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Happy Scab - The Hullabaloo Incident"For the best in music, pick the Scab."
#3 PERFORMANCE: Jan 17, 1970 ===== Here's the rest of the story on the Hullabaloo club gig. The Scab really bulked up for this gig. The Hullabaloo club was, like, the best gig in town (for us, anyway), so we wanted to kick butt. So we borrowed as many amps and speaker cabinets as we could find, so it looked really impressive on stage. I'm pretty sure we had a couple of cabinets there that we didn't even use, but we had The Great Wall of amps behind us. Anyway, the gig was going really well - we had 'em dancing and everything was cool. Then we started playing Volunteers of Amerika by the Jefferson Airplane. This was a very political song, and Chuck and Pam would perform a little skit using an American flag and a little toy machine gun. This night, the spirit moved inside Chuck, and he decided to add a little something extra to the tableau. Our drummer, Jeff, kept a little talisman on his bass drum - for luck I guess. It was paper mache dog turds, two nice long ones crossed over one another and painted brown. Fairly convincing up close. Chuck turned around and grabbed Jeff's little turd pile, and holding it high in the air, yelled into the mike, "You see this? It's a plastic piece of shit! And that's what you are if you don't care about what's happening in this country!" Well, it actually wasn't plastic, but in those days, the term "plastic" had other, very negative connotations. All this went on while the rest of the band was vamping on the verse, and the dance floor was still full of dancers. Somehow one of our PA columns started swaying. Maybe a dancer hit it, maybe one of us did, maybe the joint was just rockin'. Well, the column went down, as it happened, right onto the shoulder of one of the dancers. The music stopped. The injured dancer was attended to. While all this was going on, the rent-a-cops who were standing at the back of the dance hall started coming toward the stage. Although the kids on the dance floor were probably not paying attention to Chuck's little tirade, the cops were. Trouble is, when Chuck held up Jeff's little turd pile calling it a "plastic piece of shit," what the cops saw was a silhouette in his hand. They thought he was holding some kind of crucifix. Erie is a very Catholic town. So the cops were coming to get Chuck. They halued him into the back room, and about five of them GRILLED Chuck for what seemed like forever. Remember, this was 1970 - just a few months before the National Guard killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University. Things were generally very weird and tense with students and the Vietnam war and all. Anyway, the dance was over - the kids all left. The rest of the band stood around waiting while Chuck got the third degree from Erie's finest. I think Pam had to go in there for while, too. When Chuck finally emerged, he was livid, we were told in no uncertain terms that we were no longer welcome at the Hullabaloo club, and were out of there, brimming with righteous indignation.
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