November 12-15, 2005

Ah, to be the hero of half-empty small town bars, or to fight for attention in mid-time music halls? It’s the age-old question: is it better to be the big fish in the little pond or the other way around?

People make a lot of assumptions about us when we walk into a room. Some of it is the equivalent of locker-room verification – checking out and comparing the equipment. We carry nice gig bags, and a hand drum in a case, which is a rarity at most open mics.

When we unzip, people make judgments about us. Everyone does it. Nothing about us is flashy, but we look prepared. Prepared and traveled. I think of Takamines as the Saturn cars of the guitar world – Popular with the middle class, sensible, gets good mileage and handles well in all kinds of weather. And though the instrument does not always make the man, there is an assumption that people with good gear are good enough to know good gear, and then good enough to play it. This said, there is gear that everyone knows is good and buy as much for sound as status. These days, if somebody is playing a Taylor , about the only thing that suggests is that they could afford it.

Squires usually set off alarm bells in my head. Someone in here tonight has a Wal-Mart electric guitar that they picked up second-hand at a pawn shop. I am not sure if I should be afraid.

In bars like this, we know what to play. We know what compliments we will elicit. And we know that we will walk away with a couple dollars at best, a booking offer if the place regularly features music, but little else. It’s a quick fix, and the high wears off fast. But, if you get too egotistical and decide that places like this are beneath you, you will fight for people to give a damn somewhere else. The rewards might be bigger there, the compliments of greater weight, the CD sales more lucrative, but they might also go to the other guy that night who was just that little bit better than us. And how do we feel about ourselves then?

I can’t write places like this off, no matter how many of them frustrate me and make me question my choices and my gas mileage.

I’ve coined an expression for nights like that. I call it “wearing the sequin dress to the baseball game.” That is when you feel like whipping out all the stops seems not only like overdoing it, but inappropriate. Last night, was the opposite. Whipping out all the stops was the right thing to do, the goal to be the “stand-out performer” part of the deal … and yet this time we somehow got punished for it.

While at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem for the open mic there a couple nights ago, one of the volunteers there suggested that, since we were to be in Philadelphia anyway, we should head to the World Cafe. It’s a radio thing, but apparently they opened up a music venue. A competition like Eddie’s Attic, the staff of the place picks who advances. We figured this was a great way to meet some new people in Phillie and start making the most of a city we had not really taken full advantage of.

Any open mic at which you spend 6 hours is sort of difficult. So we go last night, showing up at the appointed hour of 5pm to wait in line for the 6pm sign-up, and we are the 7th in line. By the time they let us in, there are 15-20. We somehow wind up going 16th.

I always find myself looking around at moments like that and try and figure out who is going to be good. What they are going to sound like. I am almost NEVER right, which I guess should put to rest some of my own fears about looking the part. Although, there are some that look SO much the part and are the art that it is completely infused throughout their look and personality. There were a couple of those – a guy with crazy hair in big beads and a red hawaiian shirt. Everyone who was artfully disheveled it seems, turned out to be good. The venue itself was gorgeous … definitely not the baseball game. There was even a piano on which to writhe in the sequin dress you would have been totally right to wear there.

So the night crawled forward … As they were about to announce the winner at the end of the night, 11:30 or so, the bar manager came up to me and said we were the hands-down favorites. Everyone had voted our way.

But then they figured since we were a touring act we would not be able to make a date so soon and would likely be in parts elsewhere, so they picked someone else. It’s totally what we could’ve used – a built-in audience in a place we’ve got no draw.

I told the woman I wished she would have asked us, because we could have made the date. But she said they wanted to offer us a gig, and so they figured that was how we would “win.” I told her we don’t have much in the way of a huge following in Philadelphia, so it would have to be an opening act. I thanked her.

UGH! Too professional to win! If only they knew how many nights of our lives were spent in open mics. The gig is fine, but to be honest, a stair-step competition might be better for us seeing more and different kinds of audiences instead of trying ot pull numbers at a gig. They said if we came back another month, we would most certainly win and could go through the contest that way if we liked. They loved us. I think that was what was so frustrating. I wanted to tell them that we are not as well off as they think. But then again, I don’t want to tell people that.

Long night for the utmost in musical blueballs. Damn that slutty sequin dress and all its promise.