December 4th, 2024. Last night at the SPARK w Bill Baker + Nightmares.

Okay, this is one of those weird open mic posts where it takes me a while to get there. But here’s the list!

Nightmares last night. Strangely coherent dreams over the last several days. No false memories. No moments of confusion upon waking. But hard emotions. Memories of my dad. Driving. Woods. Old Lovers. Bodies. This morning I woke from a dream that me and Juels Bland were driving through a mall parking lot? His blue car. I don’t remember what we were talking about but he turned to me to finish a sentence and we had a narrow squeeze between two SUVs. He almost stomped on the brakes and then it was clear that WE were in the clear, continued through the gap JUST as a tiny girl on a small bicycle rode in front of the car. In the dream Juels wasn’t entirely cognizant of her and though I WILLED the car to stop we kept riding forward, pushing her down, under the car and over. He drifted to a stop on the sidewalk at the edge of the parking lot. Crowds converging on the girl in the rearview mirror. My own mental timeline diverged and I dreamt that either I stayed in the car crying or I jumped out of the car calling 911 and struggling to find the name of the damned mall, or I gripped Juels and said “we need to get our story straight, she came out of NOWHERE” or I asked him to make sure I had his parents’ phone number as he was taken away in cuffs.

Seka is a rarity at the open mic, so we soak her in when she DOES pop round!

Yep. There IS a reason we mic things the way we mic them!

I woke up to the sound of power tools and construction and my own alarm tone which I’ve got to change because I’ve irrevocably ruined that damned Ayreheart song now.

Last night’s open mic was tricky. I’d been looking forward to presenting Bill Baker, but as is often the case with artists I hold in high regard, I tend to try to be breezy and don’t send them as much intro information as I should. I’m too casual. The whole day was a little too breezy, I guess – and I don’t simply mean the bone-aching cold December winds…

I think I was perhaps trying to escape the absurdly stupid technical issues I’d been battling with over the course of the day. Email servers and website issues. Confusion over mailing list messages and poorly-worded dates. I was ready to just get in the car and face known dangers like traffic and known technical issues like webcasting and audio engineering.

FallRisk performed while I was doing talking to college kids about careers in the arts, but I got a “book them!” text from my open mic hosts… and so it is written. We’ll have them as our featured artist on March 11th.

I was about halfway down I-95 realizing I’d forgotten my laptop for the webcast.

But I got to the Spark plenty early. I sent out some texts. I was stressed over it but not TOO stressed. I mean – the worst that was going to happen was that I’d NOT webcast the night. Only a dozen people tune in Live. Most people watch it in post. It’d be easy to record the night and post it the next day. BUT Bobby brought a laptop. Clif brought headphones. It ended up being one of my favourite open mic nights in quite some time. I Loved watching Bill play, he brought a new-to-me partner and the whole night just felt chock-full (I don’t really know what this expression means) of positive vibes and cooperation.

Thomas has been coming out solo recently – and he’s fantastic on his own. Still, it’s nice to have John back in the house tonight!

The ONLY fly in the ointment was David and I have a VERY non-communicative night. Part of it was definitely my fault. In my casualness about the night I hadn’t pinned down what Bill and Derek were bringing (two amps, no problem as long as I’ve thought it through), or when they were bringing it (too LATE for a sound check, but early enough that if I’d thought it through I’d have been ready for it), or how to mic it when they did (I had a mic plan for Bill’s amp, and the addition of Derek’s amp was fine, but then we moved everything to the centre and the cable for the mic for Derek’s amp wasn’t QUITE long enough). Unfortunately that sent me scurrying for their setup and David has a bad habit of sitting in the back of the room, often with his BACK to the room because of how he’s got the board set up, asking where I’m plugging things in, often WHILE I’m bantering to pass the while as I’m physically setting up. Then I’ve got to set the cameras, check the webstream audio, all with David saying “so what channels are we using” “what’re they plugged into” “what’ve we got”? Well… if you’d LOOK over THERE you’d see exactly what I did and NONE OF IT IS YOUR PROBLEM because we don’t need to mic the amps in the room so HUSH AND LET ME WORK.

We got there. David gets some slack because he’d driven up from Charlottesville that afternoon but HUSH and read the room! Which is ME!

Ahem.

In any case, like I said. Great performances. Great new-to-me artists. Great old-to-me artists that I hadn’t seen in a while. Good conversations in the background as I moved from thing to thing. I ALMOST …. Almost… felt like I was among friends and not having to be some horrible open mic Dad. I EVEN almost … ALMOST got an apology from someone who’d been a real dick the last couple of weeks.

Yes. There’s a reason we mic your instrument that way. No. It’s not perfect. Yes. You do anywhere else and they’re going to do it way, way, way worse.

A perfectly imperfect night.

Shame about the dreams.

We do this every Tuesday. Signup before 7. I start at 7. 7112 Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, MD. robsopenmics.ilyaimy.com for more information. For information about the photos and videos and usage thereof, please click here!