About a week before the tour began, David Allan finally started rehearsing the band. Because the musicians were pros, and because the arrangements were fairly standard, they soon had about an hour's worth of material together, but the whole structure was shaky, like a house of cards waiting to be blown over. […]

We finally headed out, full of uncertainty, for a two-night gig in Nacogdoches, Texas. The Venue there was a typical country roadhouse. The club's people were nice, and the place was clean. When show time came the band took the stage, still without knowing what they were going to play. David Allan banged out the opening chords to Billy Joe Shaver's "Ride Me Down Easy," and they were off to the races. This pattern repeated itself for the rest of the set: David Allan would sing the first line of the song, and the band would frantically follow him. Between songs, David Allan didn't say a word--he just hesitated a moment, then leaped into the next number. The songs were very rushed, almost as if he wanted to get the show over with as quickly as possible. If so, it worked. His hurry-up approach took what should have been an hour-plus of music and compressed it into forty-five minutes. There was no encore, and when the crowd realized that he wasn't coming back, they grew ugly.