The Steel Guitar Forum

Some place out there is a black '77 9x9 Emmons D-10 (with a Crawford Cluster on it,) that has a half moon on the front apron from a beer bottle bottom being thrown into it at the Rainbow Bar in Sioux Falls, SD. I found out that some guy saw his girl dancing with another guy. Not sure if he was aiming at him or her, but he missed.

------------------
My best,
Ernie

www.buddyemmons.com

Eric -- I grew up in Toronto and "savate" (pronounced savat) was a popular form of street fighting among young toughs of French descent. Seeing feet flying helped me figure out real quick that real fights ain't nothing like the movies! http://www.kickboxing.com/knowledge/search/styles/savate.htm

Please keep the stories coming fellas. I have always enjoyed reading and hearing "road" stories. <FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Mike Winter on 09 October 2003 at 08:37 AM.]</p></FONT>

Played behind chicken wire with The Twang Brothers in Hays, Kansas in the mid-seventies. There were a lot of places I played that should have had chicken wire. One time I had a drink fly right past my head. It was amazing how it did'nt spill out of the glass until it hit the wall behind me!

Mike,
Worse than playing behind wire is going into the club and the bar is behind wire but the band stand isnt. That makes you feel good. The club was on 12th and Porter Street in Nashville. We were doing a private show case before the club opened thank goodness. The building was lime green.

I got a kick out of this old thread, so I thought I'd resurrect it. There are a large number of newer members on here now. How about it guys? Chicken wire? Brawls? Flying bottles? Obnoxious drunks? Jealous boyfriends or husbands? Any new horror stories?

Wow, Mike I remember this thread and I also remember the "old days". No horror stories, but it was rough as a corn cobb playing those gigs. Lots of times the band guys/gals had to be 'escorted' to their vehicles. That was especially true here in west Texas because of the clientele. Mostly oil field workers and then when the Air Base came into this town it filled up with Airmen, and as oil and water don't mix, it's especially true that Airmen and Oil Patch workers can't get together either. Enjoyed the trip but wouldn't want to have to do it again. Senior citizen dances are lots better and sometimes I'm home by 10 PM to watch Bonanza on TV.

Phred

No chicken wire but maybe it was behind him .An old mate of mine used to play piano in a gay bar in Hobart Tasmania. He assures me he always had his back to the wall.

Playing six string in a club outside of Brownsville, no bandstand and no place to hide, just up against one wall. Looked up to see a pool cue broken over the owners head. Big guy, went down, then back up and cleaned the cue slingers clock. Same club, two gals going at it got escorted outside. The music stopped, so I stepped out too, just in time to see one gal stomp the others face into the gravel. It was called the Carousel, really not to bad a place to play, Freddy Fender was right down the street and we were making $15 on a good night. Wouldn't have missed it for the worlds. Joined the Marines shortly there after.

Like many others, I played (thankfully only once) in a place that needed , but didn't have, the chicken wire, in Norfolk, Virginia back in the Eighties. It was a grungy little hole-in-the-wall bar called, with ludicrous inappropriateness, the Garden Lounge. No stage, just set up against one wall. About halfway through the second set on Friday of a Fri.-Sat. engagement, someone among the bikers and rednecks present pissed somebody else off, and the place instantaneously erupted into a full-scale melee. It was insane--funny to think back on now, not at all funny then--like a cheesy cowboy movie saloon scene where the first fist thrown is taken by everyone else in the place as a cue to start inflicting mayhem on whoever is handy. It's almost not an exaggeration to say the air was thick with high-velocity flying beer bottles, which hit the walls with sounds frighteningly similar to gunshots. The only employee in the place was a female bartender! We ran for the kitchen, me with huge regret for leaving my Sho-Bud out there--miraculously, it came through unscathed--the cops swarmed in and arrested half a dozen or so, paramedics carried off a couple of inert ones from the floor. Needless to say, the remainder of the gig was cancelled. I wonder if the place was ever reopened?

Glad folks are jumping in. There have been some "heavy" posts lately...this is just fun.

A few years back I worked a couple joints like that in both South Jersey (please consider us a separate state...at least of mind)and in lower Delaware and Maryland eastern shore area. I think it was the Bears Den in Cumberland county NJ owner by a couple retires NJ State Troopers

"Those were the days my friend... we thought they'd never end"

Back in the early 80's when I was playing lead guitar, our country band used to play this smaller Legion Hall out in the country. The bar was set up almost like a small room, so that when it closed, the bartender could reach up over the bar and flip a hook which held up a big heavey sheet of plywood hinged at the top, which would drop down and close off the bar. On many nights, this became the "saving grace" for the "Buster" the bartender, as it was "standard operating procedure", that whenever a fight broke out, everyone in the place grabbed whatever bottles, glasses, and ashtrays on the table in front of them, and whipped them overhand at the bar! Thank god, that this "tradition" was never revised to include throwing stuff at the band!

Another club we played back in those days was the old "Moon Palace", which was a combination chinese resturant, bar, and dance floor. The main dining room was seperate from the bar & dance floor, but there was, beside the stage, an area with tables seperated by a wood railing where folks could order & eat a meal. One night a fight broke out between two "ladies", soon to be joined by some more female "friends". Well, there was the usual squalling, hair-pulling, clothes ripping, etc, but there was also chinese food all over the walls, the floor, and even some on the ceiling! (What a waste)!

On another night at this same venue, there was also a bit of a "scary scenario", when a guy came staggering up to the stage, stood weaving in front of the lead singer, pulled out a pistol (we later learned it was a "starter" pistol), pointed it about a foot from his head and said "sing snakes crawl at night, or your a-gonna die"! The lead singer turned white as a sheet, and with shaking legs & a bit of "un-natural" vibrato in his voice turned out his on-the-spot rendition of the song, with the rest of us trying to keep up. (There used to be another country song out about that time which had this "scenario" as part of the lyrics - I can't remember if it was a Jerry Reed song, or whatever.) In any case, the guy grinned, & staggered off, happy that we had done his request. Wow, there was some "skid marks in the skivvies" that night!

Its usually me...I had to quit drinking because of it. Grew up in Louisiana where fighting wasnt that big of a deal..people up here dont like it to much. You can go to jail for one punch, with no regard as to why you threw it. I sat on stage watching a guy hitting on my girlfriend all through my set. After the set they guy got in my face so I floored him,,off to jail. Here they either call the cops or get a gun if they cant win. Now as a joke I yell "JUDO TIME" and tackle the nearest band member. The bars up here have smoking bans in place, and what ends up happening is everyone hangs out in front smoking. Inevitably someone walking down the gauntlet of drunk fratboys bumps someone and a brawl breaks out. So during a song the whole crowd disapeers and we think people must hate us,, but it was a fight out front every wanted to watch.Not so much in the bar anymore though.

In more than fifty years of playing music in bars, beer parlours, legions, weddings, country barn dances and all else, I can say that I have never played behind the protection of any barrier.

I have played in many instances where there have been fights and wrestling scrums on the floor but, the band I was playing with was never targeted.

The only times, which was three times in the fifty years, was because some woman who had too much to drink was trying to get too close to a member of the band. In only one instance a few chairs came flying on to stage but, they were directed towards one person only.

I can’t understand all these stories of steelers accepting gigs in places that are nothing but Saturday night brawl barns.

Fred, I was in Odessa in 1954 and played in some pretty rough places.. One in Monohans especially. I think it was called the Archway. Another on the Andrews Hwy. but I don't remember the name. Jody.

One time before a show I was trying to fix a cable and I couldn’t find my little pliers. I ask a guy seated close to the stage if he had a knife? He answered "no but I’ve got a gun."

Jody S. maybe the 'yellow rose' in monahans or i think we played a joint called 'backstage'. In any case both were not the best places in the city. I think I did a gig on West County Road in Odessa called 'Yall Come Back Saloon' that would qualify as one of the worse places to play. I've been thrown into better ones I know that.

Phred

,,,good one Bo,,,,!!

We used to play a joint in Lubbock called the Flamingo,,,had (and needed)the chicken wire,,stage was about 2' off the floor, with a juke box sitting on the floor in the middle of the stage,,about 2-3' of juke box sticking above the stage. When the bottles and bullets started flying it got REAL crowded behind that juke box as we all dove behind it!! The place had a low ceiling and it was funny,,,smoke was so thick that all you could see from the bandstand was "bodies" from the waist down, dancing,,, A couple of stories I can't tell,,,"you would have had to have been there" type things. I remember one time a guy (a well known local gambler)with a sweaty white shirt on came up to request a song,,,I bent over with my ear a few inches from his face, the chicken wire in between. About that time a hand with a knife in it reached around from behind him, stuck in his left upper chest, pulled it down diagonally to his right hip,,,that white shirt instantly turned red as the guy collapsed on the floor in front of the bandstand. I straighened up as if I didn't see anything,,,kept playing while they cleaned up the mess. That was a rough place to say the least,,,Lubbock was a rough town in those days (50s),,,sparkly clean on the surface,,,strong crimnal element underneath.

Bo Legg wrote:One time before a show I was trying to fix a cable and I couldn’t find my little pliers. I ask a guy seated close to the stage if he had a knife? He answered "no but I’ve got a gun."

Chicken wire, it was a good deal around Wichita Fall,s and Lawton Ok. back in the 50,s. Played in many place,s with Chicken Wire and some that didn,t but wished they did. Like some of you now i play senior citizen dance,s .Lot,s of fun and no smoke

Back in the early 60's (62-63) Bryan Adams got us a job. When Ben O'Dell and I got to the club and went we both thought "we is gona kill Adams when he gets here". This place was a bar right next to the gulf of Mexico, some where between Port St. Joe and Apalachicola, FL. Not only was there chicken wire in front of the band stand, there was a bunch of dents beer bottle size in the wire. The only reason that Adams is alive today is it was one of our best paying gigs. We were in our early 20 in the Air Force and then we was bullet proof, I sure like those senior centers now.

Mike

I played a "chicken wire" stage years ago out in California City in the Mojave Desert. No incidents that night, but got to hear some great stories...

You guys from Portland, Oregon might remember a big tavern called The Euphoria. Played there a few times in the late seventies, and did a show there once with Commander Cody. One other time there I saw the biggest brawl of my career. One big mean SOB was going around the bar taking other peoples beer until somebody tried to stop him with a steel backed chair across the back of his head. That just got him riled. He grabbed a beer bottle, broke off the neck and started swinging it into whoever got in his way. Pretty soon it was cue sticks, pool balls, bottles, chairs flying all over everywhere. This lasted for most of an hour long set and would migrate toward the stage from time to time. We had a roadie standing on the side of the stage with a mike stand cocked and ready and the steel player (I was playing guitar only in those days) was up a couple of times with bar in hand to thwart off the mob. The cops finally got there and hauled off a few, including the instigater who got hacked a couple more times by cue sticks while the cops had him in handcuffs.
In the same band we were playing in Evergreen, Colorado in a club that wasn't really known for trouble, but one night one jerk kept yelling for some Johnny Paycheck, which I'd have nothing against doing, but we didn't play any. Our piano man finally told the guy to "take that song and shove it". The guy threw a full pitcher of beer at the piano player, fortunately across the stage from me. They had a bouncer who was a retired offensive lineman from the Buffalo Bills who took his job title serious and bounced the guy down about five cement steps to the street.
I guess that's two of the more memorable fights I recall.

Leavenworth, KS. Early 80's. The Stables - near the train tracks, of course.
The club was lined with 10 years of Playboy centerfolds varnished on to shingles.
A long wheelchair ramp led from the gravel parking lot up to the front door. While on break, I walk up to the club owner by the front door. He's against the inside wall and peeking thru the doorway down the wheelchair ramp. Like an idiot, I stop right in the middle of the doorway and ask " What's going on, what ya looking at?" Then looking down I see the club owner has a pistol cocked at his waist. Down the wheelchair ramp I look to see a shotgun over the hood of a car pointed up the wheelchair ramp towards the doorway... and me! A cold chill passes over me and I step to the side. Cops show up moments later and thankfully, no shots were fired. Chicken wire would not have helped at this gig. You needed a Kevlar flack jacket for that place!