Day 8 - October 6 - Las Vegas, Nevada

Life is so terribly tragic in the rock & roll world. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Las Vegas!

Let me begin by telling you that I lost 200 bananas, but I did have a good day of granny watching! Boy, can they throw in the ol' coins! Raine won a grand, Dunk won 600 clams and Mike led the suckers and closed shop down about 300 bones. We stayed at the Hard Rock casino and played a place called the Joint inside the casino. More specifically, it was a convention type show and that always makes it more of a challenge to win over the crowd.

We began the day with two acoustic radio performances -- the first at KEDG and the second at KXTE -- that both went extremely well. Everyone was so pleasant, must be the desert air. Raine's voice was getting a little tuckered, so he decided that betting on the Denver Broncos would loosen up the ol' throat strings. Luckily, the Broncos beat the spread and crushed the Pats by 14 points. However, he also bet the Yankees would beat the Indians!

After the radio performances came sound check and I'm still trying to get over this stomach flu that I can't seem to shake, so my belly was singing "Hocus Pocus" by Focus during "Naveed" and "Superman's Dead." After my stomach check, I decided to take a break and take in a little Wu-Tang before donating more of my hard earned money to the slot gods.

Next up was the strip -- boy, oh, boy -- they certainly didn't spare a dime on New York, New York! Two words: De-luxe! Except they don't have those claw games -- you know, the ones where you can pick up high-end watches and such -- they have it at the Lex Luthor, or whatever that wacky pyramid deal is called. The fellas tried desperately to get me on this death trap of a rollercoaster on the roof -- no thanks, doc! On our way back to do the show, I saw this special slot machine out of the corner of my eye, so I told Dunk that he had to play her (at this point Dunk was down 200 cans). She was called "Crazy Eyes" and sure enough he slipped in a buck and out flowed 100 back (from which I collected my usual 10 percent finders fee).

I thought I had crazy eyes when we got to the gig and realized that the Village People were our opening act. Sometimes life can throw you a curve and it's up to you to hit it or step into the pitch and take one in the gonads. We stepped in, took one in the nuts and stole three bases. Come on everyone ... "HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! MACHO, MACHO MAN!"

JEREMY TAGGART
(October 15, 1997)