My saxophone died like a rockstar in Manitou Springs

I was sitting in with one of my favorite local bands playing my saxophone with Family Elephant at the Armadillo Ranch in Manitou Springs, Colorado on the evening of Manitou's amazing mardi gras parade called Carnivale. I had been roller skating in the parade earlier, it had been an amazing and long day. The band kicked off their sixth or seventh song of the set when it happened.. I became completely excited and enthused by this rocking song starting up and began to viciously head bang! This is when I had long hair so I thought it must have looked pretty cool... After about 10+ seconds of head banging to the beat of the music I stopped and stood up straight to get ready to blow some notes. I was suddenly super dizzy. I took one step forward to try to catch my balance but the problem was that I was positioned at the very front of the stage. I then tripped over the monitor speaker in front of me, rotating me over, and went head and chest first off the stage crashing down onto the dance floor in front of a completely packed house at the Armadillo... It was quite the scene. My tenor saxophone exploded! Some of its smaller parts scattered all over the dance floor, my mouthpiece even came flying off! Some dude was dancing and was stepping on it. The band kept the music raging, the show must go on! It was pure rock and roll in Manitou Springs. I was crawling around the dance floor picking up shiny broken sax parts. I went downstairs in the Armadillo Ranch to the green room to try to repair my saxophone with duct tape and ketchup packets but only was able to make about half of the notes function again. I must have worked on it for a good 45 minutes before realizing that my night of playing music was over. I had many friends come down to see me and people were super supportive, a lot of them said it was pretty spectacular.

In the end I decided to take my severely battle wounded saxophone and turn it into a piece of artwork that will live indefinitely in the Armadillo Ranch above the bar. My son Asher even helped with taping off the horn and preparing it for paint. So next time you go to the best bar in Manitou Springs, the Armadillo Ranch, make sure to have a drink and salute to my saxophone. Fortunately my wife is super super duper amazingly cool and let me go out and buy a new horn a few weeks later. I now play a Yamaha pro level horn. The one above the bar lasted me 20 years. I played that sax in tons of shows with the SkaDaddys in the early 2000's, blues groups, reggae, and rock bands all over California. I am glad I was able to turn lemons into lemonade with this one. Thanks for reading my silly but totally true story.

-Jared Thompson