Last night's gig with the "Electric Meter Specialists", held at the Ramada Inn Convention Center, down town Eau Claire went really well.
It is always nice when the group offers to help carry the sound equipment in and out again as that has gotten to be the toughest part of my job description.
They graciously invited me to join them for dinner but I have learned over the years of playing what I call "The Mashed Potatoes Circuit", to forego the eating of a meal just before performing. I think it has helped keep some of the weight off.
I opened the show with a one liner my good friend Matt Capell had sent me from Italy and it went over very well! I shall keep it in use for some time.
Matt Capell is one of the dearest friends of my life. We both went through the hell of divorce at the same time and ended up sharing an apartment on Main Street in Eau Claire. I was teaching 8th grade English at the time.
After moving in and living with me for a couple of months, Matt became very disconsolate that he did not have a job. I told him there was an opening for a cook at Howard Johnson's where I was working nights. Matt applied for and got the job.
Then the first thing he decided was that we needed a stereo system for the apartment. So he went to see another good friend of ours, Doug Cox, now of San Francisco, who was running a stereo shop on Water Street.
Matt picked out the stereo that we wanted (I still have the amp somewhere in my basement) and told Doug that we couldn't pay for the whole thing up front, but couldn't we please buy on credit.
Doug, with his wonderfully dry sense of humor, replied: "Here's the world's biggest deadbeat asking for credit for the world's second biggest deadbeat", and he proceeded to fill out the necessary papers.
Matt and I did, indeed, manage to pay off the remaining debt on the stereo system.
Matt is one of the funniest guys I know (besides Doug). One day, it was really slow at the Howard Johnson's restaurant and Matt was standing around quite a bit. The manager came in and decided this would not do and started looking for minor, insignificant tasks for Matt to do outside of his job description, which was cooking.
At one point he had Matt up above the stoves, cleaning the grease off the huge vent hoods. So Matt took a big bandana, tied it around his head "Aunt Jemima" style, and in a very loud "slave" voice started this rap: "Yass, massa, I be cleanin'' jus' as fas' as I can! Please, massa, don' whup me no mo'!"
He kept it up until every customer in the place was craning his neck to see what was going on. Finally the manager said: "Okay! Okay! That's enough! get down from there!"
Once Matt and I took a road trip north to visit my friend Gerald in Spooner. This was the late 1970's -- the wild years -- and yes, we both had gotten into the 'erb before we left.
Matt is driving north on Highway 53 when suddenly he says: "Is this highway two lane or four lane?"
Says I: "Pull it over! Better let me drive!"
Even weirder is the fact that Gerald worked for the Northwest Regional Planning Commission in down town Spooner. So we look for the address and park. The Planning Commission shares the building with the Spooner Police Department.
We sat in the van for half an hour! Scared ourselves straight! Talk abut paranoid!
I will never forget the time that Matt came down to a bar my band "Yesterday's Wine" was working. It was back in the day when the "Outlaw Country" singers -- Willie, Waylon, and the boys had everybody wearing huge cowboy hats and country rock was the music of the day -- we were tearing through a country tune when Matt walks in, sits down at the bar, takes off his huge black hat, takes aim at a coat rack near the band stand and lets fly -- the hatlanded like a perfect "ringer" in horseshoe! Spun a couple of times and came to rest.
The band stopped playing, our jaws dropped! Finally I said: "I'll bet you can't do that again."
Matt says: "I don't have to." and turns back to the bar.
Funny the stages we go through in life. Back then we were all "drug store cowboys". Later I would use the joke "Cowboy hats are like hemorrhoids -- sooner or later, everybody gets one."
Matt and I were in "Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum". I played the slave Pseudolus and he played Captain Mileus Gloriosus.
At one point in the show he sings a number while grasping me by the tunic. One night, he thinks he has lost his place in the lyrics when he really hasn't. He is mumbling them so that only I can hear them but out of panic, he is really putting the screws to me, throwing me around like a rag doll.
I kept whispering to him: "You've got the right words! Sing! Sing! You're killing me!"
Several years ago, Kim and I visited Matt and his wonderful wife Dianne in Italy and they were the most gracious hosts in the world.
It was a trip I will always cherish!
I have a lot more Matt Capell stories but some of them are unprintable.
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