Playing The Clubs

For the next few weeks, I did the best I could to get us booked into the major clubs in Conn. Booking any band was not something I had a great deal of experience with. Most of the bands I had been in had the booking handled by managers and booking agents. That was their job, not mine...and I had always been OK with letting those people do that. But I had so much at stake with Avalanche, and was so aware of my need to keep the band working...and moving forward, that I stepped up and did the best I could while waiting for a deal to materialize. In the beginning, it seemed very easy...all the major clubs wanted us in as quickly as we could get there...but the number of rooms in the state that were actually large enough to accomodate us could be counted on two hands...and we played pretty much all of them in the first three months...and sold out nearly all of them. The problem that we were facing was overexposure in the same rooms. Most club owners had bands come in on a rotation...once every two or three months at the most, because to appear more frequently then that would usually result in people getting burned out on a certain act, and then not coming back to see them at all...or at least a lot less often. It made perfect sense, but it eventually left me with a dilemma. Where do we go now? The logical choices were the many colleges and clubs in the two or three state area bordering Conn. I had no idea how to contact or work with those places, but my twin brother, as a club owner, had a lot of experience in dealing with the people who did. I thought that after the hell I had been in only a few years earlier, and how well the band was doing, it would not only be something he'd be willing to do to help us...but it would also be easy and profitable for him too. I was prepared to offer him 10% of whatever the band made from his bookings.  And since many total strangers had stepped up with a lot of help, and he being my twin brother, I never thought twice about asking him. He agreed to get involved, provided I was willing to give him exclusive booking control. He told me that he didn't want me to cross-book the band on the same day he may have booked us elsewhere. That made sense to me, so it was an easy choice. It also proved to be a disastrous one...because when all was said and done, we never got one gig as a result of that decision. At first, I just figured his lack of results was due to his having to lay some necessary groundwork, but after it had gone on for an inordinately long time, and was starting to really affect the band in a negative way...I found out that there was another reason why that was true.