Plez here.

Bobby: glad to hear the marriage is still going strong. We enjoyed playing your wedding party at Makato's. We drank for free, ate shrimp, flirted with the teenage cousins in the crowd, and got paid. And we got the pleasure of seeing your combimed families try to understand how in the heck these guys could be considered a wedding band. Doing the hokey pokey with you and Donna and your two families: that was interesting. We had to do something to make 'em all quit giving us the finger.

I have a good heckler story to tell, but it's about a show in Alabama a few years after the old Johnson City scene sort of blew up. Anyway, I used to play at this tiny little crudhole bar called Gentilly Station in Auburn. It was a good place because it was definitely for the few locals in that town, not for the students at all. So anyway, I used to play there either just by myself ("Hey, you know any David Allan Coe?") or with a woman who played the keyboard. It was not exactly the kind of gig that would advance your career. It was the kind of gig where people would ask me to do Jimmy Buffet, and I'd just play whatever little bit I could half remember from "Margaritaville" or whatever, and that'd be good enough for a free shot of Jack from some appreciative Alabama farmhand. So anyway, one night, the keyboard player and I decided to just see how much they were listening and--I remember this very clearly now--after we finished a Clint Black song, we played the Bert Bacharach hit "This Guy's in Love With You." You all remember that one, huh? Made famous by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass: "You see this guy. This guy's in love with you." Not what the crowd was expecting. About 4 bars into the vocal, the inebriated woman sitting right in front of me stands up, about 1 inch from my face now, and starts this: "You suuuuuuuck! Quit plaaaaaaaaaying! You suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!"

No kidding around--I consider it one of my proudest moments on stage that we didn't stop until we played every note of that song. We took a break after that song, and her husband came over and bought me a beer. We played that song at EVERY Gentilly Station show after that, but it was never quite that good again.

Sadly, Gentilly Station closed for a while and the reopened as Bubba's. Last time I was in Auburn, I walked in there. It was exactly the same. I guess the name change was an attempt to reach their target market more effectively.

--Plez