The Best and Worst of Gigs (Part 1)
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
Written May 16, 2008

Ah, they were the best and worst of gigs…One of the worst gigs I ever played was a catered party for the Port Authority on a ferry boat in Seattle in 1983. It was formal, the men in my band were in tuxes and I was in a formal gown. They rolled out lawns on the ferry decks for the guests to play croquet and the second my band finished playing, they stowed us away to a room and ordered us not to mingle with the guests! It was crazy! One of the most interesting gigs I ever had was as a Green Cross lounge singer. The local Green Cross (medical marijuana clinic) asked me to play music in their clinic to lighten up the communal area, as people who are really sick go there. I learned a lot while I was there, honestly, as person after person came in, some on medical leave direct from the local hospitals’ chemotherapy units, under the direction of their doctors, many terminally ill, many in wheelchairs, and I just sang as they medicated themselves there. If they wanted to talk, I talked with them, much as a lounge singer would, but if they did not want to talk and just wanted to medicate and listen to some live music, that was fine too. Of course, I risked arrest every second I was at work there, but hell, it feels that way just trying to busk on the streets of the Pike Place Market, so what the hell!

It is funny how amidst a sea of memories of what seems like a million gigs over my 30 years as a performer, some gigs just stand out as the worst, and the best. Morton Loggers’ Festival was right up there as one of the most gawd awful experiences of my life! I am laughing even as I write this, the memories are just so crazy of that gig. Seattle Swing, my band, was hired to play their all you can eat breakfast extravaganza in 1983. We were to perform from 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM on Saturday and Sunday mornings. My band arrived in Morton Friday. Somehow bikers had decided to converge on the small town of Morton that weekend, and Morton, the city, was freaking out. Store owners were boarding up windows afraid bikers would break them. And by evening, as they had predicted, there were thousands of motorcycles along the streets in Morton, WA. As most of Morton trembled in fear at this invasion, my band and I saw this as a perfect busking opportunity and we went out on the streets and busked for huge throngs of motorcycle club members and enthusiasts all night long in the streets. The bikers loved us, tipped well in all commodities, and a great time was had by all. The bikers rolled out of town the next day.

On Saturday morning, our band got up and played this weird pancake breakfast. Then all day long there were bizarre contests such as contests to see who could carve animals figures out of stumps of wood with loud, powerful chainsaws, the fastest and all of the “crafts” booths were full of dough art, those whirligig things for gardens, and these painted saw blades, that were in every booth it seemed. They all were selling saw blades, painted with evergreen forest scenes. The irony of that was killing me, as it was those saws that were making forests extinct! It was this extreme redneck environment the likes of which I had never seen before and have never seen since. I was familiar with the biker culture on Friday night, but I was a hardcore hippie at that time, and the Morton Loggers’ Festival was just a crazy experience. A few years later, I was performing at the ultimate leftist hippie fair at that point in history, the Oregon Country Fair. I walked up to a booth selling handmade wool felt balls and bought three to practice juggling with and the person behind the booth said, “I know your secret, we saw you all in Morton.” And we burst out laughing, and hugged as if we were family for *surviving* that redneck event. She said her crew was also blown away by the redneck atmosphere when they got there. I think we had not noticed the “loggers’” part of the festival title and I avoided “loggers’” festivals thereafter.

One particularly bad night I remember comes from when I was performing with Annie Rose and the Thrillers, a Motown revue with 12 members, and in 1980, we played the opening gala for a new bar in Seattle called “Dez’s 500.” When we got to that gig, and throughout the rest of the night, the band outnumbered the audience! It was like a paid rehearsal. Then there was the time Linda Schierman and I were “escorted” out of Auburn, WA in the mid-80’s, for performing radical feminist satire as “Raw Sugar,” at the street fair during their Meeker Days celebration. Raw Sugar has some fabulous stories of performance angst among the audience, for sure. At this Meeker Days event, a man in a turban walked up to me and handed me three marbles, and said, “I think you lost these.” Not getting what he was doing, I innocently handed them back to him, saying nope, they were not mine, but thanks for asking. He then insisted I take them, insisting I “lost” them, and his friends began to laugh, and finally I made the connection. He was upset that Linda and I were making fun of patriarchy, he was upset we were singing satiric songs about issues like birth control, dead beat dads, and how being the “little wife” sucks, etc., so he was now implying I had “lost my marbles.” Not long after the marble incident, we were given an authoritarian escort out of town. Oddly, we had been invited by town officials to come busk this fair, they must not have known what our act was about!

Another gig I remember as especially strange was a private party Linda and I (as Raw Sugar) were hired to play in 1984, in Bellevue, WA. When we got there, it seemed like other private parties we had performed at. But very quickly, things took a turn. As we began to perform our radical satire, unlike most private events where the audience cheered, laughed, and loved us, this audience was immediately offended. And as we could see the audience was getting very angry at what we were singing, we asked if we should stop and the guy paying us told us to continue. We went on, and it became clear in time that this guy was playing us, as a joke, on his conservative friends! It was nuts! We ran out of there, with payment in hand, hoping we made it out alive!

Another wild memory I have with Linda Schierman is when we busked the Phoebe Snow concert line *inside* the Backstage Tavern building in Seattle, WA around 1983! There was this long line of people waiting to get into the Phoebe Snow show and they were there for quite a while so Linda and I got the bug to perform when we saw this. We went down into the basement of the building where the Backstage Tavern’s entrance door was, and began to just busk right in the hall outside their front door! The crowd loved us and were tipping us wildly and that made the Backstage worry we were emptying pockets of patrons, and so they told us to stop it and go away. They said we were on private property and needed to leave. We went to the elevator to leave, and the crowd was begging us to stay. The Backstage employee went back inside, and Linda and I began to perform for the lines *from the elevator*! We put out our tip jar *inside* the elevator, and when the Backstage employees were coming, the crowd would warn us, and we would just hit the elevator button to go up, and would go up and then come back down, and when the elevator door would open, and we were there again, singing away, they would all cheer and throw money. We did this cat and mouse with the Backstage employees for quite a while. It was a blast and one of my most memorable performing experiences!

If I am going to play a really horrid gig, I prefer to do it with company. At least if you are at a weird gig with others, you can commiserate and make jokes about it together then and later. But when I experience a truly horrible gig alone, that is so surreal. A painful solo gig memory I have is a Christmas party at Mayor Charles Royer’s house on the waterfront in Seattle in approximately 1979. I had only been performing professionally for less than a year. He hired me after seeing me busk at the Market. When I got to his house, he put me in the living room. I set up and began to sing songs and play my guitar. He then put on an apron and began cooking in the kitchen. At this point, everyone left to the kitchen but for a drunk man in the corner. I kept playing and Charles came in and told me to come into the kitchen and sing. So I did, and the whole crowd ended up moving back into the living room. It was not for sure that my music was making the crowds go from room to room, but Charles kept trying to shuffle me from room to room following where the people went and I was so freakin’ glad when that hour and a half was over. I remember getting into a cab to leave that gig and thanking god I survived it. Nearly 30 years later, I still remember it as one of the longest few hours of my life.

Another particularly frightening solo gig was when I was hired to perform at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA in 1983. I had been hired to do a one hour show at their outdoor amphitheater. When I got there, it started to rain. I could not do the gig but needed to be paid as it was a long commute from Seattle to Walla Walla. So the sorority that hired me, instead said I had to perform at a fraternity party on campus that night instead to earn my one hour’s pay of several hundred dollars. I knew this was not going to go well! LOL! But I wanted to get the pay, so I took my guitar down to the frat party as they said I had to. I knew that there was a high probability that I would be out of there in less than 15 minutes. I went in and the sorority girls made the men turn off Led Zeppelin from the stereo for *me*. Oh man, I knew to just take this ship down as quickly and painlessly as possible, that I needed to be truly terrible for them to just give me my pay to leave. I began to play the slowest Joni Mitchell songs I could think of. In two songs, they paid me and I was free to leave Walla Walla, never to return again!

There were certainly many more fantastically horrible and wonderful gigs in the last thirty years, but an article like this should only go on for so long, so I will stop here. But I think I will write a few more articles on this topic, as the stories of gigs I have seen are pretty funny and wonderful and just make for an interesting read. So stay tuned for *more* Best and Worst of Gigs stories to come! (You can read more about Kirsten’s performance career, at her character Mother Zosima’s MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/motherzosima.)