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The St. Patrick's Day Massacre

Since I've been a part of Magnolia Blue the band has been hired every year to play a St. Patrick's Day event at Mad Fox Brewing in Falls Church. Not that this blog sucks up to those who pay me, but the St. Patrick';s Day event is hosted by by the fabulous Tori McKinney of Rock Star Realty in Falls Church, VA - see her for all your real estate needs!.

Ahem. Anyway, every year I've been with the band it's been a catastrophe, but the good news is that the catastrophe level is declining - maybe next year's event will be smooth sailing:

Year 1 (2017): I never even made it to the gig. My unexpected heart surgery was on March 15th of that year (beware the Ides of March!) and I was still in the hospital on the 17th. They got a sub for the gig.

Happy St. Patty's Day! No corned beef & cabbage. Or whiskey
Year 2 (2018): A year later I was in much better shape, but our band leader wasn't. By a cruel twist of fate (at least in terms of playing St. Patty's Day gigs) his birthday is March 15th (once again, beware the Ides of March!) which means he shows up for the gig with a hangover from multiple days of partying. 2018 was a milestone birthday for him which meant an especially heavy and long bender. He showed up at the gig looking like death warmed over. Worse yet, he had brought his house-mate's PA, a very cool digital system which has no mixing board - you control it remotely from an iPad. Unfortunately, the house-mate had given him only a quick tutorial on the thing and in his addled state he couldn't make it work. We did the first set with no PA system. During the first break I jury rigged something using our monitor amps, which was better than nothing - but not buy much. Hung over Neil, no PA, new guitarist who didn't know the material very well, and a fill-in female singer who had the moves but not the voice (moves like Jagger, sings like Yoko) made it a pretty painful gig.

That's more like it!
Year 3 (2019): Another year, another Neil hangover. First of all, I've learned by now not to arrive at the stated call time for gigs, since if I do it means I'll be sitting around twiddling my thumbs for a long time - I had a nice long time last year to sit and get to know the "moves like Jagger, sings like Yoko" singer while we waited for the rest of the band to show up. This year I got there a little late. Most of the band was already there. Neil, who should have been there first to set up the PA, was just rolling in as well - admitting to being hung over enough to have already puked several times that morning. This time he brought a lower tech PA ... well, at least he brought most of one. Oops, he forgot to pack the mixing board! Fortunately, Neil has friends who are willing to do his bidding. About 1 hr before we were supposed to hit the stage his friend Tom headed back to his house to grab the mixer, about a 1 hr round trip. For whatever reason, Neil declined my offer to run home (10 minutes away) and get my very similar unit. Whatever. The friend returned just about the time we were supposed to start and after some mad plugging in of cables we were able to get started almost on time. Of course, we never set levels or sound checked so who knows what it sounded like in the house. But we had no sub players, no major catastrophes on stage, all was good! We even got tickets for three beers apiece - except it turned out each ticket was good for a 4 oz. "taster" beer. So we rally got one 12 oz. beer apiece. Cheapskates.

I'm looking forward to 2020's gig. It's gonna be perfect!


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Location: Falls Church, VA, USA

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