“Don’t forget you are up for a column this week,” read the text on my phone Monday morning. It was a message from Review Editor Ron Eland and, oops, I had forgotten.
Knowing that I have a first public gig with a brand-new band coming up this weekend, Ron joked that I should write about “what it’s like getting ready for your big stadium concert Saturday.” I’m not gonna do that. Non-musicians would find it deathly boring. But neither am I above a bit of shameless self-promotion. So, if you have nothing better to do, come out and see Rev. It Up! (actually it’s version 2.0 which is too long a story to tell here) at The Composers Room inside the old Commercial Center complex at 953 E. Sahara “over the hill.” We go on at about 8 p.m.
Anyway there is, of course, a band aspect to this missive. No surprise there.
This all happened like 25 years ago and I’m not sure what made me think about it. Except that we recently finished an election season where a guy who has never been about “under-promise and over-deliver” won the highest office in the land. For a second time.
It’s a philosophical thing. Do you tell people how amazing and awesome and perfect and huge and the best thing ever something is when it doesn’t actually exist yet? I have never been good at tooting my own horn, as it were. I have always been very much an “under-promise and over-deliver” kinda guy.
Maybe it’s having come up as the only real working class family in a solid middle class neighborhood. I only found out at my dad’s funeral a few months ago that the reason my “dad is an auto mechanic” family grew up in a neighborhood populated with Rocketdyne engineers and their offspring was because my grandfather, a full-bird colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers called in some favors. (Not the only time he saved dad’s hide, but those amusing anecdotes are Stories For Another Time.)
Anyway, I guess I was always afraid that if I bragged about something, it was just an invitation for someone to knock me off my tiny pedestal and laugh about what a dork I was. So I learned that minimizing how great something I was working on might be and then presenting something that exceeded the low expectations I had fostered was a much more effective and a safer path toward the praise that my tiny ego so badly wanted.
Until that night in Santa Monica.
I had been working with bands under the Rev. Bill and the Soul Believers name for about 10 years at that point. We specialized in horn-section-driven Memphis soul music and the typical Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears stuff that is expected of any horn band. By the late ’90s, we had gotten really pretty good. Good enough to get booked at an offshoot of the Playboy Jazz Festival held in Pasadena, Calif. I got to go to The Mansion and everything for the press event announcing the shows and, for the first time in my life, I was not on the press side of the proceedings. I was a performer hanging out with some of my heroes who treated me as a peer just because I was there with them. I was hanging out with Hugh Hefner and Bill Cosby before either of them got canceled. It was weird. But another event had prepared me for the “If you’re here you must be somebody” phenomenon.
This happened a few years before that Mansion trip. Ironically though, the gig where it went down was booked for us by the same guy who booked us at the Playboy event. Billy Mitchell is a really good jazz piano player who I met while I was editing a weekly newspaper in Pasadena and he wrote a monthly column for me for years when I was doing GIG Magazine which we eventually compiled into a book called “The Gigging Musician.” And he did some booking and was a huge supporter of other local players and bands.
This was a restaurant gig at a posh place by the beach. I can’t remember the name of the place. It was one word and a woman’s name, I seem to remember. Marianne’s maybe? I don’t know and Google was no help.
So the place was uber-hot for about a year because it was co-owned by Robert De Niro and Sean Penn and so it was a reliable celebrity hangout. I remember being just a little intimidated.
While the band just a few years later grew to between eight and ten pieces and got pretty dang good, at this point we were a five-piece with one sax player instead of a horn section and I was the only singer. (Later, we would end up with three female singers at the same time. I am still married to one of them, one is a good friend who I would still be working with if we were not in different states and the third I am still working with and you can see her if you come out on Saturday —shameless plug again.) If I am really honest, it was a “lull point” and we were really only OK.
So we are setting up gear and an older gentleman came up to me and said he was the maitre’d and asked me to tell him about the band. Remember, under-promise and over-deliver? So I told him, “Hey man, we’re just a bar band. We play a lot around the Pasadena area but I don’t have any star stories to tell.” And then I got back to work setting up gear. Like the leader of a bar band does.
So, they open their doors at about 7 p.m. and there is already a line. We were slated to go on for the first of two sets at 9 p.m. and, over the next hour it was a who’s-who of Hollywood “men of a certain age” with much younger models on their arms streaming through the door. Then, we heard Dwight Yoakam was there. Then we spotted Madonna. De Niro was in the house. Sean wasn’t there, but his younger brother Chris was. In fact, during the pretty wild second set, Chris came up and sang a couple of songs with the band. Again, surreal stuff.
But the crux of the story is just before the band started playing.
The maitre’d came up onto the stage as we were getting ready to play and grabbed my mic and this is what he told the assembled stars and wanna-be’s:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a real treat for you tonight,” he announced with great enthusiasm. “They just returned from a six-week tour of the United Kingdom and the Continent where they played to a series of sold-out venues. You have definitely heard about them and you have probably seen them on all the late-night TV shows!”
I began to panic. What the hell was he doing?!? I told him we were just a bar band. “Oh my God,” I thought. “He has us confused with someone else. He’s about to introduce the wrong band!”
And then, he actually almost shouted into the mic, “Ladies and Gentlemen, give it up for Rev. Bill and the Soul Believers!”
In a daze, I counted the band off and we hit the intro to “Take Me To the River.” I was expecting to get boo’d out of the place.
Which is not what happened. It was a great gig. The audience was fully into it. We actually had maybe the most enthusiastic response we had ever had up to that point.
As I stood up there taking it all in, I came to an intimate understanding that the response was not about how great the band was. It was because the maitre’d set really high expectations and then sealed it with a dose of “If you don’t already know these guys then you are just not hip enough to hang out here.”
It was probably at that point when I really embraced the whole Rev. Bill persona. I bought an electric blue pimp suit that I wore to every gig for years. I still have it and may actually pull it out again for Saturday. I mean, I really should. Because, you know, it’s the one I wore on all those TV shows…