Yaakov Chesed

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Baruch Hashem we’ve played a lot of shows over the last few years, and like many bands we’ve had our shares of close calls. We’ve had a our lead singer get the flu the night before a gig and had to sub for Jake (!), forgot to be picked up at the airport in Calgary (the person picking us up thought we were coming in the following day), had a car breakdown in the middle of the night in upstate NY with no cell service, and had one major show almost cancelled by a bomb threat (seriously). Yet, the old adage is true, the show must go on, and BH for us it always has……but we’ve now come to expect our share of close calls… The latest of which happened at the Ohr Naava Shabbaton last Saturday night.

We were scheduled to play an hour set opening up for Lipa= yes, THAT Lipa. Believe us, we thought it was an odd pairing too, but it actually worked out shockingly well, once all the band members actually showed up. The show was in Parsippany, NJ and was a good 80 minute drive for those of us coming from Long Island. Unfortunately our beloved drummer Mosky has been a bit under the weather (Refuah shelaymah!) so we had to use our awesome sub-drummer Elan (of Except Saturday). Elan lives in Borough Park, and actually had the shortest drive, and therefore should have been the first one there. Obviously that’s not what happened. There was a nice sized snow storm last week and Elan hadn’t gotten his car out. Unfortunately it had warmed up a bit on Friday, but got cold once again the following day. The result: Elan’s car was frozen over. Bad news for Yaakov Chesed. As there were 500 people at this gig we were quite nervous- playing without a drummer just wouldn’t work for this gig.  Ultimately, Elan had to take a cab to the show and, BH, literally arrived as the band was taking the stage. It doesn’t come closer that. Elan did a great job, we had an awesome show, and Ohr Naava booked us again for their Purim Chagigah this Thursday night. So everything, once again, worked out for us. We’re either very lucky, very blessed, or both.

We do want to mention one other bizarre moment from the show. We knew that this was going to be a very frum crowd and tried to steer clear of our English songs (which are of course Jewish themed) and our Shlock covers. We figured, why take the risk of offending anyone. We were sitting outside the ballroom selling CD’s and talking to a few fans when we suddenly hear “Bad Romance”…coming from inside the ballroom! Imagine our shock when we look in and sure enough, Lipa is covering Lady Gaga. That’s right: Lipa. Gaga. Wha-huh?! Most of the crowd seemed into it, though there were some people as shocked and confused as we were. The people who never heard of Lady Gaga thought Lipa wrote a new pop-niggun, and loved it! We should point out that he didn’t sing the chorus and changed the lyrics around. The ironic thing is that we actually discussed doing a Shlock version of that exact song during rehearsal, and thought it probably wasn’t the best idea. Show’s how much we know. We better start working on our cover of “Poker Face” before Avraham Fried beats us to it.