[Dixielandjazz] worst gigs)

[Butch Thompson]

Here are a couple:

1)  Following the cold weather thread, I marched in the St. Paul Winter
Carnival parade c. 1963 with the six-piece Hall Brothers Jazz Band.  I don't
know how we got into this situation, but it was grim indeed.  The
temperature was something like 20 below Fahrenheit.  There were medics and
cars along the route in case anybody fell out, and we did see a couple of
cheerleaders -- wearing no more than they would in a steamy high school gym
-- who collapsed and were taken away.  The band had no kind of uniform, and
it was so cold that we dressed in layers of sweaters, jackets, ski pants,
whatever.  In just a very few minutes my face was so numb that I couldn't
find my mouth with the clarinet mouthpiece.   We gave up any pretense of
actually playing, but at the end of the route was the St. Paul Auditorium,
where a sizable audience was waiting to see the parade in warm comfort.  As
we shambled in, we heard the announcer say something like "what is that? --
maybe it's a band --   I guess it might be a band"   etc etc.  Of course we
couldn't play.  These days they call off the parade in that kind of weather.

2) Nothing to do with weather, but --- one St. Patrick's day in St. Paul, I
think about 1980, I was engaged to play solo piano in a downtown joint
called Fiorito's.  This place featured a six-piece jazz band every night,
but the owner/manager, inexplicably, had decided to put me on alone.  When I
arrived, the place was so crowded I had trouble getting to the bandstand,
where the piano -- a spinet, of course -- was draped with bodies, several of
them sound asleep, others just extremely relaxed. It looked hopeless, but I
needed the money, so I elbowed my way across the room to the bar, where the
manager was frantically filling steins and glasses with green beer (the St.
Paul streets run with the stuff on St. Patrick's Day), and he suggested that
solo piano might not be required.  So I fought my way to the exit. I never
got paid, of course.