All night long.

When we were strarting up, we did mostly three-chord blues and simple rock songs by artists like Slim Harpo, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.  Later we added more complex songs and arrangements after Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Allman Brothers and Jimi Hendrix.  But the core of our performance was always The Fabulous Thunderbirds.  With Mark's singing and harmonica, and supported by the roadhouse sound from our no-frills sound system, the T-Bird covers always stood up best.

A typical set was 14 songs long, and we always did 3, sometimes 4 sets a night.  You do the math--we really did have a "vast repertoire."

The name game.

Blues legends seemed to all have great nicknames, like B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf.  Why not us?  The Creature came to the band with a nickname already, so no fun there.  It was pretty easy to come up with "Slim Tim" and "Blues Mark," although on occasion we called him "Booze Mark."  Jason's name eluded us for a while.

Finally, there was a guitarist who we would sometimes let sit in with us who liked to turn up the distortion.  He complained about Jason's style of play, which was clean and bright for most songs.  (You can hear it in our recordings of "Woke up this Morning" and "Scratch my Back.")  He sneered one day that we should call Jason "Mr. Clean."  We thought it was a great name, not at all the insult our musical friend intended it to be.  Not only did we adopt the nickname "Mr. Clean" for Jason, we also dubbed our distortion-loving friend "Dr. Dirt."

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