The band Reverend Horton Heat was invited to play at an Apple store but found the gig a bad fit, with Apple placing some unreasonable demands on the band. The band posted an update on their Facebook page today, explaining how the gig blew up. I found it to be an insightful look at these no-pay corporate gigs:

Reverend Horton Heat
In case you don’t know what happened with Apple….We were supposed to do an in-store appearance at their 1 Polk Street store (Market Street really) on the afternoon of the 14th of July. Of course, they wanted some kind of striped down or acoustic thing. I was working on figuring out what songs would work in that “retail” enviroment. It’s not easy to do a gig like that. It’s completly different than what we do. Of course, it was for publicity only – ie no pay. There was going to be a Q&A with the people in attendence. They wanted to record the thing and make it a podcast. All fine, except then, I found out that they wanted me to come up with an MC and figure the whole thing out – not exactly welcoming. It kind of seemed that they wanted us to play for free, set the whole thing up and get ourselves there too without doing too much to make the event a success. Getting ourselves there is hard because we have an upright bass. It would be impossible and expensive for us to bring the bus with trailer. Anyway, I made a post on facebook about how it wasn’t right to throw everything on the artist instead of doing they’re best to welcome us. That was bad and I’m a bad, bad man evidentally. They got on the phone to our agent and said that they didn’t like the post. Later that day, I took the facebook post down – maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did. Then, today, I hear that they canceled the event. They didn’t call me. I just heard. So, my preparation was for nothing. I think that anytime an artist is coming to your store (and they’re bringing their fans into your enviroment where you are trying to sell something), you should be especially appreciative. The Mom and Pop stores, now closed down forever, used to go out of their way to make us feel comfortable and wanted. Those days are gone forever…evidentally. Call the store if you can. Ask them why.