Hayes'd and confused

So- did the local-ish lad make good?

Without wishing to sound too immodest- yes, I think I did. I'd managed to shake off the mystery virus enough to get through the set without wincing too much (I feel as though I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday asleep. Maybe I did!) and only came unstuck once- in of all songs 'Rawhide', where my left hand refused to do as it was told for a couple of seconds choosing instead to send a dull pain the length of my arm to my shoulder. Ouch! Still given how I'd felt the previous couple of days that was nothing too much to worry about. My Dad came along (he complained to me that there weren't enough guitar solos!) as did several members of Shirley's family and quite a few Pro Music shop regulars (Hi Ian, Jen, Morgan et al) as well as quite a few friends, all of whom unwittingly contrived to make it an oddly nervous experience for your humble narrator, albeit a very enjoyable one. Oh and I managed to play the riff from 'Purple Haze' during my bit of the band introductions in 'Sweet Home Chicago'.

'Purple Hayes'- get it? Well, it made me laugh!

Anyway a couple of weeks ago in a act of shameless self-publicity I sent out some e-mails and text messages to various people who I thought might have been interested in attending the show; almost immediately I started getting replies along the lines of 'is it really £16 to get in?'/'is there a guest list?'/'can I get in for nothing if I come down with you?' and so on. It was amusing (not to say predictable!) to begin with, but I must admit I was surprised how irritating it became. It would seem to me to be obvious that if everybody gets in for nothing then the show can't take place (which is of course true of any event at any level) and with 9 people in the band it's easy to get a situation where if everyone would like an average of 2 guests at a show then there's 18 people getting in for nothing. On some evenings that could be the difference between financial life and death- very few venues will fail to notice that! Then again I suppose £16 is quite a lot of money for some people (clearly people who have never been to see The Rolling Stones, but that's another story.) It's quite a complex situation isn't it? I must admit that in the end I got so fed up with people asking for free tickets that I just told everyone that there wasn't any- which of course meant that there wasn't, including for people who I would have liked to have offered a guest ticket. Even my Dad paid to get in!

I'm not really sure what point I'm trying to make here, other than to say that I probably ended up doing the ticketing equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face; then again I've never really understood what that saying means!

Moan moan moan, that's all I do- but next time I go to see one of my mates play and I hear myself something like 'is there any chance of putting my name on the door?' I'll remember just how many times I've heard those words in the last week or so...