Chas,

Yep! It was me. I'll be 67 in a couple weeks, still performing 4 to 7 jobs a week, mostly one to two hour performances instead of four hours in a smoke-filled bar room. My timing is still holding up, and my voice quality seems to be OK too. There have been times, especially after a double, or the dreaded triple, when my butt really begins to drag. This has the tendency to effect pretty much everything--not just my musical skills. I frequently find that when I'm really worn down that my organizational skills suffer dramatically. A classic example occurred yesterday at the end of a double when I couldn't remember the location of a particular third-party style file in the keyboard, one that I use almost daily. I finally found it, and I didn't have any dead time between songs while searching the User Style area of the keyboard, but it did bother me that I couldn't just press a button and immediately go to that style.

Physical limiations are also a problem. I'm convinced that my equipment has somehow mysteriously taken on weight. That Bose base unit seems to double in weight by the end of the day, yet the scales says it only weighs 32 pounds. Now 32 pounds was nothing when I was in my early 50s and I never considered any speaker weighing less than 75 pounds worth having. Today, however, a 75-pound speaker would rip my guts out, especially if it had to go up on poles.

One day in the not too distant future I'm going to have to retire. At that point I had over all my jobs to the younger locals such as Songman55 (Joe). The irony of this is, though, there are at least a dozen guys around this part of the world in their early 70s that still keep up a schedule of 15 to 20 jobs a month, so I guess I have a few years left.

Thanks again,

Gary

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Travlin' Easy