Today was a fun day, performing at the historic Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles! It was…ummm…how shall I put this? Perhaps THE most bizarre gig I’ve ever played (and I’ve played a LOT of bizarre gigs).
The event was the annual “Harold” awards, an awards show named after silent film star Harold Lloyd, who was a Shriner. Staci Wilson (Don Wilson’s daughter, who made the excellent “Stars on Guitars” documentary about the Ventures) was there to receive an award, and Ventures-pal Jeff “Skunk” Baxter was there to receive an award as well, so our Ventures tribute band “Venturesmania” were asked to play four songs as part of the awards show. All that seems pretty great, yes? And it was great. But it was also weird as hell!
I wasn’t involved in this show other than just showing up to play a few songs, so all I could do was observe. The auditorium holds 6,300 people, but the audience for this event was about 40 or 50 people total, so…it was a bit “low-key.” They didn’t have access to the main PA system, so a small portable PA system was set up at the front of the stage pointed at the 40 people in the audience. Venturesmania played strictly old-school style, no microphones on the amps, no microphones on the drums, and no vocal microphone to talk through! It was kind of great, just the way an instrumental band from the early 1960s would have done it.
Then there was the show itself. Besides the aforementioned guests, the show also featured a black superhero named “Dangerman,” a dog act, a clown, a Shriner dressed as Colonel Sanders with a KFC chicken bucket as his fez, a pair of young white rappers who did a rap about silent movie stars of the 1920s, Gallagher’s daughter doing a tribute to her dad (who smashed a watermelon with a mallet to close the show). There was another band with some cats I know who brought everybody on and off the stage…also playing the giant auditorium with no mics on anything. There was a guy who performed a few songs on his acoustic guitar, playing along to karaoke backing tracks on his karaoke machine. The whole thing was quite bizarre!
The best thing about the show is that because it was a Shriners event, there was no security anywhere. We had the run of the place! I spent the time we weren’t playing exploring every corner of this historic venue, and nobody hassled me. It was great.
The Shrine auditorium opened in 1926, and has been the site of some of Los Angeles’s most historic events. The original 1933 King Kong movie shot the scene where Kong breaks free from his chains in a theater here.
Elvis Presley played his first Los Angeles show here in 1956. The Shrine has also had just about every performer you can think of grace its stage over the years, including Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, the Mothers of Invention, all the way up to modern stars like Jack White. Of all the historic stages in Los Angeles, the stage at the Shrine might be the stage with the greatest number of legendary music stars to have performed here.
The Academy Awards were hosted at the Shrine for decades, as well as the Grammy Awards, the Emmy Awards, the MTV Music awards, and a bunch of others. The 1984 Pepsi commercial where Michael Jackson caught his hair on fire was shot on stage at the Shrine Auditorium. There’s a lot of history here. It hurts your head to realize the amount of history at this place.
I feel like I got to explore every little nook and cranny of this historic Auditorium, and play a very weird gig and have some fun hanging out with the guys from Venturesmania.
In the future, when people ask me about the weirdest gig I ever played, I’ll remember this day. Clown—check. Colonel Sanders Shriner—check. Black superhero named Dangerman—check. Dog act—check. White kids rapping about silent movies—check. Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of the Doobie Brothers—check. Gallagher’s daughter destroying a watermelon in her dad’s honor—check. Venturesmania hauling a bunch of Fender Showman amplifiers in and blasting with no microphones in an auditorium that holds 6,300 people—check. A weird day, but it was fun!
