We'd accepted a gig uptown at a shitty pub across the street from MSG from some aging hippie dude named Russ who was very eccentric to say the least. The gig held some personal interest for me as the guy had also booked semi-legendary ESP-Disk label artist Ed Askew as our support act, and I was fascinated with all things ESP at that time. His set wasn't quite what I expected, but he was better than us that night for damn sure. Then Jet and I took the stage and the nightmare began.
Four songs in, I broke a string on my guitar, and had to switch to a spare guitar Russ happened to have handy. This guitar was almost completely impossible to play. It was nearly half the size of mine and had its action set to fingertip-destroying level. I hardly managed to make it through the next song, which naturally was a song I had to play a significant lead part on. My attempt to play this lead on that piece of shit guitar was embarrassing to say the least. Jet then had to play the next song all by himself while I paused to fix the string on my guitar. I recall him angrily muttering "You better get that thing fixed fast, Ray!" under his breath to me as I went backstage wanting to die.
We'd have hoped it would get better from there, but it got worse in a big, big way when Russ, who had a big bag of percussion beside him in the sound booth, suddenly decided that the Living Guitars needed a percussionist. This might have been acceptable were it not for two big problems: he had absolutely no sense of rhythm or restraint, and he didn't bother to ask us if we actually WANTED a percussionist. No, he just whipped out a big-ass tambourine and started playing it as loudly and obnoxiously as he could, and it made an already horrible set even worse. After several minutes of this, Jet eventually shot Russ a dirty look or three from the stage and he finally bowed out, but by then the damage was more than done.
The only positive thing I can say about this gig is that Ed Askew seemed to like us. He spent our set sketching on a pad, and when we finished he presented us with a nice little drawing of us. Don't know what happened to that drawing (do you have it, Mark?) but I do still have the tape of this show, which I can't even listen to. Oh, and we never saw Russ (or, for that matter, Ed) again after this wretched night...
