> > Tweedy actually stopped the song completely: "You know, I don't care how
> > fucking far you drove to see us. You don't give the band directions."
>
> And really, for me, that sort of sums it up. Abstaining Tom caught these
> details about these guys, and I wonder how much patience on-the-wagon Tweedy
> needed to have with these obnoxious idiots. If the club can't take steps to
> quiet, or remove drunken-stupid patrons who are disrupting the performance, I
> can't blame the performer for getting pissed-off enough about it to "break
> character", so to speak.
>
> b.s.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that hecklers can really screw up your
groove and take the steam out of the act of performing. I've always been
in bands that would either have come down off the stage and whipped the
guy's ass and then gone back and resumed playing, or acoustic songwriter
stuff like Kimmie does where the people who are there are generally
there to listen to her, and if they are not they are quickly escorted
elsewhere.
Kimmie handles them well when she does get them, however, because she is
so much more verbally facile than most people; she always manages to
shut them up by turning it around on them and embarrassing them in about
two seconds.
I do think that if you are an act that tends to attract noxious drunks
then it would be good to develop a strategy other than letting it ruin
the show for everybody. That's what bouncers are for, if you can't
handle it from the stage pretty fast. The problem is that if the act
comes across as the heavy ("get this asshole out of here") then the
crowd can turn on you. The solution is to talk to the bouncers before
the show and ask them to remove people once they get to the point that
they have caused you to stop what you are doing more than one time.
--
Joe Gracey
President-For-Life, Jackalope Records
http://www.kimmierhodes.com
