IN GREENSBORO IN THE MID-EIGHTIES there seemed to be high demand for electric bassists who could slap and play ridiculous white-man funk. I decided I would be the man to fill this void. If you can play drums and guitar a little, you can pick up funk bass well enough to work in a cover band. So I got myself a shameful Steinberger-copy bass guitar from a pawnshop, for one hundred and fifty dollars. It was a dreadful-looking futuristic black truncated stick with some strings. And within a few weeks I was slapping that bitch like it owed me money. I do realize that doing the electric slide with a cheesy bass hanging high across the breasts and rocking the “white man’s overbite” ain’t exactly the portrait of dignity, but I felt it was an improvement over polkas. If I was going to be found at the bottom of a river somewhere, the victim of a carjacking, at least I wouldn’t be in leather shorts, suspenders, and clogs.
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Early on at UNC-G I found work in a lounge/top-40 band at an Italian restaurant called Giovanni’s. The couple whose band it was fought openly onstage, while the sparse local audience howled and cheered them on. Everyone assumed it was an act. But the band knew better and we looked at our shoes in shame as they argued. Sometimes the couple would even stop mid-song and have it out. The husband would yell at the rest of us too—also a big hit with the audience.
“I had a smoke-blowin’ show band in Las Vegas, you turkeys! I could have stayed there and wouldn’t have to play with jokers like you!”
Giovanni, one of the owners—the other owner coincidentally turned out to be my cousin’s stepmother—took me back to his office one night for a talk. With a gin martini in hand, he showed me drawers full of handguns and a special, sentimental place on the floor where he’d had sex with a famous female singer back in the seventies.
Giovanni told me, in his overly cultivated, gravelly Godfather accent, “One-ah day! One-ah day you gonna be ah-fuckin’ famous, Ben Folezzz!”
Finally, someone sees this! I thought. Thank you!
Then he finished his thought.
“Yez! You-ah gonna be a famous…a famous clown!”
Well, not quite the kind of famous I was thinking of, but it was still recognition, I guess. He showed me pictures of himself as a young man posing with a comic by the name of Red Skelton. I would one day be like Red Skelton, he proclaimed. “Clowwwwwn!”
He said I was funny, much funnier than the silly couple I worked for, the ones with the domestic quarrel shtick. The Couple-Fighting-Onstage comedy routine had played itself out, he thought. Particularly the gag where the husband threatened to hit his wife onstage and the guitarist walked out. It seemed too real, he said. He preferred the moments when I sang “Rawhide” or moved to the piano for “Great Balls of Fire.”
“That,” he told me, “is why people come a-back!”
I respectfully declined his offer to take over the band, because I didn’t want to shit on the couple who’d hired me, even if they were miserable to work for. I played the gig awhile longer before moving on, taking pickup gigs here and there, on piano, bass, or drums, but the extracurricular schedule soon took its toll on my studies. I struggled to make it to 8 A.M. theory classes after late-night gigs, often many miles from town. It was all too much so I decided to take some time from University and just earn money.
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I took a gig playing bass and directing a house band at Pinehurst Golf Resort near Fayetteville, North Carolina, and lured a couple talented musician friends away from their studies at UNC–G to be the rhythm section: a drummer named Dave Rich and a guitarist named Millard Powers (who now plays with Counting Crows). This ensemble was pretty large, fronted by six singers. After a few weeks rehearsing volumes of medleys at our new home at Pinehurst, we were ready for opening weekend at their new spiffy nightclub. Opening weekend turned out to be our and the nightclub’s last.
We were but one of many identical bands at their sister resorts. There was a format and repertoire to follow. One of the format’s shticks involved a female singer flirting with the older golfers and bringing them to the dance floor. On that first night, our best female singer, following the script, approached a well-dressed older gentleman seated at a large table with his wife and friends, and pressured him to dance. A spot followed them to the dance floor as the audience egged them on. Then we all watched in horror as the poor man went into violent spasms, collapsing in front of the bandstand. A few doctors, who happened to be seated at his table, tried desperately to keep him alive before the paramedics showed up, to no avail. He was dead from a massive heart attack before the paramedics arrived.
At the end of the harrowing evening, in which the deceased was carried away under a blanket, we quietly rolled up cables and put away our equipment. The place had cleared out, except for the band and some remaining staff. The local soundman, sporting a massive mustache and baseball cap, broke the silence with—and these were his exact words—“Well, I hate to say it, but you guys were knockin’ ’em dead tonight,” and exited the restaurant with his case of mics.
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That was it for our Pinehurst gig, but the company found us work at one of their other resorts. We took a Greyhound bus to Schuss Mountain, Michigan, where we joined a large show band called the Schussy Cats—a Northern Michigan tradition. Suited up in pink cummerbund and bow tie, I was beginning to get the picture. Nearly all the cover-band gigs were corny. They’d seemed so appealing back when I bagged groceries and it was a pipe dream to put food on the table with music.
Our audiences at Schuss Mountain weren’t afforded any more dignity than we were. They were called “Fudgies.” “Fudgy” is a not-so-endearing term for tourists from Southern Michigan vacationing in Northern Michigan. The word was coined by Mackinac Island locals who made their living selling their homemade fudge to tourists and then mocking them for buying it.
That summer rockin’ the Fudgies left me with what the Schussy Cat singers called “transition damage”—what you get from memorizing too many endless medleys with segues every fifteen seconds. I can’t hear four bars of “Gary Indiana” without a mental transition into “Oklahoma,” dovetailing into “Kansas City Blues,” and so forth. If I hear a song with a state’s name, I have to compulsively work my way through them all. It’s a problem, still.
Transition damage and all, I’m very grateful for what I learned playing with these various cover band gigs. You learn a lot about songs by experiencing what works about each in front of many audiences. Seeing when they get up to dance, where they sing along or point to their best friend while mouthing a phrase that means something special to their friendship. I put in my time as a musical mercenary—playing radio hits, cocktail jazz, dance music, and requests on piano, bass, and drums. I believe, as undignified as it often felt, it was invaluable life (and death) experience. I highly recommend a couple of years of it, no matter how cool you think you are. The things you will learn.