Self-Serve

"We showed up at the Bean Bar, where five bands had a combined draw of ten people standing around," says Four Kings singer/guitarist Drew Bent of a recent gig scheduled near the Sports Arena. "We show up with 75 of our own people and are ready to play, only to have the promoter tell us that there was a mistake and that he sent us the wrong date. This was at 9:30 p.m. He said he would compromise and put us on at 1 a.m. All of our fans and friends did not want to wait around for a 1 a.m. set on a Thursday night at an all-ages venue. We couldn't come to a compromise with this guy, so I told him to stick it."

The band then set up their equipment in the Jiffy Lube parking lot across the street from the Bean Bar. The band played until around midnight.

"A friend of mine is the head manager at Jiffy Lube and opened the place up for us so we could draw power," says Bent. "The cops miraculously never showed up to bust us. With all the commotion stirred up from the confrontation at the Bean Bar to the parking-lot madness, our free show ended up with a crowd of around a hundred people."

Four Kings have not been invited back to the Bean Bar, but they appear tomorrow, July 13, at Portugalia.