Chaos and Disorder: 28 November

If you're going to have just one gig in a weekend, you'd better make sure it works.  And my word we did our best.  The Lazy Jazz Drunks assembled in a re-configured line-up on Saturday night at Rory's Pub on 178 St and did everything we could to keep ourselves afloat.  Continuing our bass-less theme, and in response to the exhortation to "keep it down" we lost the keyboard as well, so the Swedish Ambassador sat behind the small drumkit and I moved to guitar, with Tall Tom and Ian The Punk sticking to guitar and vocals respectively, and Aussie Ken doubling on harmonica and stomach trouble.  A particularly (unsurprisingly I guess) drunken Irishman opened the festivities by taking a microphone and making an a##hole of himself and reminding us how fragile some of our equipment actually is.  As if we didn't need reminding.  Because shortly it developed that my mixer was only working on one channel, so we flew in a replacement.  Before too long the speakers gave up as well, so there was another trip to Aussie Ken's to retrieve backups.

To mix it up a little further, we had two power failures and two broken guitar strings, the second of which somehow screwing up the electrics in my acoustic leading me to abandon performance briefly in favour of the comforts and reliability of the bar. 

But did we give up?  The beer was flowing and so was the music.  We sang, we played, we had a sh*t-hot guest or two (playing Chuck Berry, Neil Young), we pushed through about half our regular material and added everything from AC/DC to Abba, including half a dozen of my originals, some inspired gibberish vocals from Ian The Punk, at least three versions of Dirty Old Town (one unplugged in the darkness) with crowds coming and going around us, dancing, headstands, dropped glasses, bewildered passers-by, and managing by mistake to play the manager's favourite song in a nostalgic nod to the bar formerly known as Revolution.   

Just another quiet Saturday night on the expat island ...

More LJD madness this Friday (4th) at Huxleys from 8, and the Hellhounds are back at Talking to a Stranger on Sunday evening (6th) from 6. 

Don't take any wooden money.