I have to tell this story at every party I go to

I have to tell this story at every party I go to, so I guess I'll share it here. In 1985 we had just released our second album and it wasn't doing very well (neither had the first). So the label decided that to get our name out there they would put us on tour supporting their Big Name Act. Now if you listened to college radio or watched 120 Minutes on MTV in the late '80's or early '90's you'll know who Big Name Act is, but to protect the innocent I shall refer to them here simply as Big Name Act.

So Big Name Act was embarking on a national summer tour, playing 2,000-3,000 seat venues in college towns, mostly. We were booked on for the East Coast leg of the tour, forty shows in fifty days. A real grinder. We met Big Name Act for the first time before the first show and they were very nice to us, offered to let us sleep on their bus--just nice guys. Looked like it was going to be fun.

That first show was in Chapel Hill--our hometown--and we went out there and just absolutely killed. It was one of those nights where everything went perfect. To be fair, we had been gigging three or four times a week for the past two years and we were tight. But that night we were awesome--and the crowd knew it and appreciated it. Now it sucks, as a band, to have to follow something like that. But it's even worse when, as was the case for Big Name Act, it's your first show in five or six months and your chops are rusty and you haven't really practiced enough. Man did they blow. People walked out, they were so bad.

They weren't as nice after the show. The next night was in Raleigh at the Rialto, and the same thing happened--we killed, they blew. They barely spoke to us after the show. The next night was Winston-Salem and the same thing happened--although they were getting better with practice. The next night was Charlotte and they were on their game by then (I suspect they had spent the afternoon practicing), but we were still in "our" neighborhood, and we still got a better response than they did.

The Charlotte show is where things went from frosty to nasty between us and Big Name Act. Weird shit started happening, like our guitars would go out of tune backstage. Labels on the soundboard would get changed between soundcheck and curtain up. Mult boxes would get unplugged during our set. Stagehands would disappear when it was time to load our stuff in or out. That kind of shit.

Two or three weeks of this pass and we're just sick of it. Now one of the things we had noticed early on was that Big Name Act played the same set every night. To this day I don't think highly of bands that do that. Sure, you've got a set list when you go on, but you've got to change things up if it's not working--give the audience what it wants. If downtempo is bombing--drop it. If the crowd wants speed, give 'em speed. And if no matter what you do it doesn't work, there's always "Freebird". But Big Name Act played the same list every night, no deviation whatsoever. Even the between-song patter was the same.

We got to Tampa with a three day break before the next show. Once we'd gotten out of the Carolinas/Georgia nobody really knew who we were and we weren't getting a great response. So we figured we should probably liven things up by picking up a few semi-obscure cover tunes we could sprinkle into the set. So we rented a rehearsal space to teach ourselves a few new songs--"Calling Doctor Love" by Kiss, the "Speed Racer" theme song, "Rain" by The Beatles, and "I'm A Boy" by The Who. About halfway through the rehearsal, Jess started playing the chords from Big Name Act's opening song. I picked up the bass line, and Jason jumped in on the drums. It was rough, but it was passable. All at once we all looked at each other and said "We're going to learn their set!"

So we raced to a record store and bought all of Big Name Act's records. And then spent the next two days learning their set--down to the patter. And then went out the next show and played their set--or at least the first forty-five minutes of it. When they came on they had no choice but to play exactly what we had just played because that's all they knew. And they were so rattled that not only did they have to repeat what we had just done, they sucked while they were doing it.

To say they were furious was an understatement. They wanted us off the tour immediately, threatened to sue us, the label was apoplectic, yadda yadda. We would have been happy to leave the tour right then, but it took our managers and the promoters and the lawyers about a week to get it all worked out. And so for the next five shows we went out every night and played their set. They tried mixing it up--pulling in different songs, but were so off their rhythm that they got worse every night.

It was all over the trades, and it pretty much killed us. But that was okay, because we'd all pretty much decided it was time to enter the real world anyway. Jess went to law school, Jason went to work for his dad's accounting firm, and I turned my part-time guitar brokering business into a full time job. It was the worst but most satisfying career move I've ever made.

-Andy