Going Pro Bono

Well the band (One For the Road) (Oneftr on facebook ) ( shameless plug) made its debut at the North Side Improvement League this afternoon to support Laurie and Roger Flint. Laurie has bone cancer and is being treated in NYC where here husband (Roger) is staying to support her but is having trouble staying off the streets (NYC is bloody expensive). Hope we did them some good today.

Anyway the band was well received, though I don't think we were exactly what the crowd in the Front Row expected. This darling little old lady came up to us before the show and told us how much she liked the blues. I felt bad because we don't have nearly the blues in the set list that I'd want for a blues crowd. We actually pulled Sympathy for the Devil and Bad Company from the set list just to tone the mix down.

But the little old lady got into the blues jam we do to warm up... It's not any song in particular, just 'Blues in A' and whatever I improv. We bopped through a half dozen extra choruses just because she was dancing in front of the band. I'm hoping our photographer (my daughter Roseanne ) got some shots of her dancing. It was cool.

Other than that we did everything but drop our guitars on the first set... Zech forgot a verse to Born to Be Wild. I stumbled over intros and leads like I didn't know how to play guitar. We were sad.

The second set, where the lady was dancing to Blues in A, went off much better. People even applauded. My legs numbed up from my back problem. My left hand went numb and I forgot how to play Wild Thing

Don't know how I'm gonna handle a nights worth of music (though I really have played four and five hours straight at the blues club and at the Shoe in Montgomery Center.

But I had fun. Loved the old lady.