Last night’s open mic was one of those spectacular nights where absolutely everything went wrong until they went right. Last week had been highly complicated because sometimes I need to be better about asking people NOT to congregate where I’m setting up, and because the featured artist had gear being set up in advance, lots of people came up both to talk to him and with the assumption that that’s where THEIR stuff belonged too. This week, I didn’t have that problem at all (mostly late-comers) but once we got going…
Jimmy Blue. 
Life-saving Don. 
Ross Martin. 
Ross Martin and Jennifer Parde.
… we were GOING.
Right out the gate – I was attempting to webcast and so spent more time on the technical side of trying to set that up than I should’ve. Once that was up and running I DIDN’T plug in my Panasonic camera figuring that it’s usual spot was being taken by the webcam, and maybe I’d place it out somewhere on battery power later – seeing an open outlet another artist (with my unthinking permission) sets up his wireless rig there, nice and out of the way and under the table – and with my mind full of AWESOME POTENTIAL camera angles, I stepped on the stage and played Elephant Joke with HORRIBLE EQ not just because I was fooling with it but because my battery was dying. Kind of a cool distortion tone, but NO GOOD for solo guitar.
Dave Godbey 
Kate Buckholdt 
Featured artist Jennifer Parde
I step away, swap the battery, complete my set. On to artist TWO! No problem. Jimmy Blue has been a welcome inclusion for the last couple of weeks. He wandered into the Harbor on his BOAT, and started biking to the open mic with his five-string bass and this is his last night in town. I’d talked to him last week about how he’d strung three songs together and that’s not how “2 songs / 10 minutes whichever’s shorter” worked!
Jennifer Parde. 
Dave Benham. 
Jon Patton. 
Jimmy Stuart. 
New tonight – Tiger Xu! 
Jon’s dad, Steve Patton. 
Telly. 
Holy crap – a new find – Great voice, great guitar skills – Jesse Moody! (da fourth)
He came back this week very apologetically saying he listened to me talking last week as I’d patiently explained what was up and TOTALLY failed to parse the “whichever’s shorter” portion of the rules. He apologized to me and then also apologized to the open mic at large… honourable, mostly unnecessary, but a fine thing to do… and then artist #3 isn’t ready.
Artist # “I’d have told you earlier but I thought I was third” 3 – causes much difficulty. Because artist #4 is waiting for his singer to park her car, and #5 is in the bathroom or something and #6 JUST walked in the room from parking HER car and the next one needs the keyboard so she has to go AFTER the feature and the next guy is brand new and it would’ve sucked to throw them up randomly and unprepared…
Fuck – I stood there like an idiot for five minutes trying to get my deadtime dealt with and then the last person on the list saw his chance and came rushing up. Very thankful that he did for a number of reasons – this worked out great despite him being one of those “oh, you don’t need to mic me” artists because people don’t grasp that webcasts / recordings don’t work without mics on everything…
Whatever. I let it fly because it gave me a sec to get things back on track and make sure that artist #4 is NOW ready and we can get on with the night…
Artist #4 goes up, and after a couple of tech issues gets started… only to have his wireless cut out… laughingly he quips “you know how rob runs great sound every night etc – it’s PROBABLY his fault!” – not knowing that, yep, I set my camera back next to his wireless and knocked the power cable out. So… lesson learned. ALSO during his set I’d been getting messages from the webcast that the sound was really distorted. After trying a couple of things I eventually just shut down the webcast and try to replace it with the Panasonic, only to find the battery is dead. I go to plug it in, but that’s where Artist 4’s wireless is plugged in (I hadn’t realized yet that the failure was because I’d kicked the cable out somehow)… I get 2 minutes out of the camera, then in between songs swap batteries… THAT battery has even LESS juice (wtf?!?) and then just shut the whole thing down till I can get artist #5 up and running, unplug the wireless rig, rewire things and get the Panasonic plugged back in…
All of the above, setting up a mic because the wireless died, changing batteries, chatting with webcast viewers about sound, ALL of that’s happening at the same time AND Mai from the bar is trying to tell me about a person calling Teavolve for me…
But after that things kind of smoothed over.
Honestly, the night was amazing. Great talent, a number of new people, I managed to be charming despite all of the above. I got to play at the end though over-extended myself (DON’T PLAY “Steel” WITHOUT STRETCHING!!!!) because I was so intimidated by the last artist that I felt like I had to show off (THE HOST SHOULDN’T EVER SHOW OFF!!!!)…
It was a great night. There were some bad politics (scene politics, at the moment we don’t have any other kinds right now), there were some GREAT conversations about AI and neural networks. I got on the phone after Teavolve with Ross Martin for an hour and a half and chatted about touring and apps and things. Tiger Xu’s voice was amazing, Jesse Moody’s a great player. Nashville tuning’s not for the weak! There was mighty cheering.
Teavolve’s open mic. Highly stressful for the host, but generally a great time for everyone else! Yay us.
