Back in the early 80’s my band got a Friday-Saturday nite gig at a bar in Lawton, Oklahoma. For those of you that don’t know, Lawton is the location of Fort Sill, a fairly large Army base here in the States. Well, Friday nite went great with a lot of enthusiastic young soldiers just happy to be off the base and partying. We returned for the Saturday nite gig all full of ourselves and expecting a repeat performance of the Friday nite experience. The first set went smoothly but at some point before the second set a substantial contingent of Bikers entered the bar. Our band was essentially a Metal band that played mostly covers with the odd original peppered through the sets. Oklahoma Bikers in the early 80’s tended to prefer “outlaw country” and southern rock as their party music so we suddenly found ourselves out of our element. Shortly after beginning the second set we started to hear “play Good Hearted Woman” shouted out whenever we paused between songs. This happened a couple of times before Tony, our lead singer, says into the mic “sorry but we don’t know Good Hearted Woman’. At this time a very large man steps from the shadows into the light where we can see him. He’s got the full beard, bandana on his head, sleeveless leather jacket and sunglasses (the bar is dark). He fixes a glare on Tony and bellows “WELL LEARN IT”.
I don’t remember much after that other than getting really nervous and starting to measure the distance between the stage and the door. We hurriedly finished the set and scrambled down to our van for a break. The song is pretty easy so we spent our break trying to quickly work out an arrangement and piece together enough words to fake our way through it.
We kicked off the third set with a special dedication to our Biker friends and blasted into Good Hearted Woman. The place erupted. The Biker crowd was up on their feet and dancing in place. It turns out we really didn’t need to know many of the words since the audience was singing the song out loud anyway. After that, the tension lifted and they were with us for the rest of the night.
What did I learn? Well, I learned a couple of things that nite. Primarily, you can be a Country band that doesn’t know one note of Metal and you’ll be just fine. But if you are a Metal band, you better have at least one country/southern rock song in your repertoire. Chances are good some day you are going to need it.
