Hard Rock Cafe
My favorite place we recorded at was the Hard Rock Café in downtown Nashville. When I contacted them to record there, they told me to call the home office. I really hate calling corporate offices cause they put us off and require many phone calls to follow up on an answer. We finally got the approval from corporate. They set us up on the stage and allowed us to do our show there during the dinner hour. We recorded two shows there. They liked us, we liked them, and we just knew we had our first sponsor. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Panera Bread
The last restaurant we tried recording in was a coffee shop chain called Panera Bread. We are huge fans of Panera Bread. Not only do we enjoy their coffee, we love their food. We set up our equipment (by then we replaced our cassette recorder with a pocket size WMA digital recorder), ate some breakfast, and began to discuss the Bon Jovi concert which Brian and Tom attended earlier in the week. The more we discussed the concert, the louder we got. As we began to get louder, there happened to be a customer who was disturbed with our talking. This man walked over to us and said, “You guys are way too loud. This isn’t a radio station. Take it some place else!”

This guy was really upset. He was studying with his laptop and we clearly disturbed him. I really wanted to say, “Hey bud, this ain’t no library either!” I thought I had better keep it calm since I frequent that Panera Bread and we really didn’t have prior permission to be there anyway, although the staff said it was ok. I apologized as we went to the far back area and lowered our voices to finish the show. Show 35 - The Bon Jovi Concert Review was one of our most popular shows for about a year and a half. I’m sure its success was from the title, because we actually butchered it by lowering our voices. Sometimes we just have to swallow our pride and apologize for being who we are.