By Slim Man
On Monday, I drove from Palm Springs to guitarist Marc Antoine’s house in Laguna, as in California. I wanted to go over the Slim and Marc Show in San Antonio that Wednesday. They were expecting a couple thousand folks, and I wanted to make sure everything was OK with Marc. It wasn’t.
I wanted to sing a set of my songs, take a break, and then have Marc do his set. But Marc wanted to do it different; he wanted me to sing a few songs with him playing guitar, then he’d play guitar on a few of his songs with me playing bass. And so on.
So I re-wrote the whole show. It took all day. Tuesday morning, I got up at 4:30 and called Uber. Uber Dude didn’t show up, so Marc and I jumped in his car and tore off for the airport. He dropped me off, and parked the car. I checked in, and Marc came running up, just in time. He gave his ID, and the airline gal told him there was a small problem.
Marc’s flight wasn’t until the following day. The airline had made a mistake. The flight I was on was overbooked, and so was the connecting flight. Marc went back home; he wasn’t too thrilled.
I flew to San Antonio alone, and went straight to rehearsal. I went over all of Marc’s songs with the band, and since he wasn’t there, I had to not only play bass, but sing all his guitar melodies. I was singing “dee-dee-dee-dee-dum-da-dum-dum” for 4 hours straight. If anyone was outside and heard me singing Marc’s guitar parts, they’d have thought I’d lost my mind.
We practiced long and hard. We finished around 10 PM, and when I got to the hotel, Marc was just checking in. I got up at the crack of dawn, and did a TV show, San Antonio Living. The last time I was on the show, I went on after a two-headed turtle. Seriously.
This time, the theme of the show was Wine Wednesday. They had asked me about my favorite wine, and had a bottle waiting for me. The anchor gal poured me a glass. Drinking wine at 10 AM is something that would normally make me think about heading to the Betty Ford Clinic. But I had a couple sips and sang a couple songs. Then it was back to the hotel.
The hotel staff was really sweet. Everybody kept calling me “Mr. Man.”
“Hello Mr. Man!” “How are you today, Mr. Man?”
The concert that night was wonderful. Even without rehearsing with Marc, everybody nailed his songs. We had a big band—drums, piano, a sax player/keyboardist, a female vocalist/percussionist, and two percussionists. There were thousands of people sitting outside, screaming.
They were screaming, “DON’T GIVE UP YOUR DAY JOB, SLIM!”
Just kidding. The crowd response was great. Towards the end of the show, they had fireworks. I started singing the Star Spangled Banner, but I started it in the wrong key; it was way too high. When I got to the high note–“the land of the FREE!”–I almost gave myself a hernia.
Marc and I got back to the hotel around midnight and had a drink at the bar. I was starving. I asked for some food, and the only thing they had? A huge plate of bacon. That’s it. There must have been a couple pounds of bacon. Seriously.
I had a couple of slices. I was so hungry I could have eaten both pounds without using my hands, but with a name like “Slim Man” sometimes it’s best to show some restraint. The next morning, we flew back to California. I was exhausted; I had hardly slept or eaten in days. When I got to Marc’s house, I ate like a horse. I strapped on the feedbag and chomped away. Then I went right to sleep. It was 3 in the afternoon.
That’s show biz, kids. Gotta love it.
Slim Man is a singer, cook, and lion tamer. His concert schedule, CDs, and cookbook are available on his website: www.slimman.com
