Here is an extract of an eventful day in the life of Ray as a touring rockstar of his high school rock band #1. Photos were from his old high school where he was and still is a celebrity. I uploaded this from his website.
Thursday 26th April. - Emerald
We didn’t check out today as we were staying in the Midlander Motel for 2 nights. Total costs for all 15 of us staying in this motel was $800 per night. It was a 4 star motel and it was awesome. Had a nice pool area. Gig #6 was at St Patrick’s School after their assembly. We sat through an ANZAC ceremony where The Last Post was played by one of their students. Assembly and all went for quite a while. Our eagerness to perform built up over such time. When we were finally up on stage our lead singer introduced our band and mentioned how we throw the koala bears and to keep an eye out for them. The principal of that school intervened and told us NOT to throw them out. We’re like… “Okay…”. Gig went quite alright and we threw the koalas out anyway. The next gig in my opinion was the best by far. Emerald State High School. We were all anticipating a complete disaster. We had been doing primary schools up to now and so the thought of a high school (people our own age) somehow struck us all as a mistake. We had no idea of how it was going to turn out. As we were setting up we had people coming up to us and just staring and all. We were doing the sound check and since it was the high school’s lunch hour more and more people came to see what was going on. We ran through Master Blaster for the sound check and when some kid said to me, “You guys are good”, I had a feeling this was gonna be good. I was excited. Very excited. Somehow between the sound check and when we came to the start of our performance the number of spectators tripled. I had a whole group of people around my keyboard. Just sitting around in like a semi-circle around my keyboard, mostly girls by the way. You don’t know how excited I was. We got through our songs with thunderous appaluse and cheers. Last song for rock band #1 was Long Train Runnin, which is like ‘my’ song as I feature as a solo keyboardist. It’s an awesome song and feeling my solo approaching I was so pumped. 4 bars away… 3 bars away… I look up at all these awesome people lookin’ at me… 2 bars away… I’m lovin’ the closeness of the audience… 1 bar away… The solo went over 12 bars and for all 12 of those bars I was somehow possessed, on a natural high. I looked down at my fingers, they were a complete blurr… I must have played 1000’s of notes. Went quite psycho if you like. The appreciation of my solo afterwards was… priceless. Too brilliant! Even greater was, while packing up I was distracted by some very awesome, rather good looking girls to have photos taken with them. Happened like 3 times. Loved it! Felt like a rock star. Had another gig after the high school one, which went great but my mind was still set on the high school. That night we all played a game of rugby. I don’t even play that but I did for the sake of it. Scored like 4 tries. Awesome! I LOVED this day!!!
I really feel doubly happy to know that he is having a great time.
