As a follow up to the Bill Putt tributes. I thought I’d share a story.
I’d booked Rudd and Putt to play a Saturday night gig at the House of Fools in the late 1990s.
On the following day after the gig my business partner tore into me,
“What the fuck were you thinking when you booked those guys ?”
At the time my business partner and I were at constant loggerheads over the direction of our Entertainment Policy. I was a staunch supporter-promoter of original music whereas he favoured a Covers Band- DJ format. It was a constant battle those initial years reaching a compromise.
One of our regular punters, a Chilean woman had organized her birthday party [ at short notice] on the night I‘d booked Rudd & Putt.
A room full of South Americans were most probably expecting a Latino or Tex Mex band on the night. But they got a pair of middle aged legends of Australian Rock doing a couple of acoustic sets instead. I’d confirmed the booking a couple of months before and I didn’t want to muck them around by cancelling the booking at short notice.
I was sort of chuffed that they wanted to play at our place in Footscray, and they also had a fairly persuasive booking agent for memory.
“We could have tripled our bar sales if you’d booked one of those fucking Latin bands.”
After he cooled down he said.
“ Yeah but they played this one song which was fantastic but they waited till the end of the night. If only the rest of the show had been as entertaining.”
Even though I wasn’t there, I had the night off, I took a guess that he was talking about Spectrum classic ‘I’ll be Gone’.
So I started humming and singing the chorus-
‘ Someday I’ll have money, money isn’t easy to come by………….’
“Yeah that’s the one.”
He looked at me suspiciously as if I was playing mind games with him.
“ But you weren’t there, how the fuck do you know what they were singing?”
Australian Rock history wasn’t his forte but he could decipher a Profit and Loss Excel Spread Sheet though.
Fabrizio Marsani
fmarsani@yahoo.com.au
