Tribute Act blues, part 1.

I used to play with a tribute act dedicated to the music of The Steve Miller Band (you may recall hits from the 70s and 80s like ‘The Joker’, ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘Take the Money and Run’). We called ourselves 'The Steve Miller Band' Band.

After gigging for a few months, we noticed that we were getting the liveliest reaction at our shows when we played the songs from Miller's repertoire that were being refused airplay because of what the broadcasting authorities deemed to be 'inappropriate’ language. So popular were these songs in our live set that we eventually decided to ditch all of the mainstream material and concentrate exclusively on Miller’s 'x-rated' stuff.

Accordingly, we changed our name to 'The (banned) Steve Miller Band' Band.

We started to get more bookings and built up quite a following. Things went so well that we started to produce our own range of merchandise to sell at gigs: t-shirts, posters, key-rings etc. One of the most popular items was an encircling strip, made of rubber, which could be worn on the wrist or lower forearm.  

It was, of course, 'The (banned) Steve Miller Band' Band band.

Our gigs were lively affairs. People would often get carried away by the energy of the music, to the extent that inebriated audience members would throw stuff about the place. On a tour of small towns in the north-east of Scotland, we once played a particularly raucous gig at Stonehaven at which a member of the audience had to receive medical treatment after being hit in the eye by a piece of merchandise which had been thrown by an over-enthusiastic fan. We were booked to play at Banff town hall the following weekend, but when the local council heard about this incident, they took immediate action (on the grounds of health and safety), forbidding us from setting up our merchandising stall and selling any of our goods.  Needless to say, the local press picked up on this story and, on the day of our gig at Banff town hall, the North East Weekly ran this headline:

'(Banned) Steve Miller Band’ Band band banned!

Over the next few days, however, news emerged that Banff council had denied issuing any instructions about our merchandise. It was consequently discovered that not only had our manager exaggerated that ‘Stonehaven concert injury’ report, he had also concocted the ‘Banff council outrage’ story in order to generate some publicity for rest of the tour. A spokesperson for the National Union of Booking Agents then revealed that our manager was already serving a suspension for a previous breach of agency rules and actually had no right to be managing any act at this time. After that revelation, this sorry tale came to an undignified end with this dramatic headline in the ‘Inverurie Advertiser’:

Banned band manager planned '(Banned) Steve Miller Band' Band Banff band ban!