ShoBudLvr wrote:Back in the mid 70's I was an FM Rock DJ in Seattle, and the boys were coming to town on the Poco 7/Cantamos tour. I asked my wife at the time, who was an embroidery queen, to reproduce the Poco 7 logo on to a western shirt for me. She worked on it for months & finished it the day before the show. After the incredible concert at the Paramount, we made our way outside to the back of the theater where the boys were getting in to cars for the ride back to the hotel. Rusty was riding shotgun in the station wagon and as he pulled up next to me I turned around, dropped my jacket & showed him the beautiful work my wife had done. He got very animated waving & telling the others to look out the window at the shirt. Perhaps it was a coincidence that in less than a year The Very Best Of Poco was released featuring the Poco horse shoe logo on the back of a shirt. I have always wished that I could have gotten the bands signatures on this shirt! I wore out the original one, so the wife cut off the embroidery & attached it to another which is why there is a blue boarder around it now. Another treasured Poco experience!
ShoBudLvr, that's a wonderful story! Experiences like that are wonderful when they happen and provide a lifetime of memory to look back on and memories like that always fill you with a happy and pleasant feeling. Your wife did a beautiful job on the embroidered logo!
I had what
could have almost been a similar experience one time and I'd like to share it with you ...
It was 1995 and I was playing for Ty Herndon at that time. His first single, "What Mattered Most" had just gone to #1 with a bullet on all three charts (Gavin, R&R and Billboard). Our road manager gave us a copy of our schedule and one of the dates struck my eye ... it was at a venue in Long Island, NY and
according to the schedule we would be co-headlining with two other groups ... Stephanie Bently and Poco! According to the printout, Stephanie would take the first slot, then Ty Herndon and Poco would have the main headline spot going last in the lineup. The schedule looked authentic and I believed it hook-line-and-sinker.
I was thrilled beyond measure because I'd finally get to meet my very first steel guitar hero, Rusty Young. As it turned out, we were the only headliner that night with two local NY bands opening up for us.
Our road manager, in cahoots with the rest of the band, had played a practical joke on me (knowing what a Poco fan I was) and they were getting me back after I'd played a joke on Ty by putting black shoe polish on the ball of his microphone. They knew that, after weeks of eager anticipation, I'd be crushed to get to the gig and learn that Poco wouldn't be there.
But, the story goes like this ... years ago in the early '80s I'd spent just a tad over $400.00 to have a shirt very similar to the one from the "Very Best Of Poco" album made. My "reproduction" of the shirt was an excellent copy in almost every way except the names of the band members were not embroidered above the roping and it didn't say "The Very Best Of" over the logo ... it was just the word POCO with the horseshoe and horses beneath and the color of the satin was more like copper than the lighter gold color because I couldn't find silk material matching the exact color from the one on the album.
The seamstress who made my shirt did an exceptional job on the embroidery and the logo on my shirt looked exactly like the logo on the one from the album. Also, on mine, she embroidered a pedal steel on the front chest (over the pocket) and it looked great.
Needless to say, I was proud of that shirt and kept it under plastic in my closet for years (only wearing it for the most special gigs).
In anticipation of the NY gig, I'd brought my Poco shirt with me to wear hoping that it would catch Rusty's eye and maybe spark off some good conversation ... but, of course, Poco wasn't there because the schedule had been a reuse to get my hopes up and sure enough, just as the band had hoped, I was crushed to learn during setup and sound check that Poco wasn't going to be there.
I wore my Poco shirt anyway that night and now wish that I hadn't ... after the gig, as we were going back out to the bus, something very unexpected happened ... a whole bunch of women, what seemed to be hundreds of them, suddenly rushed us and, like a nightmarish scene from a Beatles movie, began to tear at our clothes! YIKES!
I always thought stuff like that (if it ever really happened) only happened to the actual star of a show and not to the band itself. My Poco shirt ended up being ripped off my torso and I saw it being torn apart as girls fought over it, running off with pieces of it ... in an instant, before Security came rushing to our rescue, my beautiful $400 Poco shirt was gone.
Even though that night was a disaster for me (first, learning that the schedule had been a fake and Poco had never been booked for the gig; then the loss of my Poco shirt), I often think of that night and imagine what it might have been like if the joke schedule had been for real. I'm still hoping that one day I'll be able to meet Rusty and tell him in person what an inspiration his music has been for me throughout my steel guitar career ... but in the meantime I content myself with playing Poco albums all the time and listening to this favorite band of mine enjoying every song I hear from them.
By the way, I also lived in the Seattle area for awhile and when I got married, my wife and I were married in the Space Needle ... we rented the entire Skyline Level for that day and had a wonderful time.
...and on the 8th day He created steel guitar and saw that it was good ...