I love being a “night-life performer.” As a night-life performer, I get to meet a lot of interesting people.
And by interesting, I mean that some of the peeps I meet are uniquely cool and others are uniquely idiots and total mental midgets. All of them add some dose of humor to my life and I generally like that!
Some of those that fall into the idiot/mental midget category are hecklers – people who scream “you suck” to the bands, flip the bands off, etc. In the four years we’ve been playing, we’ve only had two shows where this happened to us, one just this past month.
One thing that is illustrative of the low IQ and class levels of both of these hecklers that have crossed our path is that they both were friends of the bands that we had given the opportunity to be a part of the show in question. Generally, the band that books the show determines how long the “guest” bands get to play and how much they get paid.
So you piss off the main band and your friends may not get to play long/at all, not get paid, or both. Real smart to heckle the main band, right? Well, again, we’re dealing with mental midgets here.
In this most recent episode, I got the money from the bar owner as the last band was playing. Based on prior arrangements with the three guest bands, we would pay those bands $300 after we took our cut.
The hecklers were friends of the guest bands, who did nothing to discourage their behavior, which also included throwing shit at us.
So, I sat at the back of the venue with that $300 in my pocket. The remaining patrons were facing the stage. I was inches from the door. I thought to myself, “Wow! It would be so easy to just step out with their cash!” The scent of revenge was in the air and, damn, it was smelling sweet!
What would our guests do if we didn’t pay them?
Sue us?
Fight us?
Threaten to ruin our reputation?
None of those options scare me.
Three hundred extra bucks can buy a generous helping of studio time.
What would you do?
Find out what I did in Part 2, coming soon…