My live band Bonne Nuit played the Cystic Fibrosis Great Strides 5K walk in Salt Lake City, Utah on Saturday May 15, 2010. Bonne Nuit is my latest rock band that I’ve put together with myself, Matt Rushton and my three oldest sons Erik, Austin and Skyler Rushton. We’ve been landing a lot of gigs lately and I”m telling you that having a family band is a great marketing ploy. I do have to say that my sons can really play and we’re getting a lot of compliments on how good we sound.
It seems like Bonne Nuit just keeps falling into some sweet gigs. We aren’t getting paid anything except for free food but the band is only about 4 months old. At this early stage in the band’s career we just want to play for as many people as possible and try to generate some publicity and name recognition. We’ve been lucky so far in the gigs we’ve been lining up. We actually found the Cystic Fibrosis Great Strides 5K Walk gig by looking on the local Craigslist. The organizers put up an ad that they were looking for a band to play for a couple hours to an expected crowd of 500+ people. We followed up and directed them to the Bonne Nuit Facebook page which has all our promotional material and that landed us the gig.
The show was outside in a great big park in downtown Salt Lake City. We made sure we had a cover over the band to protect us from the elements which turned out to be sunshine this time. The weather was gorgeous and there was a huge turnout to the event. That was great for us because our goal at this point is getting in front of as many people as possible. The organizers placed us right in the middle of the entire event so we were very lucky with the location.
We got set up in about an hour and did a good sound check. The organizers of the event told us we could play as much as we wanted before the 5K Walk started and again when the walkers returned. So we played about 5 songs and they started the Walk. About 40 minutes later people started returning to the park and it got very crowded. We launched into our main set and everything was sounding great.
It turned out to be a flawless gig. We played for almost 2 hours to a park full of people. We played extremely well without any equipment issues or sound problems. The band is really starting to tighten up and sound good because we’ve got some gigging hours behind us now. We also passed out a lot of band contact cards. Several people asked about hiring the band and a skating team that was there asked about having us play at some of their skating shows.
All in all it was probably the best gig that Bonne Nuit has played since we started the band. We accomplished all of our goals in that we played extremely well, generated some good publicity and made a lot of contacts. The weather was simply beautiful with a perfect spring day. Hopefully more good gigs like this one will come our way. I did ask the organizers why they chose our band to play and they said it was because of our song list and the fact that we were a family band.
