The White Water Band IV(a)

This is the big WWB event, the band's defining moment in my memory. I use the little (a), because I don't know how many posts I'll need to tell the tale. Again, the story is dredged up from beneath the sludge of 30 years of memories, so the details might be wrong now and then. The gist of the tale, however, should remain intact.

Summer, 1975. The White Water Band received an exciting call from a booking agent we'd been working with for a short time. He told us he had a major week-long gig lined up in a hotel lounge in Myrtle Beach. The band was excited about the gig itself, as well as the future benefits it might offer--that is, more high-paying, high-exposure gigs.

As soon as I heard the news, however, my throat tightened and my palms began to sweat. I was 16 years old that summer between my sophomore and junior years, and I didn't see any way that my parents were going to let me go on the road with the band. But a couple of evenings later, Harlan stood in my folks' kitchen at suppertime and convinced them that we had a good situation and that he'd make sure I'd be kept safe and out of trouble. At last Mom and Dad agreed.

Jim and Harlan took off work for a week. Terry and Kirk had just graduated from high school and, if they had jobs, did the same.

Along the way to Myrtle Beach, we were to play a night in a bar out in the country somewhere around Hickory, North Carolina. Maybe it was a Saturday night in Hickory, and we were to travel on to South Carolina to begin our gig sometime early the following week. Whatever. I have two memories of that night. First, I was on stage, singing, and a dancer or two on the floor kept making motions as if they were throwing something at me. I didn't feel anything and thought they were just playing with me, but then I looked down at the floor and saw wadded dollar bills scattered around my feet. Second, complications arose in our Myrtle Beach plan. One of the guys called our booking agent to check on final arrangements for our arrival, and the booking agent said the lounge manager seemed to be backing out of the deal. The agent had him under contract, he said, so he should be able to pressure him into going along with things as they'd been agreed upon. We decided to stay in Hickory that night and call the agent back in the morning to find out how things panned out. The blue bus remained parked in the Hickory joint's parking lot, we all spent the night there. Because we were to be staying in the hotel and making decent money, we left--I did, at least--without much in my pocket or my suitcase, so I climbed up on top of the bus, rolled up my jeans for a pillow and covered myself with my beach towel. I slept fitfully through a dewy night.

Next morning, we got the bad news from the agent. The gig was cancelled. The lounge manager had double-booked his room, and he was brining in the other band. Dejected, we got on I-40 West and started back toward Asheville. After only a few miles, we stopped at a motel restaurant for breakfast. A little food and caffeine--coffee for the older guys, Mountain Dew for me--went a long way to revive our spirits, and we sat at the table and slowly grew indignant at the way that Myrtle Beach shark had treated us. Harlan and Jim realized that they'd taken a week's vacation, and they couldn't get that time back. I seem to remember Jim--tall and thin with black hair and red mustache--saying that we ought to go on to Myrtle Beach, find the hotel and, if the lounge manager wouldn't give us our gig back, "beat his ass." So, with our bellies full and our blood alive with caffeine, we piled back into the blue bus and headed south through Charlotte and on to Myrtle Beach.