I think after 1970 or so, after I sold Soul City, I took off for awhile and didn't do too many gigs.
I use Twitter as a tool to get involved with people, to sell tickets to gigs where I can stand in a room and smell the audience - and I love that!
I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage - everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to!
In Canada, the major centers to play are very few and far between. Bands that are traveling in Canada really have to travel between gigs.
I worked with a guy, I can't think of his name, him and his wife, and one of them had a saxophone and the other played drums. It wasn't a regular job but I did a few gigs around home with them.
Mary Gauthier's great. Yeah, we've played a lot of gigs together. She's really wonderful.
We always play clubs. It's not something that I feel above. Those are my favorite shows because they're intimate, they're tight, their sweaty, they're hot. You're close to the people. Those are my favorites.
I did choir, soccer, some theater. The only weird thing about my life was that I was playing honky-tonks on the weekends.
My goal was to play 350-capacity rooms in the U.K. and, if I was lucky, 100-capacity rooms in Europe. I just wanted to play music and make money off it.
When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.
In the old days gigging was everything. The whole of life was about gigs. Everything was about waiting for the gig and then doing the gig and going nuts and then afterwards the party and all the stuff that goes with it. And then that party continues through your twenties and thirties. I'm now 51, and it's still very much in my blood, but I'm really hard pushed... the gig is the party for me now.
I used to do covers gigs that would be 90 minutes, with a 30 minute break, then another 90.
I had a band with a girl in New York, and we would go around and do gigs. And then I happened to start getting work as an actress.
My friends are the ones I've had since primary school. They're really cool and such a good bunch of people. They came to every one of my gigs before all of this happened, you know; they were there in the smoky pubs, wherever.
I had a band when I was 14, and we would play around in my hometown of Middlesbrough, and we'd go to the club afterwards, which was the Purple Onion then. There would be live bands playing, and in between that, the DJ would be playing records.
Gigs are my favourite thing - even the not so good ones, because you always learn something.
I've been playing live gigs since I was 13. I really don't know how to do anything else, and please God strike me down.
The advice I have for new artists is this - write great songs and play them live as often as possible. Get residencies all over town and crush it.
I'm waiting for them to come up with a 'Star Trek' thing so they can beam me from my house to the gigs and back.
I've gotten to play some cool venues, like at an aquarium in La Jolla, California.
What do you know when you're 19? I was just stomping around doing gigs.
The first time I performed onstage was at church. Then I formed a rock cover band - Pink Floyd and Joan Jett. We'd play at birthday parties, since it wasn't exactly church material.
I used to play in biker bars, different places like that.
I've done that I was touring a couple of years ago with R. Kelly and the Lillith Fair, I would do the late night underground gigs as well because it's always around those times that there was a hot song, either on the radio or in the clubs, it would just be simultaneous.
When we first started and started hitting new places for the first time, you kinda didn't know, because we were new. Sometimes we played tiny little clubs and sometimes we'd play a larger place.
