Armed with a new reserve of enthusiasm as having come so close to a recording deal, I set about hustling for band members. I put the word out and I also put an ad in The Age newspaper.
While all this was going on I decided to join a cover band, any cover band with work in order to generate a few dollars. Around about this time, line dancing was making a big impact on the scene and bands were catering to this country infused pop music trend.
I ended up joining this strange little line dancing cover band made up entirely of one family. Mom, dad and a brother and a sister made up the drums, guitar, keyboards and vocals and now they needed a bass player. Female bass players who could sing (lead and harmonies) were a big bonus in those days and so I got the gig. They were working regularly and had bookings way into the future.
This was a dream gig for me. The material was really simple, the family handled all of the gig bookings and administration and I was just a hired hand. Little did I know that I had ended up in a hotbed of the Christian right.
This made rehearsals is a little bit precarious for me. We would get through our work and then inevitably I would have to duck some kind of lecture or right-wing tirade. I wasn’t pro or con anything I just wanted to do the gig and go home.
I was still young enough to be drawn into these fencing matches and didn’t know how to defend myself against the father who was obviously very strict with his family and somehow thought that I was a part of his brood by default. I really felt for their son who was the singer in a band. He seemed to bear the brunt of his father’s rants which bordered on the abusive in a very passive aggressive way. Don’t get me wrong, the father didn’t scream and shout, he was a very likeable man but that didn’t stop him from being relentless and manipulative.
I have nothing against Christianity, but in this case it was being used by the father in a less than Christian way. Some people will hide behind anything to justify being a tyrant. I was beginning to believe that the previous bass player had probably escaped the band rather than left the band.
They had another quirk which was quite interesting. They had played as a band for so long that if they made a mistake, they all seemed to make the mistake together. Let me give you an example but first some explanation to set it up.
We were playing at 12 bar pattern. This means 12 bars of music with four beats in each bar played in a particular chordal pattern. The pattern that I was playing on the bass guitar was a standard 12 bar riff, much like the bass riff under the song Route 66. There is no way that I can lose a beat while playing this as the riff has four notes and each bar has four notes.
So we are playing along and we get to last bar of the cycle and I’m playing the riff and the whole family, as one, drop the fourth beat and go straight to the first beat of the next cycle. The mother, who was playing guitar next to me, turns to me in mid song and says ” Try to keep up darling”.
Normally I would have a good laugh, but it creeped me out. I realised that I really was being drawn into the vortex of this family’s world.
Needless to say I didn’t stick around for too long. There is a sad footnote to this story, a couple of years later I came across someone who knew the family and apparently the sun had committed suicide.
In the meantime, I was starting to audition some great players for my new original band.
