You learn to smell it

/ Doug Jacquier

This piece has been adapted from a longer work about my days as a roadie for largely forgettable rock bands in the 1970’s. It responds to the Six Sentence Challenge prompt word of ‘band’.

This was a new band I was ‘auditioning’ for as their full-time roadie, in a sticky-carpeted outer suburban hotel where,  as the afternoon wore on and the band ground out their set and the beer flowed, a group of young men walked in and stood surveying the scene with cold eyes.

The hairs on the back of my neck told me all I needed to know as their leader strode to the bar, ordered a round of beers and marched through the dancing crowd until he got the result he wanted, a collision with a dancing man.

The fully intended brawl began and chaos ensued, with a chair sailing through the air and striking a heavily pregnant woman in the head and her partner hurling himself into the melee to ‘avenge’ her.

The band fled to the back lane, leaving me to defend their gear as best I could by shoving people off the stage with a mike stand and threatening brain damage with its base to the chief aggressors.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the barbarians left, laughing amongst themselves on their way out, proudly displaying their injuries and the band returned cautiously to watch as I restored order on stage and ask if I was OK.

I said, ‘Yeah, sure’ and as they headed to the bar, I made my exit and drove away. The band had failed the audition.

32 thoughts on “You learn to smell it”

  6. (don’t forget the waitress tray full of nearly empty glasses with cigarette but flotsam)… and trying not to fall off the loading dock in the back alley.
    fun Six (in a better to remember than to re-live sorta way)

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  13. Sounds as if you already knew going in, it wasn’t going to work out, lol
    I can’t imagine doing all the hard work, all the extra hours at the end of the night, for a band whose music you don’t even like! But hey – at least you let them audition, Doug 😁

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.