Gig Life
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| Margaritaville Encore 12/29/22 |
We are standing in the “green room” of the Great Northern Bar in Whitefish, Montana. Through the wall, the house music is thumping like a heartbeat and you can hear the crowd getting louder and louder as people funnel into the old ski bum bar. They aren’t here to see us play, they are here to see our friends, the headliners play after us. But that doesn’t change what we are about to do. We are about to put on the best hour-long show of our lives. This is the biggest stage we have ever stood on as a young band. Whether the stages get bigger or smaller from now on is meaningless. For tonight, we have decided to make this our best show ever, for our family and friends who drove five hours to see us play, for the couple hundred paying strangers who are here to dance and drink, for our own love of music that we put so much time and effort into, for the fact that there is a stage with our name on it for the next hour.
The green room is a closet really. Nine feet long, four feet wide, piled high on three sides with guitar cases and amps, cardboard boxes of unsold merchandise. The walls are adorned with posters of all the previous performers, some of whom are our heroes. Robert Earl Keen, Willie Nelson, Ricky Skaggs and hundreds of others. Any space not covered by posters is plastered with bumper stickers of the thousands of unknown bands that graced the stage but never made it into the national consciousness. Bands like us. I paste one of our stickers on the rim of the funhouse mirror. The clock strikes 9:30 pm. Showtime.
We all gather in a little circle, trembling with excitement and nervousness. In the moment, a new tradition begins. Hands stack on each other like a middle school volleyball match. Four men start chanting and bouncing, louder and louder and finally erupt into a cheer. Out the closet door we go, down the narrow hallway lined with kitchen equipment and ice machines. The rear stage door swings open and we clamber up on the neon stage as the room erupts in applause.
With the stage lights shining in our eyes we can’t see individual faces, but I can make out shapes. The room is packed, shimmering in the endless jostle of onlookers. The house music fades to silence and the room volume falls to a murmur. And we are off. The noise is deafening. We have never made so much noise in our lives. I am thankful for my ear plugs. The lights are bouncing from red to gold, blue to green as we race through our opening song.
I wrote the opening song for precisely this feeling. Standing on the front of the stage, slowly building the guitar riff into a massive crescendo before retreating to my mic to shout out words from deep down in my psyche. All my self-doubt and anxiety vanish in a wave of adrenaline. My feet start stomping. The bass player is stretched out in a power stance, holding his instrument like a movie gangster holding a machine gun, sunglasses hiding his eyes, but the smile on his face showing his thoughts clearly. The drummer is crouched over his cajon, arms and legs flying to the rhythm, eyes closed, feeling every beat and tempo change through the subwoofers beneath the stage. The banjo player is locked to the instrument mic, the product of a broken banjo pick-up, but he keeps peeking over his shoulder at us with the eyes of someone who is on a gigantic roller coaster. As the song builds, his fingers are flying, twanging notes are flying off into the crowd like sparks from a raging bonfire.
The crowd is feeding the energy back at us. Time goes by in a blur. The setlist, memorized weeks ago, gets eaten up in no time. We rage through our hour of barnburners, singing about dirtbags and grizzly bears, border patrol and Dale Earnhardt. Suddenly, we are closing the show. Once more we launch into our final chorus and I am thanking all of our friends and family. The headliners will be out in just a minute. The house music slides on and our instruments go silent. The crowd is ferocious. We cram in for selfies with the front row. Someone attempts to buy my sleeveless shirt right then and there off my back. My voice is hoarse. I can barely hear myself talking, saying thank you and goodnight to a bunch of strangers. And then the stage door opens and we pile off, leaving the crowd behind us. The headliners are waiting in the hallway, making a tunnel like a football game. One by one we go marching through, the drummer, the bass player, the banjo player and me, basking in the glow of the fluorescent kitchen lights, eyes wide from our best show ever.
The stage door slams shut, and the volume is reduced to thumps and muffled whoops. The owner of the bar comes out to shake hands and offer us another show. Our instruments are piled into the green room. The bouncer walks by and tells us that we are awesome. We are practically glowing from all the complements and the energy of the moment. The headliners gather together for their pre-show moment. We make a tunnel for them, hollering and hooting as they open the stage door and the crowd erupts again. We step out of the kitchen into the December night and silence falls. I take a deep breath. So that is gig life. Whoa.
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