Did a show last night at a very swanky club in Denver.
They had the house music cranked insanely loud with that nasty
techno-dance crap and they wouldn't turn it off for us to do a
sound-check.
Unfortunatly I'm not experienced enough to do a sound-check without
hearing my system and our current sound-person is the drummer's
girlfriend who, bless her heart, is working her tail off but is way to
inexperienced to mix from scratch.
As a result we fought most of the night with feedback and generally
bad sound. The more she tried to fix things the worse things got.
Between sets my brother and I troubleshot and fixed some things.
One thing I found was that I didn't have a good enough signal coming
out of the mains eq so she had to crank channel gain knobs to get
enough volume, which, of course contributed to feedback problems and
distortion/clipping.
This is an issue that I would likely have noticed and fixed when I did
a real soundcheck.
The rational/professional side of me thinks that if a club isn't
professional enough to give us the opportunity to make our product
sound as good as it can then I just won't play there. At risk here is
speakers that can be blown, vocal cords that can be blown, a
reputation that can be blown...
This is really a no-brainer to me, but then I'm coming from the
professional musician's viewpoint not the professional (or
un-professional as the case may be) club owner perspective.
Will this kind of approach/limitation/demand limit the clubs we can
play in?
Is this that common?

Thanks to all,
Shawn