😉
🙂

Somewhere along the 98 freeway, six miles South of Crystal Lake road, past the sleepy town of Sandusky, lies Franklinville NY, home of the infamous Kinfolk Corral.

This gig is a shining example of accepting a contract to perform without all of us thinking it through.  I suppose it was the allure of $350.00 was too hard to turn down…

Maybe our booking agency borrowed a play from Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and by deliberately booking a six-piece alternative-rock band into a hard-core country bar, Parousia would be immediately hated and then notoriety would ensue..? Yes, Parousia did make a name that night…the name was “suckers.”

Warning sign number one: the marquee atop the club read, “The Kinfolk Corral, Family Fun Country Style”, beneath the text, a small picture of a farmer and his wife dancing together.

The club was long and narrow.  The stage was way-way back against a wall, up high, about three and a half feet from the floor with a chicken-wire fence across the entire length of the stage from floor to the ceiling.  …That was warning sign number two.

It was weird playing through a fence but I’m glad it was there because this audience threw things! Without it, the band would have been knocked unconscious by beer bottles, drink glasses and silverware, or worse, beaten to death.  It was hard to adjust automatic reflexes to keep from flinching each time something flew at our faces but we adjusted and forged on to play three sets of music in front of these ‘lively fans’.

I think we played a handful of  songs that the crowd really liked, “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Trucker band, “Train Kept a Rolling” by Aerosmith and “Cat Scratch Fever “by Ted Nugent.  I thought the audience might kill us whenever we played a song by Yes, Genesis, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick or the Cars…

$350.00 is probably why we agreed to do the show… in 1981 that was bank.  Worth about $920.00 today, adjusted for inflation.

Gregg Filippone mobile sound engineer, came along to give us a hand on a Friday night to Franklinville . He was paid $63.00 including his normal “away from Buffalo” fee plus gas money for the extra long road-trip. In fact, the band had to pay both Barry and Steve Styn for gas to pick up band members in and around Buffalo and then drive all the way to Franklinville, NY.

The road crew and entourage were there, Dave Styn, Steve Styn, Keith Huels and Tim (Tom) Miller came along to give us a hand for $10.00 each (Dave was the head roadie so he got a $10.00 bump). $40.00 went towards the light-show.  Backstage Productions took their 15% booking fee ($52.50).  The truck rental expense was deferred until the band returned it after Saturday night’s gig at the Plant-6 on Delaware Avenue in Kenmore, NY, (much closer to home).  At the end of the show, expense totaled $240.50.  The estimated truck cost adds approximately $40.00 to that total leaving Parousia with roughly $70.00 to the good… and we left the gig with our lives intact! That was good too.