The Struggle to Keep Playing

After the second WCCC show at the club, we really had no gigs on the calendar, no record on the air, no record in the works (I was still paying off the studio debt from the record that had been banned) and ten people who were all looking to me to provide the solutions to our problem. I knew the only thing that would fix this was..more time..to make money, so we could get back into the studio...more patience from the guys in the band, while I worked on that...and the gigs I was sure my brother would soon be getting for us. He had been given exclusive control over the band's bookings more than a month earlier, and I was starting to wonder why he hadn't been able to tell us he had some dates booked. When I asked him about it, he just said he had a lot of feelers out, and was waiting for return calls. Although I wondered to myself why he would be having any problems getting us booked into places (after all, all he had to do was tell potential "buyers" how we had done in his and every other  club we had played in so far)...I kept that to myself, and decided to let him do it the way he thought it should be done, because I knew that this was his area of expertise, and I thought he was doing the best job he could. After all, we were brothers...and he knew what was at stake. But I knew we had to work somewhere..just to keep the guys from going crazy. There were a couple of very small local rooms that kept pestering me to bring the band into, and we all had friends in town that wanted to see the band, so I decided that if we went in with a small stage, and didn't advertise at all, outside of the local area...that it would be better than not playing, in fact, it could be fun. After asking my brother if he would be OK with me doing that, and having him agree, I booked the dates. The first was at a small biker bar near the University of Conn. It was a local watering hole we had all spent time at, so it was like playing in a friend's house. Even with only half of our stage gear, and a fraction of our PA, we were deafeningly loud...but the place was packed, and stayed packed all night, and nobody seemed to mind or care...it was what they expected...and it was almost like playing a party for a few close friends. It did nothing for us in a business sense, but it was really what everybody really needed...because we needed to keep playing....