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hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Craig, I played with Johnny in the '80s.

Malcohm Robinson - trombone

Ira Bassett - trumpet

Lee Charles Mitchell - saxes

A J - guitar

William -bass guitar

We all left Johnny and started the group Road Crew. Mac and Lee Charles are with that band today. Check'em out if you're every in Dallas.

There were also 3 other guys with Johnny during that time but there names escape me. They were from Memphis and we were the Dallas players. As you know Johnny made Dallas his home the majority of us lived in Dallas.

Hey W.C. I can relate with your story. We had a power trio as my first group and we were 16,16 &15 yrs. old. Only the guitar player had more than a year of playing time under his belt when our drummer told he got us a gig doing a Valentines day party at a local church. It was only for a couple of hours so we figured why not and since it was valentines day maybe we'd get lucky. When we got to the youth center at the church we found out we were playing to mostly a bunch of 8 & 9 yr. old girls because at that age most boys didn't want to be near a girl. There was not a girl older than 10 to be seen except for a few moms. To make a sad story short we rocked the place(lol) with Sabbath, Grand Funk & Cream over and over.

We made a big $15.00 total.

Best gig ever was about a year later we still hads the same line-up and we played a friends birthday party and found out how much girls liked the boys in the band and that was enough for me to know that I wanted to keep on playing. I still run into the guitar player evry once in a while and the valentines gig always gets a good laugh.

I hope you played "The Chicken" - written by none other than James Brown, performed by Pee Wee Ellis and made kinda famous by Jaco.

Hoo boy...Many gigs come to mind in contention for the worst gig. About five years ago we were called to be the Saturday night closing band at the Hamtramck Polish Festival. Hamtramck is a city actually entirely located within the city limits of Detroit. Originally it was heavily populated by Polish immigrants, recently having given way to many more ethnic groups, Bosnians, Serbs, Indian, Pakistani, etc. A real melting pot, but still a great destination for Polish food...

Anyway, it was the last year the bands got paid. They closed down the five-lane main street, and had a big soundstage at each end, with food, beer, and various vendor tents lining the street. We played the south side stage, our boss, also a musician, played with his group at the north side stage.

Everything went well until night fell. At the rear of the crowd of about 5000, we saw a commotion that seemed to work its way away from us. No big deal, we thought.

We finished our last tune, started packing the gear into the bass player's van parked behind the stage, when the drummer and bass player decided to take the walk to the north stage to get our money. I stayed with the sax player, keyboard player, the other guitar player and our wives and a couple friends up on the stage, as the sound guys broke down their gear. About 5 minutes after the guys were out of sight, we heard another commotion, and gunshots coming from the rear of the crowd again, which was only beginning to disperse, followed a minute later by tear gas canisters being flung through the crowd after the Wayne county sheriffs fired them into the center of the festival. Minutes later, this huge crowd was being funneled down to our end by a line of sheriffs, (including, I assume, the shooters?!) but we can't leave because the bass player, now at the opposite stage, has the only keys to the van, with sheriffs between. We remain up on the stage as hundreds of grumbling festival goers funnel past, and then more gunshots ring out just feet behind the stage. We're all ducking behind the sound system cabinets, here come more cops, guns drawn, more panic, and we have nowhere to go. Eventually it all settled down, but we were stuck there for another uneasy hour, when the sheriffs finally let the guys come back to move the van.

We never went back. No one was hit by the gunfire, as far as we knew, but strangely, there wasn't a word about it in the local media. Word on the street was that it was some sort of payback-driven clash between youths of the various eastern european heritages, but it's all the same to me once the rounds leave the chamber.

Worst gigs? Funerals for friends.

Through the years, I've played and sang for a lot of funerals. My grandpa's was a tough one. Another was a girlfriend my age who died of pneumonia in her early 30s (several years ago).

Both way too sad.

Best gigs? I like playing in church. And I really enjoyed playing keys with a band for a local cancer benefit. Then I played once in Germany with a friend who had a Christian gig. That was pretty cool. Only about half the crowd spoke English, but they loved the music.

It is a universal language, you know. :o)

Doug from N.C. here. New to TBD. Saw this group and joined up. My worst gig was a "battle of the bands" thing at The Cat's

Cradle in '04. Our other guitarist lost his place

in the middle of his solo and stopped playing until he "heard" where we were in the song. We had him in our monitor mix.

Don't know how he couldn't "hear" us or himself. It was embarrassing.