The Nevada Club

Before I get into the Nevada Club Story I thought of an interesting thing that happened to us in Portland Oregon.

We had worked Portland several times at a club called The Longhorn Steakhouse. Now they did serve steaks but their main business was a dance club. It was a great place, large and very nice and only the best groups played there. For some reason, I can’t remember why we stopped playing there. I think it sold because a highway was to be built through where it sat. Anyway we were booked into a club in downtown Portland called The Embers. Nice club but not near as much fun as the Longhorn. First I need to explain how we paid our income taxes in those days. Early on the leader of the group just collected our pay from the club owner and paid each member his share. Then it was up to each of us to file our taxes at the end of the year and get right with the IRS. Well somewhere along the way the IRS said no deal. You will have a leader and that leader will act as the employer and collect the taxes from each individual member and pay them to the IRS. Well the incident I’m writing about happened after Gary became the leader of the group. Normal procedure was for Gary to accept a check from the club owner then the club owner would cash the check and pay the group in cash. One Saturday night when Gary went to get our pay, the club owner whipped a tax levy from the IRS on him and said ” can’t pay you”. Well right away we smelled a rat. So Monday morning when the local IRS office opened Gary was waiting on them. When he got to see the agent he learned the agent was friends with the club owner. At the time Gary was in a dispute with the IRS over an audit of his personal taxes. They said he had unpaid taxes. This agent somehow decided to collect it. After some discussion Gary figured out what was going on and said ” you are not only seizing my money you are seizing money from three other people”. ” not only that but my tax bill is under protest and cannot be taken til the final amount is determined”. YOU CANT DO THAT. The agent paused for a minute looked at him and smiled and said ” I know it but I didn’t think you did”. He then gave Gary a release whereupon he took it to the club owner and got our money. In those days the IRS could pretty much do as they pleased. Thankfully Gary was well informed of his rights.

Now the Nevada Club.

After working night and day getting the building and the band ready we were finally ready to open the place. Our plan was for us to play every Saturday night but on occasion bring in a headline act. We had done some advertising and were excited to get started. Kenneth, Gary and me were the owners. In order to save money we convinced the wives to work there. Kenneth’s wife Maggie worked the door selling tickets and my wife Susan and Gary’s wife Ricki served the mixes. In those days most clubs in Oklahoma were ” bring your own bottle”. So we only served ice, pop etc. we got going and things worked out pretty well. Crowds were good. The band was, in my opinion, pretty good. After working for years with professional musicians and playing every night and practicing every day the part time group was just pretty good. Gerald Roberts, the guitar player had a fairly large local following. The drummer Gary Anderson same way. It was really fun to work if front of a hometown crowd. At first the local law enforcement gave us some problems. They would lurk about on the highways around closing time and arrest people for driving and drinking.. people quickly learned to have a designated driver so it wasn’t fun for the law anymore so they left us alone. We had several name singers come in for a night. People that were popular during that time. We had Charlie Pride, Johnny Paycheck, Susan Raye and several others. One time Kenneth wanted to have one of the older singers so we had Lefty Frazzel. That was funny. That old dude was so drunk he literally had to crawl up the stairs onto the stage. He was terrible. We didn’t have very much trouble in the way of fights but once in a while something would break out. One night a couple of guys were about to fight as they were going out the door. I locked the door after them, it was closing time, then I looked out and they were fighting. I made the mistake of opening the door and stepping out. The next thing I remember Ricki and Susan were bent over me inside wiping my face with a wet rag saying ” Allen wake up”. Some dude had knocked me out cold. I later learned what happened.

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