A request from a coffeeshop customer to the owner. On the right – a Lovely mouse-mobile and the MESS I made at a pizza place in Galveston. Their motto is “we may not know much English, but we make GREAT pizza!”. I felt pretty bad that you could follow my progress from the door to the table to the buffet to the table to the bathroom to the table… I was very, very dirty.
A little bit frustrated. For as good as the music side of things has been going – how good the romance and the friends and the weather and the hermit crabs, finances are poor. I Loved my trip to Texas. Unfortunately, at the moment I’m freaking out a little bit about making my health insurance payment and I should’ve been pushing the CDs harder (though I only DID come back with one). Hopefully the show tonight will go well, and maybe I’ll play some more open mics before we head off to Connecticut. I’m much tighter than I’d like to be, and don’t have really amazing prospects for catching up.
Yet.
This is just me being tense, and things will be alright. Like I said, the last couple of days have been pretty good – last couple of weeks, really. So much stuff in Galveston, it was Lovely – and then coming home and playing shows – Friday night at the Bowie Old Town Grill – playing for an owner that just wants us to play and play and play and play… and then the Cup on Saturday. I’m worried that that was our last show there ever. The Cup has been sold to a new owner who apparently doesn’t like music. We won’t really know about the future of music at the Cup until October, and it’s got me worried, as that coffeehouse has always been kind to us.
Tuesday night we played the College Perk open mic, mostly to new faces – I guess the new school year just started and a whole new year of UMDers are discovering the Perk.
I met a couple of new performers, two of which really made me a joyous rob:
Shawn Snyder is poofy-headed and amazing-voiced – reminded me a bit of Ben Harper in his visual and vocal aesthetics. I invited him to come play with us the next night, especially since he is a fellow road-warrior (though he’s a newbie – three months down!). Later in the evening… no -er… just LATE in the evening… I met the Carousel Rogues – two really Lovely voices, a guy playing guitar and a woman playing piano and they were marginally angellic.
Last night we played back at the New Deal Cafe – but it was a last minute show and we played to a room of less than 15 people. I Love how they’ve rebuilt the interior, moving the stage and moving the bar and everything. It looks really, really nice. Rowan fiddled with the PA and our friend Jess said it was the best NDC sound ever “clear enough to make a grown man weep. I’m a woman. Only dry eye in the house”. Twrr.
Now we’re on the way home from one of Steve Key’s showcases at the Decoy Lounge in Clinton, MD. It’s a Thursday night on the Washington DC Beltway and the curving roadway is populated with the flashing lights of police, hungry for those of us who transgress the legal speed limits. We’ve passed a couple of these people, slumped in their seats, squinting into their rear view mirrors and wondering how long this is going to take, and how much is this going to cost…
I Love playing showcases like this – it’s the first time we’ve been the centre-piece of one of Steve’s events – and it was nice to play more than three songs. In any case, the show cases are like… jurored open mics. You get a wide variety of flavours in a short period of time. Ideal for those of us (like me) who have crappy little attention spans. And unlike an open mic, you are pretty safe from those creatures who can’t hold a tune and can’t hold a rhythm or the ones who thought “open mic” meant “karaoke” or God FORBID – comedians.
They truly are the bane of the open mic experience.
But in any case, I actually feel kind of bad ranting like this. The guy I met the other night, Shawn Snyder, played this exquisite song about a guy at an open mic who is received so poorly that he never plays again… it made me feel pretty guilty, because though I TRY to be supportive come one and come all, I know my patience has grown less and less over the years. Open mics remain one of my favourite things, meeting new people, seeing new things – but they can go bad. Oh so bad. And then the etiquette of departure when those of us with crappy little attention spans are ready to move… well… I may go to Hell for my occassional behaviour at open mics. (and the part of me that causes that behaviour says no matter what Satan comes up for me, it can’t be worse than what I was running from).
At the showcase I finally saw Tim Kaye play – we’ve been dancing around the same social circle for a couple of years, but have never seen one another perform, and were mutually pleased. It’s always flattering to have someone come up to you and say things like “I really didn’t know what to expect, you didn’t sound anything like what I thought you would and… wow!” We also encountered Eva Castillo who simply has an amazing voice – I want to hear her and Heather sing together. Apparently she has herself an upright bassist and a kit player for a band. I’m curious about that as well. Steve Key was even inspired to play a couple of tunes at the end of the night, and though he didn’t hit up my favourite (Golden), he DID play “Scatter Seeds” and “New Hope” which always make me want to read his biography, or something.
It was a very good night, a satisfying gig. Nice big stage, loud sound. The Blues Brothers.
Dead ducks. All in all, a good way to leave Maryland.
