Last night was amazing. A surprise. An amazing surprise. And I ain’t just talking the spectacular sandwiches our friend Robin brought us.
7 Locks is a brewery in Rockville that we stumbled across when they started up about 4 years ago, and Keith has always been true to his mission of wanting to make a place where HE’D like to hang out. And indeed – it’s been really cool to watch the place develop over the years, becoming really popular with the local families that like to hang out and effectively picnic in the warehouse-y space while playing games and grazing off the food trucks and drinking beer or root beer as age-appropriate.
But it’s not, by any means, a great music venue. The audience is generally supportive but it’s a … warehouse space… they’ve done their best, but it’s white noise and chaos, there’s things like cornhole and Jenga, and it’s never going to be a focused environment… or at least that’s what I always thought.
The last couple of shows there have been really kind of delicious, and I’m not just talking about drinking beers made by people who talk about beer the way I talk about music. The audience has been increasingly tuned in, we get dancers and good back and forth… it’s a bar gig that genuinely feeds my soul pretty well.
It’s funny – last week with the One World Coffeehouse show… I had my worries. Ticketed events STILL freak me out because I’m worried no-one will come, and folk events STILL freak me out because I still worry we’re going to be too raucous for them – but once I saw how things were shaping up, I was pretty confident we’d wow them and have a great time.
7 Locks was almost MORE wondrous because none of us were expecting it. The place was packed despite a dreary, cold Saturday night, and we dialed them and rocked them out to culminate in something I don’t know that we’ve EVER had at a bar gig : a standing ovation and an encore.
And because the owner has built himself a place that he LIKES to hang out at, he’d wandered in and caught the show, and that doesn’t hurt.
Today I’m happily taking the day off. I hear there’s a gladiatorial sportsball event happening, and I SHOULD be participating in FAWM, but my fingers are sore, my back is sore, and I think I’m happy to just take myself a Sunday completely away from my “job”… except of course for a social media pass, an update to the website, this Journal entry, working on the neck of my baritone, repacking the Grey Bag for open mic mode, continue working my way through my taxes…
There is truly no rest for the rob.
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