Gigs really swing up and down for us, and… what can I say? Good thing we were getting paid at Costello’s. It’s such a weird bar in the first place – we’ve been there three times, and the three experiences have all been totally different. The first time, Annette Warner was running her (now defunct) singer/songwriter open mic. The place was pretty much empty, and Heather and I ended up pretty much playing the whole night to Annette, Deanne, a couple of their quietly watching friends, and George, the owner. The owner Loved us, and asked us to come and play that weekend, and offered us some pretty good money – (Deanne, our favourite agent, went back and got him to offer us more…).
The gig introduced us to Costello’s part 2. Filled with “D.C. gays” who just wanted to watch music videos, we were asked to shut down after about an hour or so because we were just NOT what the flaming doctor ordered. They paid us, and we went on our merry way. Thumping dance music, yelling to be heard over it, and an ass so sore from pinchin – well, that was what left a lasting impression. That was what I warned Sharif and Rowan about, and we were expecting that, in Heather’s words, the “joint” would be “jumpin'”.
Costello’s part 3 had an elderly, very well dressed collection of apparently heterosexual couples asking what covers we knew. Very quiet, but with Celtic music playing over the house system. The night varied with all sorts of different crowds over the course of the night, but we eventually called it a night at around 1am when the attention was far too focused on some baseball game in the back of the bar.
I wonder – my Dad frequently asks if “we’ve ever tried playing different kinds of music”. Specifically, he’ll mention that he really likes some of the covers we do, and that when we break into “Sweet Home Alabama”, he’s like “yeah, stuff like that – that sounded really good”. We have friends who play a lot of covers, and a lot of bars will pay good money for that. You won’t sell any CDs doing it, and you won’t ever get much press being a cover artist, and above all, you certainly won’t be playing you’re own music, but you will make decent money. I frequently wonder if we should be persuing that, making sure that we’ve got a large lexicon of covers in our little skull databases so that we can play those bar scenes and whatnot. I just don’t want to spend too much of my energy doing that, booking it, becoming known for it… and I can all too easily imagine running ourselves into a situation where every week we’re faced with a choice: book an ilyAIMY show at a venue where we need to work to bring people out, where our pay depends on the vaguaries of draw and CD sales… OR book a cover show where the bar is happy enough to hand us a couple hundred dollars if we play four or five hours of classic rock favourites (maybe a bit more if Heather dresses real nice). I can imagine slipping into that as a Lifestyle, and hating it. There seem to be a lot of people “making a Living off of music”… but there aren’t nearly as many making a Living off of THEIR music.
