix of contemporary jazz, pop tunes and some oldies.  At the end of 
this fiasco the guy complained to the agent that we couldn't hold a crowd. 
DUH!!!
Larry Walton
St. Louis
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dick Baker" <box2 at twotonbaker.com>
To: <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 5:01 PM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Another strange gig courtesy of the Sheik


> At 01:16 PM 8/6/2006, Jack Bryce wrote [a delightful story about playing 
> an Indian wedding, which went sour, with Dave Littlefield].
>
> I've got my own Littlefield "gig that went sour" story--and I'm not even a 
> musician!  I was, however, the sound man for the Potomac River Jazz Club 
> in its early years, and did some free-lance sound and recording jobs.  One 
> year, The Sheik had two big New Year's Eve gigs booked, so, like Lester 
> Lanin, he sent a "B" band to one of the gigs.  He hired me to do sound for 
> the concert, and asked me to pick up the band's paycheck at the end of the 
> evening, so I was, willy-nilly, the group's manager for the evening.
>
> It was in the ballroom of a big hotel on the Washington Beltway, a Ramada 
> Inn, I think.  It was the hotel's party, and the director of catering had 
> hired Dave and his Charleston Sheiks band, which specialized in 1920s hot 
> dance music.  It was a sellout crowd, probably 400 people, geared for a 
> good time.  Dave had hired the finest local players for the gig, and had 
> assembled a quality set of charts.  They played great--and the crowd hated 
> it!
>
> You see, they thought they were getting modern music.  I'm not sure how 
> much whispered, or even shouted, grief the guys on stage were getting, but 
> a steady stream of patrons made their way to the sound table in the back 
> of the room to complain to me about the "corny old crap" that the band was 
> playing.
>
> At the first break, I huddled with the band and explained that the folks 
> in the crowd wanted rock 'n' roll.  They riffled desperately through the 
> Sheik's book and found, amazingly, a rollicking chart for "Proud Mary," 
> the 1969 hit by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  God only knows what it was 
> doing in a '20s book, but the crowd loved it.  So for the rest of the 
> evening the band played Charleston Sheiks music to boos and hisses, 
> interrupted every 20 minutes or so by a repeat of "Proud Mary," to great 
> acclaim.  The crowd wasn't happy, but at least occasionally mollified.
>
> At the end of the evening, I presented myself at the catering director's 
> office and asked for the band's paycheck.
>
> "You must be kidding," he said.  "My people hated your bums, and I had to 
> give lots of them their money back.  I should be paying you a fraction of 
> your price, if anything."
>
> Luckily, and coincidentally, I had talked with Dave about how he got the 
> gig, so I was able to reply, "Sorry, Buster, but I happen to know that 
> Dave Littlefield gave you a one-hour demo tape of the band and a list of 
> every tune in its book.  You hired him on that basis, and if you sold your 
> crowd something else, that's your fault, not the Sheik's.  Pay up!"
>
> And he did.
>
> --------------------------------------------
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------
>       Dick Baker - Now in Chattanooga!
>             box2 at twotonbaker.com
>
>
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