You mean you'll pay us??

Did you folks ever hear about mine and Jake's first professional gig? No? Well, it went like this:

We have this friend that we play music with, he's a really great guy, loves to play, has some very cool jam sessions in his basement, we've had like thirty people crammed into his basement on jam night at times.

He calls me one day and says, "Hey Trout, wanna play some music in Mancos?" "Sure" I said. I didn't know what the deal was but I figured it'd be a hoot considering who asked us to play.

He says, "We're gonna play a chuckwagon show for a stage line in Mancos, the deal is, they ride the guests around a loop in the stagecoach and they eventually wind up at the cookhouse for dinner, we play while the dinner is being prepared, then we play when the dinner's over"

Sounded cool, except . . . we got no cowboy music. So I hop on the internet and dig up a couple dozen cowboy favorites, Jake and I run through them a time or two we call ourselves "ready"

We get gussied up in our cowboy finest and away we go, we ended up playing for a couple hours. It was a good time, at the end of the day we each had 33 dollars in our pockets, a wonderful steak dinner in our bellies, and Jake had a big pile of phone numbers from a group of out of state tourist girls.

It doesn't get much better than that.