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OK...bring on the Lulz...I'm a big boy... I can take it...


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Just HAD to share this with y'all. A friend of mine recently sent me some old live footage of my 80s big hair band. Man, we were lucky to have this. He videotaped two entire shows. Prior to this, the only live video we had was a few random TV appearances we did.

 

Anyway...the background on this clip. I didn't front the band very often---I was the keyboard and rhythm guitar player---but I came out a couple times a night to help relieve our front singer. And this is what it looked like. This was our "oldies" medley: Mony, Mony, Twist and Shout, and Wipeout.

 

This show we were playing a "3.2" club in Denver. We hadn't played it before and never played it again. I remember the gig pretty well for that reason. Not our usual crowd and I was a bit surly with them...lol.

 

We also didn't have a proper bass player. Our bassist played keyboard bass because he was the right guy for the job, but played the wrong instrument so we had him play bass on a keytar. (although that term hadn't been invented yet.) Sounds a bit weird now, but made sense back in the day. Oh well. This is from 1985, I believe...

 

But...ya GOTTA respect the hair! But fire away!

 

 

 

 

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Thanks, Lee! Those were crazy, fun days. 5 nights a week on the road 50 weeks a year. Pack it all up in the truck at the end of the week and head on down the highway drive a couple hundred miles and do the whole thing again. Just the amount of lights and sound we dragged around in those days was pretty staggering. Not to mention the boxes of Aqua Net and Fog Juice. And gunpowder for the flash pots!

 

That venue was place called The Party Place, in Thornton, CO I believe, for anyone who may have been around there back in those days. Colorado had this tiered drinking age thing back then where you had to be 21 to get into the regular bars but you get into bars that sold only 3.2 beer if you were 19. Of course, nobody OVER 21 would dare hang out in those places with "the kids".

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Oh tons. The light guy would pigtail right into the main power supply at these venues.

 

Between that and the homemade gunpowder flash pots, the whole thing would completely illegal today!

We use to have a 200 amp service panel in a case that we would tie into the bar electrical box. We had 1000 watt par 64s that would melt your face off. lol

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I don't know how he was tying in exactly' date=' and I probably don't wanna know! But yeah... Those 1000w pars were killer[/quote']

My brother got to be real good at it. We had hired a buddy to be the light tech who had worked for awhile as an electricians apprentice. He hooked it up wrong and fried 12 pars and an ETA dimmer pack. Expensive mistake.

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I don't remember any major mistakes---other than over-fogging the stage and having to rush the lead singer to the hospital when she got badly burned standing right over a flash pot once! That was pretty bad. During a show where we went on in front of a big crowd who just got done watching Quiet Riot. We were supposed to open for them (this was one of their very last smaller club dates just as their album was breaking huge) but it was their last stop on the their tour and they were in a hurry to get home and asked if they could play first.

 

We played 1/2 a song....

 

But our guitarist's little brother ran lights for us back then. Worked his way from our general roadie to doing lights. He must have learned how to do the electrical stuff from the light tech before him. I don't recall him having any problems beyond just dealing with whatever the various situations were with the different rooms. Worked out well for him though. He's now a top light tech with one of the big deal lighting companies in Vegas. Nice to know we set him on a good career path. One of those kids that I'm not too sure what he might have ended up doing otherwise.

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