First Gig

The van pulled into the parking lot of Fitzgerald's. At first I thought we were in the wrong place. It looked just like a house. Although, how many houses have parking lots in front of them? We all got out and stretched. Tom and the band started unloading their gear while I headed into the club when I heard a voice behind me.
"Hey! Aren't you going to help us move the equipment inside?"
"No. You guys are the band." I went into the bar and got myself a beer. Fitzgerald's was a small room. It seemed to be built on the box principle. A large box with several smaller boxes placed inside. One of those boxes was the stage at the head of the room it was built up three or four feet off the floor and looked like a stage for grammar school plays. It faced seating for what looked like would be an audience of a hundred, tops.

I wasn't completely convinced of Swifty's trust in his nephew, so I watched everything Tom did under the pretense of hanging out. I watched as he brought the equipment in, setup the amps, mic's, and sound board. Since the room was so small, Tom commandeered a table in the middle of the room and set the sound board on that, running all the cables from the amps, mics and guitars into the mixer and set the levels during the sound check. It wasn't that hard of a setup.
We didn't have any special effects like dry ice for fog, no smudge pots, not even any colored lights except for whatever existed at the club.

While this was going on I was trying to figure out which song we should open with. We hadn't rehearsed 'sets' of songs because The Doors never did. They usually planned the first few songs ahead of time, but after that they frequently stopped between songs to discuss which song they were going to do next. If you listen to the bootlegs there are huge gaps in the shows where they're doing exactly this. That's why the band and I learned all The Doors' songs, so we could recreate this feeling and play any song that came up or that the audience called for.

The dressing room at Fitzgerald's was literally two steps behind the stage, as would become the usual, if there was a dressing room at all. It was small. There was an out of tune piano pushed up against one wall, a bunch of music stands were pushed into another corner. Against a wall stood an old-fashioned gilded stage mirrors with light bulbs that run around the outside edge. Of course all the sockets were empty and there was a layer of grime on it. I wondered how many lives it had? Did it start out life in vaudeville reflecting the likes of Bob Hope or Jack Benny? Maybe it had come from a theatre of Barrymore or O'Neill? Maybe the owners of this place had just bought a replica, a facsimile of the real piece and no longer had a use for it.

I thought I had worked out my nervousness at 'The Place'. Maybe it was because of the hometown advantage, or because I thought it would all go up in flames anyway, so I hadn't been nervous, but now I was and didn't know why. After all, I did have Morrison's blessing from the dream, but the dream made me more nervous. It really was just a dream, a little wish fulfillment courtesy of my subconscious. I didn't have Morrison's blessing or anyone else's for that matter. Maybe my nervousness was me trying to tell myself something? Or maybe it was because now it was more real. Everything was on the line. Everything I had dreamed of, all my hopes.

This was the make or break point, there was no going back for me. I'd sold my trailer for the money to rent the house. When I gave up the house, I sold all my possessions and collections, just as Morrison had when he started The Doors. He severed his ties with his family, going so far as telling people they were dead. Morrison knew there was no going back. The boys had homes and families to go back to. Everything I had known was gone. Everything I had worked for was to get me here, everything I wanted was in front of me one way or another I wasn't going back. Nothing would be the same for me after this. It was either fame and fortune, or failure. What if I did fail? At least that was something I could understand. I've felt the cold hand of rejection before I could understand dejection. But what really scared me was what if I succeeded? That I couldn't imagine, I couldn't even imagine the feeling? Joy? Exuberance lifting me to the heights? I couldn't even imagine what it would be like, outside of anything more than an abstract, or a cliché that didn't really seem to be a definition or even satisfy. Is that why Morrison acted so confidently, he knew that joy? Would I ever feel that? I thought I could feel it welling up inside of me, spreading like a warm smile. I'd felt it the first night at 'The Place', but suppressed it. I couldn't allow myself to feel it then because it was a beginning. The question was, could I allow myself to feel that now?

When it was time to go on there was a knock on the door and Tom stuck his head in the room with the rhetorical question "ready?" We crowded into the hallway. I was behind the band. I would go on last for heightened effect. The club was darkened, except for the spotlights on the stage. I could see figures, unknown, moving in the darkness. I could hear the chatter of a hundred different conversations. Then I heard Tom say from the mic at his improvised sound booth, "ladies and gentleman! The Unknown Soldiers!" And I felt a shot of excitement and adrenaline surge through me. The band took the stage each took his place at his instrument. Then it all seemed to slip into slow motion, the walk out to the microphone, my hand reaching out towards it and in my head I saw a movie of Morrison's hand reaching out to grab the microphone. I knew somehow I had to play somewhere The Doors had played. I had to see if that hand could reach out across time and touch me.

We opened with Peace Frog. The club went wild when I sang "blood in the streets of Chicago," just as I knew they would. My voice was a shriek compared to the screams Morrison used to jolt his audience from their complacency. But that wasn't enough I wanted them on their feet.
"Celebration of the Lizard." I said to the band. I rattled a tambourine to give the snake slither to the piece, the feeling of a story being told around a campfire, a preface that Morrison usually invoked when priming his audience. The band hit the first discordant notes of the 'song' it was a poem, really more theater, a loose narrative of a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors gather to tell their stories. Morrison variously acted, screamed, or moaned through the piece. It was supposed to be the long theater piece at the end of the third album, like The End and When The Music's Over were on the first and second albums, but they couldn't get it together enough for it to be on the album. Not to Touch the Earth was the only remnant to survive to the album. They usually used Celebration as a punishment when an audience was unruly demanding to hear "the hits", or to shock their audience into submission if nothing else worked. I recited the first few lines, and let the sounds vibrate around me and into the audience. I looked passed the lights into the audience and I could tell by the shocked look on their faces that they weren't familiar with this facet of The Doors, or the surprise that awaited them. We were going to give them the abbreviated version. As Mitchell hit the last note he held it, sustaining it, letting it linger in the air. I raised my arms, every eye in the club was on me and I knew I had them. I dropped my arms and the band went into the opening notes of Light My Fire. There was a gasp of recognition. The tension that was holding the crowd suspended was released and erupted. People were dancing others rushed the stage. As we got better in our show we’d do this over and over again, we’d play something like 5-1 letting the pressure build until the audience was ready to ‘POP’ then we’d let them off the hook with something like Love Me Two Times, it almost always provoked the same reaction, near riot.

After we played the last set, the audience was energized and still wanted to hear songs, and we still wanted to play. We had gone through the songs we had rehearsed the most, so I fell back on a device Morrison had used.
"What do you guys want to hear?" I asked the audience. Somebody shouted back,
"Land Ho!"
"You're kidding, right?" I asked. A hint of a laugh in my voice, "let me ask the band." I turned back to the boys, "you guys wanna play Land Ho!" They shook their heads no. "The band doesn't want to hear it either!" Everybody laughed. "Let's slow it down a little, here's a song I identified with too much in my tragic youth, End of the Night." The boys started the slow waltz of the song. I had always thought Pink Floyd had heard the song and adopted the feeling and used it for The Darkside of the Moon.
"All right! All right! All right!" I said, as we walked into the dressing room after the set.
"That was so cool!" Johnny said, "I've never seen an audience do that!"
"Unfuckingbelivable!"
"Let's do that again!" Brian yelled.
"Jim! Jim!" I heard someone yelling. I turned to see the manager of the club grabbing me around the shoulders, trying to be my friend.
"Uh, it's Michael actually." I said.
"Jim, Michael, whatever. Look, I understand what you're trying to do here," he said, above the din, "I like The Doors too. That's why I booked your group, but you need to tone down the histrionics. We can't have everyone in the club running around. There are fire laws and I'm trying to sell drinks here."
"All right, man." I said. And I knew I would be successful.

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