Slice of Life: Rocking the House with the Band

Our first gig was a success! My band, Duke Rushmore, had out first outing last night at a brewery in a nearby town, and about 175 people came out to, eh, “sample” fresh beer by the Paper City Brewing Company and listen to some music. We were a bit nervous, given that this would be our first time before a live bar audience (we did play briefly last year at a benefit concert at my school) on St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

But it was fine. No, it was great. We were mostly pretty tight, and the crowd got into it. We were handing out Duke Rushmore tambourines and shakers, and while the place is not designed for dancing, a few folks did cut the rug for a few songs. Most just held their cups and swayed to the music, and we got a lot of a good feedback from people.

I tried to set up my Flip camera, but I could not get it in a good angle. I’m not sure if we can salvage much of the video footage, but one of the bar dudes jumped up on some kegs and filmed a few songs for us, and then loaded it up to YouTube. The first song is my original song, which is really called “Champagne, Whiskey and the Rhythm and Blues Tonight” but we changed it to “Irish Whiskey.” The problem was that we kept forgetting to switch the words, so we had this funny exchange (you can’t see it on the video) between us singers, looking at each other, like, It’s Irish Whiskey, you fool, and then we were both cracking up.

The second song is our encore, which we hadn’t practiced all that much. The singer thought he would forget the words but they came back to him at the right moment.

Peace (in the rock and the roll),
Kevin

PS — that’s me on the saxophone, by the way.