Still in Houston. I like it here. Well, I like it indoors here. We’ve been to a couple of open mics, met some interesting people, but mostly I’ve just sort of been enjoying visiting with my brother and Del.
Last Wednesday we headed out to the Vintage Bar, which was officially the most unpopulated open mic I’ve ever been to. During our set we performed to the host, my brother, his fiance, the bartender, and the one man act that had just gotten off the stage.
The saving grace of the place came when a two man act wandered in on our second to last song – Simple and Hammer went up after us and did something we hadn’t seen in a long while – i.e. – something DIFFERENT. Pete Simple has a pretty nice voice and one of those outline-only travel guitars, and his partner, Hammer (what WAS his first name?) was a beat-boxing bass player, which, as I said, was at least something DIFFERENT. Good bass player, too. We haven’t seen any beat-boxing since leaving Maryland, and it was a refreshing blast after so many straight-forward acoustic performances at Kerrville.
Well, we hit it off pretty well, and they offered us a couple of gigs for this upcoming week.
Thursday night we ALMOST went to an open mic, but then we decided to be slackers.
Friday night Del hooked us up to play outside a very cool bar on the campus of Rice University, where she works. We set up our amplifier under a big tree and played for a couple of hours to passer-bys and friends of George and Del. We sold a couple of CDs, but were busking more than anything else, and we’re still a little shy for that, embarassingly enough. I’m not quite sure where we expect to get in Life if we’re too shy to stick our tip cup in people’s way… but…
I don’t know, I came home from that a little bit depressed, feeling the need to practice a bit more (which I haven’t done) and feeling the need to remember a couple of new songs (which I haven’t done) and REALLY feeling the need to write some new material (which I STILL haven’t done). I feel like my entire Life is taken up by maps and email and booking and… well, writing in this Journal (though I LOVE writing in the Journal) and upDating the website and all that stuff, and I’m perhaps using that as a way to escape from my REAL chosen profession.
Worry… worry… worry.
Heh, and Saturday night we were GOING to go to TWO open mics, but decided not to. George and Del found a sandcastle festival to go to instead, and that sounded like a lot more fun than staying home, so we wandered out to Galveston and stood amazed at the base of the sandcreations (not often actual castles) that towered over us.
It was a long day on the beach, and I have some burns to show for it. The sun in Texas is unrelenting, and the South constantly reminds me that if there’s one thing I’ve never dealt well with, it’s heat and humidity. Nothing else screws me up so bad, makes me play sloppier, makes me sing poorer, saps my energy and my personality, not to mention my will to Live.
The sun in Texas in unforgiving, and I’ve got stripes to prove it. If I had a blue shirt, I could be quite the patriot.
d
