Direct Hit! – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

This Crazy Tour Story was written by Nick Woods of Milwaukee based band, Direct Hit! You can check out the band’s crazy story from touring, after the break.

“One of the wildest nights of my life was actually with my old band when we somehow got booked by a homeless dude (not couch surfing – bum) at this bar we played in New York City. I don’t remember the circumstance exactly, but I think we booked it just by calling the place and asking if we could play, and this dude would always come into their bar to steal liquor, and would end up just hanging out behind the bar, answering their phone from time to time. So he just happened to be there when we called, and was just like, ‘Yeah sure, you can play.’ But anyway, after we played that night – to 4 people, surprisingly – dude took us out for beers at what looking back was probably an illegal bar selling liquor off the books to 19-year-old kids like us. It was literally just a diner packed full of people with an old guy selling shitty liquor instead of shitty hash browns. We had to pay in cash, under the table, and tip a shitload. Dude also took us to the abandoned warehouse he was squatting in, and we smoked legal tobacco that he just took out of his pocket, unbagged, and covered in lint. He also nearly electrocuted himself when he flipped the switch to take us back down the elevator. Multiple times over the course of the evening switching back and forth between thinking I was going to die, and having the best time of my life. Life is weird!

The REAL story though occurred before any of this. Over the course of the night, as we learned about how all of this had transpired from the ACTUAL employees at the bar, the dude mentioned we didn’t have to worry about playing our own songs all night long, because he had a friend coming in to “jam with us,” who apparently was “pretty much B.B. King’s right-hand man.” Needless to say, none of us really trusted that promise. But whatever. As we were wrapping up our set, an older guy with a giant afro comes up to the stage carrying a beat-ass guitar case and says “Hey guys, I’m Marvin. You the band?” We confirm that yes, we are the band, and Marvin asks our singer to step off so he can take his place, as he pulls an even further beat-ass Stratocaster out of his beat-ass case. He plugs and goes, “Call it.” To which I said, “What?” to which he said “What’re we playing?” I remembered the B.B. King comment and suggest “Red House” by Jimi Hendrix, because that’s the only blues song I know how to play. “Do it in B,” he said. So that’s what we did.

Now, it doesn’t matter at all whether Marvin was B.B. King’s right-hand man or not, because Marvin was without a doubt the best guitar player who had ever bothered to play with me. We jammed on three chords for probably 20 minutes while dude just went to fucking town, shredding his ass off. And then when he was finished, he just put his guitar in his case, and left.” -Nick Woods

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