The Montana Wedding Part 1

(Names of anyone other than the band members have been changed to protect those who don’t remember this.)

I had found peace. I was finally able to sleep in a car after years of paranoid anxiety due to the fact that I had once been brutally beaten in my vehicle. I had bundled up my jacket and created a pillow against the driver’s side rear bench seat window and drifted off in a rare successful attempt at time-traveling through an 8 hour road trip to Montana with my band mates. I had fallen deep into REM land, where the mind takes you nowhere and wraps you in a cocoon of dreams and energizing impulses. Being that deep makes getting pulled out quickly a nasty experience; especially if that experience involves all of your emergency survival functions.

The Nissan Pathfinder had jerked suddenly hard to the left and then hard to the right. Where was I? Backseat? Yes. People? Yes. Who? Nabil, Jeff, Martin was driving. They are screaming! We are crashing! WE ARE ABOUT TO CRASH! We are on the freeway! Am I belted in? I don’t want to be belted in! I WANT TO RUN! I am screaming! I am flailing! I am going to die! MY SON NEEDS A FATHER! DON’T LET MY WIFE’S NEW HUSBAND BE FUNNIER THAN ME! I have life insurance. It won’t be enough. Prepare to lose your life, limbs, mental facilities. Laughter? Why are they laughing? The vehicle isn’t shaking. They are laughing. I am still screaming. Stop screaming. They are laughing. They are laughing at me. They are looking at me. Why are they looking at me? Stop flailing. They have tricked you. Is it funny? Yes, it is funny. Are you going to die? Probably not going to die. Will you be needing this adrenaline? No, I won’t need this adrenaline. Are you sure you don’t want to use this adrenaline to kill the leader of this group so this trick does not happen again? Yes, I would like to do that. No, on second thought, I had better not kill anyone. Start laughing with them or the teasing will be worse later. Good Lord, I’m only twenty minutes into the trip.

Months earlier, the cover and wedding band I play drums for, Vote for Pedro, had played one of our many high energy shows in downtown Seattle. Like many of these shows we had packed the dance floor with a large group of people who enjoyed themselves thoroughly. We often attract partiers from other places after people with cell phones place barely-audible calls to friends around town to “GET DOWN HERE NOW! SHELLY IS WASTED AND THIS BAND IS AWESOME!” (For some reason every group has a Shelly in it and Shelly may have a problem with alcohol and/or prescription drug use. The person’s name isn’t always Shelly. Sometimes it’s Shelley spelled with an E-Y, or Mike, M-I-K-E.)

On this particular night, we had attracted a very well dressed wedding party from Montana. Who stayed all night, danced, drank and took our information asking if we would consider playing a wedding in Missoula, Montana. Of course we would. These people were fun, and even though the gig was a few years ago and we had played many others at that bar in the past, I remember that one very well BECAUSE they were so much fun.

Nabil is the guitar player for VFP and called me one afternoon to ask if I would be available to play a wedding in the far-off distant land of Missoula, Montana for the couple that had spoken to us at the bar. The other members had said yes and I was a yes too, but the logistics of getting a band to a single gig two states away would be tricky and costly. We would have to charge more for gas and hotel. We had to come up with some kind of fair estimate. Nabil is a structural engineer and naturally a numbers guy, so I figured he would come back with some very solid numbers on how much we would have to charge. I did a set of numbers too.

Nabil called to give me the bad news about an hour later. If we were going to play the gig in Montana, we would have to charge almost triple our normal fee just to break even. My numbers were about half that. Nabil uses math in his job to ensure buildings don’t fall down. I use math to ensure I have enough change for a parking meter. My math was correct. One thing to keep in mind if you are worried about someday venturing into a building Nabil has worked on is that Nabil was off on the PLUS side of the equation, meaning that although some of his buildings may have been wrong, they are much more likely to repel a missile attack than to fall on you.

The numbers worked out and we had a good plan to get us to Montana. We rented a little U-Haul trailer for our gear, packed some sandwiches and hit the road early in the morning.

I fell in love with playing with this band years ago because they are first and foremost extremely fun guys. They are nice, they are amazingly talented and they play songs that not every cover band plays. They have a song catalog that runs through all decades and genres from the 50’s on up (No dubstep or jungle… yet). I had come to trust them and call them close friends. I trusted them enough to set aside my psychological fear of control in a car to fall asleep for the first time in years. That brings us to where we began this story.

Luckily, the joke they had pulled on me in the Pathfinder scared me BEYOND wetting my pants. I was terrified so much that my body bypassed the “evacuate bladder and bowels in preparation for embalming” message the panic sensors send the body and went straight to the “Hold all hydration liquids and possible secondary energy sources because you need to outrun death” mode. (That’s not scientific, but it happened.)

We had calculated a slow drive and we would arrive one-and-one-half hours before we were to play at an offsite location in a large public park near a historic army fort. Since it typically takes our band about an hour to set up and test our equipment, this timeline left us 30 minutes of cushion should any unforeseen issues arise causing us to need to find a fix. Early on in our trip we were consistently ten minutes ahead of schedule and we all felt a little pride that everything was going so well.

As the Earth moves around the sun, it also spins on an axis. As the Earth spins on its axis, roughly half of the Earth receives the light of the sun while the other half spends time in the shade, or darkness. This has led humans to creatively compensate for the observances of time. One of the more clever ideas is that of “time zones” or areas of Earth running vertically from pole to pole down the globe separating observed time segments as one moves East or West. From West moving East, one can jump ahead in time by crossing a border from one observed time into another, usually by an hour. I’m sorry if this seems like a tedious explanation of time zones, but on this particular trip, four grown men had forgotten how time in relation to the planet Earth works.

We had gone from 10 minutes ahead of schedule to 20 minutes behind schedule seemingly in the blink of an eye. There was much wonder as to why we had fallen so far behind. At first, we blamed Martin for his two extra bathroom breaks, but that only accounted for 7 minutes and 43 seconds. It puzzled us for some time until Jeff, the keyboard/bass/saxophone player first brought up the idea that we had passed from Pacific to Mountain Time. This seemed plausible, but I was willing to place the blame on the Idaho State Legislature, as that absolved us of any wrongdoing in the planning department.

We raced into the wedding site and quickly began setting up, so as to not be present as the wedding party approached. TACKY! You don’t want to be messing around with your gear in front of guests on a couple’s special day. We would be very visible in a gazebo in front of a large outdoor dance floor and banquet tables as guests began to arrive. It was a beautiful park and a lovely, sunny day. I just hoped we wouldn’t spoil it by being four sweaty guys lugging heavy gear to set up while finely dressed guests tried to guess what vulgar messages our t-shirts bore through perspiration drenched sweat lines. That was when I heard the bagpipes.

We were halfway through our setup when the bagpiper led the wedding party to the reception in the park. We hastily moved the rest of the gear to the gazebo and changed into our performance clothes. As we returned to the stage, we saw the groom and the bride standing there waiting for us. I was prepared to take a tongue lashing and knew we had deserved it. Although we hadn’t made a mess, it has always been our band’s policy to be setup and ready to roll on time and be out of the way for the weddings we play and we were not meeting that standard. Instead, they had something else to say.

“We’re so glad you’re here! Is there anything we can get you or anything you need?” The bride and groom asked.

“Uh, shouldn’t we be asking you the same thing and apologizing for making a mess of your reception area?” I asked.

“What? No, we’re just glad you’re here and we want you to join us for dinner before you start playing. You guys had a heck of a drive. We brought some water over for you and help yourself to the bar. In fact,” The groom motioned to one of his groomsmen and without a word, he arrived with cold beer, “this should get you started.”

This would be a good time to distinguish between the three types of weddings we typically play:

Dry weddings are weddings that don’t serve alcohol. They are pleasant, subdued events that people enjoy, have dinner, stay for the cake cutting and then head home. If we are hired to play one of these weddings in the afternoon, we can feel fairly comfortable booking another gig in the same evening because the wedding will end two hours early with even the bride and groom leaving out of boredom. We usually play one set and I have to give the flower girl five dollars to dance to a couple of our songs. It’s awkward for everyone and I still feel justified in taking our full fee because of said awkwardness.

Beer and Wine weddings get going on time, people start to dance early and stay through the entire evening having a genuinely good time. Sometimes a member of the wedding party will want to play or sing with us. That’s fine. The environment stays safe and the only people out of control were the ones that everyone KNEW would be out of control because of their “problem” (usually a Shelly, Shelley, or Mike).

Liquor and open bar weddings are the red Kryptonite of social engagements. You never know what you’re going to get and it’s almost always bad news. The party usually begins before the bride and groom arrive and it begins with a vengeance, like the party should have started an hour earlier and everyone is making up for lost time. Drinks are thrown in faces. Friends become enemies. Enemies become lovers. People end up missing for hours (we once had to stop playing and make an announcement that the father of the bride was missing and everyone needed to search for them. He was found, asleep in an unlit vineyard 100 yards away from the hall). Fights happen at liquor weddings. Cakes are ruined and presents are opened by guests at liquor weddings. If I know I’m going to play a liquor wedding, I consider bringing a gun.

This wedding was to be a liquor wedding. I didn’t have a gun, but this being Montana, there was a good chance that SOMEONE might.

To be concluded in The Montana Wedding Part 2

In Part 2 we find the band in over their heads, a chicken, a delicious buffet, multiple servings of cake, Nabil reverts to a state of adolescent wonder, sex, Jeff is almost beaten to death, at least three women fall head-over-heals for the Argentinian guitar player without him having a clue and the United States Army arrives.