Funny Gig Story from Dan Pliskow

Bassist Dan Pliskow sent me this funny gig story a couple of weeks ago, and I thought that readers would get a kick out of it:

In 2001 I got a call to work a quartet job at Greenfield Village that
meant playing seven days a week from noon to 3 PM. Part of the Gig was
playing on a horse-drawn, flatbed wagon in a Village parade for one
hour and it took a week for me to learn to balance myself while facing
the back of the wagon sitting on a stool playing with the wagon
rocking and swaying back and forth. About five or six weeks into the
gig we were bouncing along playing and with no warning my bass quickly
began rising straight up in the air. It all happened so fast I had no
idea what was happening but I knew I wasn’t going to let go of my bass
so I held on until my feet were a foot and a half off the wagon bed and
I was starting to swing like a pendulum towards the musicians in the
back. I looked up and the scroll of my bass was hooked around a branch
of a tree and just then the branch broke and I came back down to the
wagon bed unhurt and with no scratches or damage to my bass. I was
really lucky but I was amazed because none of the other three musicians
ever said, “are you OK?, is your bass OK? ” They just kept on playing.

We bassists always need to beware of the evil scheming trees while playing wagon gigs.