With the coming of the New Year, there is always hope.
When I was younger we had to stay up Old Year’s Night until dawn. These days, young people stay up until dawn when they go to a party almost as a matter of course, since they don’t leave the house until midnight anyway.
So it may be no big thing nowadays, but it was for me “back in the day.” It was the secular expression of hope and wonder that had begun a week earlier on the religious side.
We would go (rather, be taken) to Midnight Mass at St Patrick’s Church on Christmas Eve, then come home to the ham and pineapple on the dining room table, ready for sampling, and to open a single present each.
Not that I got many more, but who’s counting? The joyful solemnity of the church service thus gave way to sleep, sleep to a big Christmas lunch and present openings, to Boxing Day and more eating and sleeping, then a mix of work and relaxation (depending on the day of the week Christmas fell on that year) to the climax of the season, Old Year’s Night.
Today, December 31, seems to be getting better known as New Year’s Eve thanks to our more Americanized culture, but back then you didn’t call it that. It would betray crass Americanization, akin to people who went to the the United States for a holiday and came back with a permanent Yankee accent.
Making money
“Where you going Old’s Year’s, man?” was the familiar exhortation. As we played in a band, for us the word going was changed to playing.
As this is a business column, I will now tell you a bit about the view from the bandstand on those nights. If you think I am going to get into a sentimental reminiscence of those days, then you are mistaken, my friends: For us, Old Year’s Night was about making money.
Yes, we were rather cynical about it. Here we were, slogging out the Top 40 week after week at fetes and nightclubs for a pittance (we felt) and on that one night of the year, the same hotels and venues were willing to pay you ten or more times, really, up to about 20 times, what you would earn on any other night of the year.
Patrons just wanted to hear live music, a real band, no matter how good or not-so-good they might be. Recorded music was not what they wanted – I am not judging, just saying – so we in bands had a commercial opportunity that, like Christmas, came only once a year.
The Crane, the Hilton, Carlton Club, the Marine and many others put on the big fetes year after year. Many offered food and drink with the partying in an all-inclusive package. It was crazy. People you never saw “out” were out, and on the dance floor too. Let me tell you, we loved Old Year’s Night.
Once we were booked for a major venue (not to mention names) with another band and things were going along smoothly until we were told that the other band had been summarily fired – Fired! – in the middle of it all. Could we carry on? For extra money, of course.
Well, that was a no-brainer, but it nearly killed us. You see, a music set in those days was about 45 minutes, with 15-minute breaks in between. In the middle of our second set we were told we had to play through the other band’s set, so we ended up going for an hour and a half, and this after playing the first set and watching the other now-fired band do theirs too.
And why did they get fired? It turned out that they had been a lot more enterprising than we had been, having also accepted a “parallel” gig at a nearby hotel. They played their first set at our venue and then slipped out to play their first set at the other venue. But traffic was very bad between the two places and they couldn’t get back in time. They were either stuck in traffic between the two or their first set had gone on too long, who knows?
Enterprising
People in music back then had to be enterprising because on every other day of the year the pay was fairly low, unless you put on your own fetes or were one of the top two or three bands.
I may be wrong, but these days I don’t think the average middle class couple goes out to dance Old Year’s Night away like they used to. There may be some events for them but, as things always do, the scene has changed. After-parties that start after a party which itself started at midnight are the norm.
Driving out to the East Coast to see the sun rise is not something you still do only in the early hours of January 1, nor is looking bleary-eyed and maybe with a couple of drinks in your head for some venue that served “breakfast” at four in the morning.
I look back on those years, as we all should, with fond memories, as our mental filtering system pushes forward the good times and tries to pull a curtain over any that weren’t so great.
I would therefore have a hard time finding some fault with the good times we had on the Old Year’s Night bandstands of my 20s, when for one night only you were treated almost as a rock star, and made to feel that your music, no matter how it really might have sounded, had been handed down to a grateful populace from the gods.
The next week, just to level things out, you were back to being a struggling musician once again. Life was good.
