Yesterday, the band’s calendar showed a show that we had never booked. It seemed to have shown up on every site that one didn’t need our login information to post a show on, so I thought that someone was messing with us, or maybe trying to get the band back together.

But then, I saw that it was on the venue’s website. I emailed the venue saying that they had a false booking on their calendar and that my band had never booked that show. I also sent a message to the band that it said we were playing with, and that band told me that they had booked the show through a promoter, but the promoter never mentioned us, nor had the band suggested us.

I then looked at my past emails with that promoter, and saw that we had indeed been offered that show last month, but I had turned it down.

The venue emailed me back today, saying “tell this booking agent not to say they are booking you.” They forwarded me an email from that promoter about that show and the bands that would play, which dated before the email I had from him offering us the show. In short, he booked the show without asking the bands he suggested if they could play it, and when we, the intended headliners, couldn’t do it, he forgot to tell them that we weren’t playing.

All in all, this may seem like an honest mistake on the promoter’s part. However, the fact that the person told the venue that we were playing before he even asked us, let alone received our reply, does not exactly demonstrate competence.

The worst part is what the other band told me. They showed me a message they got from the promoter, blaming the show’s cancelation on us. In his message to the other band, he claimed that he had just found out today that we were refusing to play the show because we wanted guaranteed pay. The truth is, however, that he had found out a month ago, upon offering us the show, that we could not do the show unless we had guaranteed pay, and yet still told the venue that we were playing.

The other band and the venue know that our word is good, but I still do not appreciate being made to look like a greedy scumbag who suddenly refused to do a show because it did not pay enough. No, I told him upfront that it did not pay enough.

This is almost the main reason why we don’t accept deals where we have to play for the door. Because the people booking shows like that do not always know what they are doing. Some of them even keep a lot of the door money for themselves, giving just some of it to the bands and saying “yup, this is all of the door money.” I’m not sure what this particular person was trying to accomplish by booking us at a show we had actually turned down, but I suppose I will never know.