Hello Elvis, goodbye Aznavour.

Rock music hit him hard. He was shakin' all over. So he did what a lot of boys all over the world did back then - he got a guitar and taught himself to play. His first group was the Blue Stars, four young guys who played Beatles covers.

He left France when he was still young. Paused briefly in Israel. Came to Canada 27 years ago. Got married, had a family. He is coy about his real name.

Meet Joe Star.

The Blue Stars may be just a memory, but the Joe Star Band is very real. It is made up of two guitar players, a drummer, a keyboard player and a sax man who doubles on the clarinet. Joe sings, and plays one of the guitars.

He and the boys work weddings.

It's a part-time thing. The demand's not there. Deejays have killed most of the live music in town. But you want live music at a wedding reception. Live music is authentic, almost tribal. Everyone has fun at a wedding, even the people who don't like to dance. You go to a wedding with lightness in your heart; you leave the reception the same way.

And this is what it's like to be a working musician in a wedding band:

You nap in the afternoon in order to be at your peak all night. Your kids learn not to make noise while you are asleep. You close the curtains and set your alarm for mid-afternoon.

When you get up, you take out your charts and run through some tunes because you've got to limber up before the gig. You have a bath, you shave and grab a bite to eat. You get one of the kids to shine your shoes. You eat lightly because you don't like to play on a full stomach.

You load your instruments in the car and you leave home looking like you're heading for a night on the town. But you're on your way to work. You leave early, giving yourself time to find the hall, unload the car, set up on stage, tune your instrument and do a sound check before the crowd arrives.

If you play a lot of gigs, you rarely get New Year's Eve at home. You don't take your wife to dances on the weekend because you're one of the boys in the band - you play for other couples. You can't have the boys over for poker Friday nights because you're usually at a gig.

But it's still fun for Joe.

A good thing, because he's of a certain age, it's hard work making others happy, and it certainly isn't easy for a dance band musician to make a living any more. Joe doesn't work a lot in the winter. He still sells a bit of real estate on the side. In the summer, he may play one or two jobs a month.

The Joe Star Band wears black to work - suits, shirts, ties, shoes, socks. Except for the keyboard player, whose tie is silver. The keyboard player is an iconoclast. There's one in every band.

Joe and the boys have an eclectic repertoire: a little jazz, a little salsa, the usual Top 40 hits, all the standards. They play a lot of Jewish weddings, so they know Hava Nagila and all the other songs including Mezinka, which is played when the last child in the family ties the knot.

Joe knows how to work the crowd. He has corny jokes and a line of patter. He knows how important it is to get all the old relatives out on the dance floor. Most importantly, he knows how to flatter the bride. When she enters the banquet hall, he'll play "The Girl From Ipanema" because when she passes, each one she passes says "Ah."

And the band plays on. Joe does not put his Stratocaster in its case until the last dance has been danced, which means he always gets home late.

There is one consolation. Joe says, "At the average wedding, nobody remembers the chicken, nobody remembers the beef, but everybody remembers the band."