Damn it. Damn it and sigh. But mostly damn.
Six Mile Coffee will close its doors at the end of this week. Chris, the owner, wanted to go out with one last open mic so he’s staying open through Thursday, but after that, it’s done. It really, really makes me sad – I think it’s probably a decision that’s been looming for a while, but he announced it to me Friday night. I stepped out of Elk Run Winery and checked my email and I saw the subject line “Six Mile Coffee” and I just KNEW it wouldn’t be good news. No-one ever writes with GOOD news when they could wait a couple of days and tell you in person.
I’m incredibly saddened by this – it just seems so unfair. Java Mammas had been around for a while and I was very sad to see it go, but I felt like the open mic at least had sort of gone through a generation of turnover. It had had a complete Lifespan. Six Mile had only been opened for about 6 months, and the open mic had only been running for 3! We’d been getting a LOT of press recently, newspaper articles – Hell, THIS Thursday a local paper had a reporter in the audience – and he didn’t leave me a card and now there will be an article in a newspaper for a coffeehouse that has only a couple of days worth of Life in it.
Damn. And we’d JUST moved downstairs. And the people are SO great.
Meanwhile, at least things are going well at the Monday night Everyday Gourmet open mic. Above, Shannon Bishop is showing off her ability to hula hoop and almost play guitar at the same time. I informed her that she’ll have to provide her OWN damned wireless system, thank yiou very much. Continuing in the Takoma Park vein of bringing instruments you’ve built yourself – here’s Chris Ousley performing a couple of tunes on his homemade banjo.
It’s difficult because the nights that I’M at a business, business is good (if I do say so myself). I run the open mic, I push the food, the drinks, the whatever they’ve got – and Hell, I spend most of my pay in buying stuff right there. But I can’t account for the other six days and I hate it when I hear that the rest of the week isn’t doing well. I didn’t know it was going THIS badly.
Friday night I was pretty broken up about it. Saturday night I wasn’t interested in finding another place to run one… and by this morning a friend has me just about convinced to try with a coffeehouse local to HIM…
– We’ll see.
We shall see.
I don’t have many other great things to say at the moment. My brain’s pretty scattered and it’s Sunday morning, which means I was probably out late last night and I’m suffering from lack of sleep – and sure enough, we played at Teavolve last night and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. A couple of old friends from college dropped in, one I hadn’t seen in some 14 years or so. Michael Jones was the head Rover back when I was working security in school, and collectively there was a lot of CRAP that we went through together. It was fantastic to see him again, and I had a rush of memories of grave shifts spent working together, me playing guitar and him twisting wires together into strange little sculptures and making up lyrics about possums. I have the tapes around somewhere…
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There’d been an altercation back then and he’d gotten his hand slammed in a car door and since then his ability to make those little wire creations slowly dropped off as the scar tissue grew and grew… just recently he managed to get a couple of surgeries done to undo the damage, one to remove the grapefruit-sized lump of damaged tissue, the second to replace the nerves in the hand. He’s overjoyed to be back to full capacity. Hell, he seems happy to be able to use a fork!
Unfortunately, other than a number of close friends, the venue was relatively empty. Suni, one of the owners, wasn’t too upset about it – she shrugged and said “eh, it’s summer”. She thanked us for bringing more people than she WOULD’VE had. In addition to the people who come to see us, we’re pretty active about grabbing people’s attention through the floor-to-ceiling windows and drawing outsiders in. But I’m horribly aware of never getting that critical mass of EXCITEMENT required to make the show POP. We played our songs, we had a good time, but the applause seemed polite and measured and I just couldn’t PUSH that energy over the cliff into our more-accustomed frenzy.
A similar malaise with the previous night. Friday we had a huge audience out at a winery in Mt Airy, MD. Absolutely stunning night and people stretched all through the surrounding fields, but so did the applause and after every song you’d hear a ROLL of applause, difficult to gauge for the distance. It was almost ridiculously idyllic though with a beautiful sunset and perfect temperatures… fireflies slowly appearing out across the vineyards sparkling below the mountains. A couple of small cats stalked the grounds and gingerly approached tables for head rubs and we spent some time squeezing a big grey mammal that seemed to Love us quite intensely.
My last Six Mile Underground open mic continued to draw some pretty marvelous acts. Above – Bryn Mawr and _________, dropping in as part of their East Coast tour. Further proof that Six Mile was just kicking off – playing to a packed house at the Six Mile Coffeehouse in Catonsville, MD. Our average list was 16 performers, and my average audience throughout the night was 40. More of my peeps… Evan Manuel and his Manuettes at my last Six Mile Underground open mic.The guy on the left also played ukulele and was almost inexcusably smiley. Brennan Kuhns ended up being the last performer at the Six Mile Underground – Sigh. Cleaning up at the end of the night was just painful. Goodbye perfect room.
And then the night before, of course, was Thursday. It was my open mic. Unknown to me, the second to last one. It was a great night, a lot of fun. There was a full list with a little bit of time left over for Sharif and I to jam at the end of the night. Great performers, a reporter excited to see this local haven for local music… I can’t believe it ends this week.
