BobbyG's Binge Thinking: My Las Vegas era music podcasts

Santa Fe and The Fat City Horns, and their extended tribe.

We lived in Las Vegas from 1992 through 2013. Loved it there.

Moved there from Knoxville TN when Cheryl was promoted and transferred to take up the post of QA Manager for the DOE contractor Nevada Test Site nuclear waste cleanup program. I was long out of music. But, in the fall of 2005 I was exhorted by a local bass player I'd met to "go check out Santa Fe, man. Every cat in town would kill to be in that band."

The night I first saw them at their Monday night late lounge gig at Palace Station, I was thunderstruck in the first 10 seconds. 15 top tier Vegas show musicians who did this over-the-top off-night gig for fun. Tasered.

Speechless. I could not sleep that night after what I'd just experienced. Floated into my health care analyst day gig bleary-eyed Tuesday morning—as late as I could finesse it.

I became a rabid regular. We soon became friends. Baddest cats in town, but not an once of ego within a hundred miles of them. Friendliest, nicest people I ever met. They're still going strong, better than ever.

I became their photographer, blogger, and podcaster. Eventually, I became the goto "20-feet-from-stardom" freelance photojournalist in Vegas. My stash of live performance shots is somewhere around 40,000. I never charged anyone a dime. Having been a hardscrabble road musician, and now a comfortable white collar tech guy, I just felt the need to help others promote their art. Vegas is about a dozen performers deep on every instrument and vocal type at the top, people who can just walk in and read the charts cold, but their struggles to survive is something I knew all too well, and felt compelled to support.