Never trust your agent. This should be a given.
It is understood in the entertainment industry that agents are usually more than a little dishonest. This fact sometimes escapes me because I have known my agent for many years. But had I remembered this truism I would not have been absent for the last few weeks. For this I am sorry but as you will soon learn I think it will bring us all closer together. As many of you know I divide my time pretty equally between bowling and promoting the XBA, playing gigs in all corners of the world, delivering medical supplies to third world orphanages and going on alcoholic benders. Sometimes, if I’m lucky I get to combine them all. Such was my plan when my agent booked me and the members of ‘Tastes like spam’ a band I was briefly a member of from 1972 to 1989.
I say briefly because during that time I was also the member of many other bands so the time I spent with them was generally brief.
The ‘Tastes like spam’ never had an American hit unless you count rising to number four on the charts in the protectorate of ‘American Samoa’. ‘Blinds eyes’ was however huge in Southeast Asia and on the many other islands of Micronesia. So when my agent told me we had a gig playing the Mango Festival on the island of Papua New Guinea I thought it sounded great. There was an orphanage there that I had brought supplies and clothes to in the past and I knew of a bowling alley where for six dollars you could bowl all night, with complimentary drinks and drugs and they would have a couple of fine young maidens polish you off at the end. Paradise found, if only for a while, and when he said we were booked first class round trip I could see an angelic halo forming around my agent Bernie Goldbloom’s bald head.
In and out in a couple of days Aaron, it will be great. And they are going to pay you a mint! Top dollar! You can do it all! It’s a dream gig! Six days later I awoke in a Papua jail with a splitting headache wearing Bermuda shorts, black socks a tie and suit jacket whose pockets were filled with parrot feathers.
