Headed east in Connecticut to land in Westport Massachusetts, one of the most eastern parts of a northern state. The sky is cloudless and blue and with this straight stretch of highway and a full tank of gas, the world almost seems limitless. Heather and I are sparring about lyrics, talking past one another good-naturedly, listening with half-an-ear to the beauty of Anna Tivel’s album “The Question”.
Last night we tried a Concert Window show – and I THINK it was a good thing. It certainly helped us monetize what would’ve otherwise been a dead night.
This whole tour has at its heart a hollow caused by gigs that didn’t. A double booking at a club that is mortified but wasn’t able to do anything other than apologize that the date that had been booked months before was suddenly someone else’s all along just 4 or 5 weeks before the show – and a house concert that fell by the wayside as the house got sold. I have a LOT more sympathy for the latter as the owner had an opportunity on his DREAM home and who are dreamers to get in the way of a dream?
There was a lot of shuffling to make these things happen though, and other, long-standing relationships were willing to bend around these shows, and then to have them BOTH drop out, back-to-back, was frustrating.
Still, Concert Window – an online concert facilitator that’s been around as long (if not longer) as any of them – allowed us to host a show “attended” by 20 people and to monetize them in a way that otherwise probably wouldn’t have been terribly possible. We made money on a night that otherwise probably would’ve seen us spending it and tried something new and legitimately played a show to plenty of people that are missing us in different parts of the country.
IN truth I had the vague dream that a tenth of mailing list would find a way to tune in and we’d have an amazing THOUSAND people tune in, but it wasn’t destined to be (nor did I really expect it – I think there’s substantial deadwood in the overall mailing list) – but as proof of concept and a first attempt, that in ITSELF ended up being a backup to a backup, I think it was pretty good.
The morning of the show the internet provider for much of the surrounding area, including the beautiful old French-style home we were going to perform in was down – scheduled to be back up by 2pm – but definitely and firmly down for the moment. Starbucks couldn’t accept debit cards and the Flop and Pop couldn’t process payments except in suuuupeeeeer sloooooow mooooootion. 2pm rolled around and the ETA had shifted to TBA and by 3.30pm we decided to have the “show” in Kristen’s mom’s Living room since she (fortunately) had a different ISP. Setting up, testing speeds, 1/6 the bit rate of what the little French house had yesterday, but an infinite number of times faster than it was today – we tried our cell connections… 1/6 the speed of the other place was still 44 times faster than the marginal 4G we were getting through our phones so… I jiggled bit rates and compression ratios, popped the stereo signal down to mono, reduced the frame rate and hoped for the best.
What we ended up with was described as “Harryhausenesque” but the audio came through nice and clear (which, if my brief sampling of other channels’ streams is at all accurate, is something of a rarity) and only one or two who tuned in dropped out.
It took a little… well, okay… a LOT to get into it. We had an in-house audience of three who // well, I wasn’t sure if we should’ve had them clap or not. There were a number of folk-audience-appropriate exclamations – a “nice” here and there, a soft whistle, claps as well – but it was a little weird, and most of our audience interaction was with the people online, who, through the online chat functionality, were appreciative and vocal – but because of the lag – generally responding to things about 45 – 60 seconds after we did them, which was weirdly disconnecting.
Still, good to have familiar screen names pop up, people that we only get to see out in the Midwest, or the West Coast, or who have been sick and can’t go see shows… I’ll happily do more of them (though I don’t know if we’ll try them as “band” shows too often) – we’ll see what becomes of us!
Well – despite the success of last night, I’m still really, really glad to hear that tonight’s room is just about sold out and very, very excited to play to a full house of REAL HUMANS. Headed east to Westport, passing Moosup and meandering down the road… still aggressively cloudless.
