I just remembered a funny story from the EARLY EARLY days of Abney Park, that I thought Id share... When we first started as a band, a hundred million years ago, we had like, zero fans. This is because the day a band is formed, youve done nothing to be fans of. Youve leased no albums, played no gigs, etc. Its pretty hard to have fans at that point, unless you have a ton of friends. But everybody in the band was super shy back then...super introverted...so we barely had friends other then each other. Which means when we did our first couple shows...almost nobody came. (Most musicians are introverted by nature, but you have to overcome that nature to make a success of a career onstage.) Now, there is a standard deal clubs give you early on. No pay, on a terrible night of the week when nobody goes out clubbing, like a Tuesday. But you get drink tickets (two per band member), and you get guest tickets so you can bring a couple friends to the show. Meanwhile, if enough people came and saw you, then the next time you played theyd give you a better night to the week. This would make it a smidge easier to make fans, as people might just be coming to the club on their own, on a better night like a Friday or Saturday. One night we were playing a tiny Seattle club called The Color Box, and I came up with a plan. I had the band take our 15 drink tickets and 15 guest tickets out into the streets of Seattle, were we found 15 homeless guys. We offered them this, Okay, come to our show, and pretend to be our biggest fans, and you can hang out in a warm club all night a have a drink on us! An hour later we are onstage in front of 15 grizzly and scary looking homeless guys, who were cheering their asses off, and having a fantastic time! Most of them proved to be really nice guys, and one of them I later got a job at the fish restaurant where I was a cook. In the meantime, the club manager figured out what we did, and was not happy about it. We were told never to do it again. Apparently that was cheating. :) Funny thing is, by the end of the night, they really were friends and fans, so what started as a cheat actually worked. - Robert
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 17:20:14 +0000
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