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The Gear Daddies will return to the Red Carpet Nightclub in St. Cloud, MN, on Friday, November 28. It will be our first time playing on that stage in many years, and likely our last. It will be a nostalgia-filled evening for us, and hopefully for many in the audience as well. Let's face it, the Gear Daddies are getting up there in years. We still have a little gas left in the tank, but the ticking of the clock has us waxing a bit nostalgic. Over the summer, as we sat backstage at a show, we started talking about venues that would be fun to play one last time. One of the first that came to mind was the Red Carpet. The Red Carpet, along with the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis and Kirby's in Moorhead, MN, formed a three-stop, Interstate 94 run that we made countless times back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Our Red Carpet shows were always sweaty, freewheeling fun. Enjoyable train wrecks, often tied to the fact that we frequently played there on cheap pitcher nights. I don't recall the exact price they charged, but it was absurdly low. Those absurdly low prices, shockingly, led to a lot of VERY drunk college students. And very drunk college students were the (usually equally drunk) Gear Daddies' wheelhouse audience in the late 80s. Thank god everyone didn't carry a movie camera in their pocket back in those days. One less pleasant memory of playing the Red Carpet was when an overly enthusiastic fan beaned our roadie, Larry, in the head with a glass beer pitcher, which sent him to the emergency room for stitches. The offending glass pitcher was almost certainly one that had been purchased at an absurdly low price. One of my favorite Gear Daddies bootlegs was from a Red Carpet show circa 1987. It was the final stop of a long road trip, and we were hungover and exhausted. There couldn't have been more than 25 people in the audience. My stage banter is always meandering and banal, but I took it to a new level that night. Attempting to fill a long pause while Nic tuned his bass, I asked Randy what he had eaten for dinner the night before. "Moo goo gai pan", he answered, "It's Chinese". After ten seconds of awkward silence, I replied, "No shit?". From the crowd, other than a single muffled cough, it's crickets. Late in the set, I kick off Wear Your Crown. After the song wraps up, Billy can be heard off-mic saying, "Didn't we already do that one?". He was right. It had been the second song of the set. Clearly, the "hair of the dog" approach I was taking to deal with my hangover had caught up to me. There are a couple of other venues we're considering playing again for old times' sake, but sadly, the majority of the venues we played at "back in the day" are long gone. If you have any suggestions on venues we should revisit, please let me know. You can purchase tickets for the Gear Daddies' November 28 show at the Red Carpet here: TICKET LINK
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