After posting yesterday, I remembered that the second photo below was squirreled away in our basement; the first one also turned up in the same box. Both are from the summer of 1995.
Exhibit A: Avant Garage performing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY.
The photo is poorly lit, which accurately reflects conditions on the ground. (I'm in the shadows at far left, with the Gibson ES-335.)
The glaring inaccuracy of this image is the impression that lots of young people are having a good time while we play; the photo must've been snapped very early in the evening, before our audience figured out that they would better enjoy hanging around outdoors in the sweltering heat, rather than staying inside and enduring our music in air-conditioned comfort.
Exhibit B: Avant Garage performing at New Paltz, NY.
This was a wedding celebration for the families of our lead-singer/accordionist's brother and his bride, who had tied the knot earlier that year in the Caribbean. We were one of numerous bands that performed throughout the afternoon and evening.
When I first saw this image, I thought, how charming that those two little girls are sitting there listening to us play. Then I realized that my only turn on lead vocals at that gig was my "Body-Piercing Blues," in which the narrator is trying to bed "the sweetest hippie chick that you ever seen / A tie-dye shirt and peasant skirt and Birkenstock queen," who insists that he's too vanilla and really ought to get a body piercing. Subsequent verses work their way down from eyebrow to nostril to lip to nipple, culminating at the groin. (Our shocked protagonist cowardly refuses all.) Yes, that's what those two little girls are sitting there listening to.