Where's The Stage?

My early '80s shitabilly band, Kings of the Western Bop, once opened for Eugene Chadbourne's Shockabilly, on an inauspicious Sunday night at the Antenna Club in 1983, or thereabouts. There were approximately 20 people in the audience, comprised mostly of our band and its pathetic group of followers. I had become aware of Chadbourne's brilliant solo guitar work a couple of years earlier, and the idea that he and his collaborators would bother to come to a backwater like Memphis to play to an uncomprehending audience, would have been much easier to process if the hundreds of listeners which the music deserved had materialized at the time. They were only off by ten years, give or take.