K&W at South Coast Plaza -- 01Dec2006

I love pulling my Christmas music out every year. Unfortunately, we don't get many gigs in December to play the stuff. So I sent out an "only chance!" message to the K&W mailing list, and it actually worked! 9 out of 10 gigs, nobody we know comes in, which is fine. Of course it's nice when somebody does show up, but also rare. This time we had 17, count 'em, 17 friends: my brother and his wife, my dad's college friend and his wife (who've known me since babyhood), and old high school friend and her husband, three Toshiba friends, one from Linksys, and, almost at the end, two Princess friends with five teenybopper daughters-and-friends in tow.

Which made it pretty fun. Just getting to play those songs is fun in itself, too -- most of them are more elaborate, and therefore more interesting, than the standard pop songs we play. I attribute a lot of my growth on the guitar to my years-long striving to get those songs sounding good. Pop songs just don't "get" the diminished and augmented chords like them old tunes do.

Also, since there's no Definitive Version of most of them (Elvis' "Blue" and Bing's "White" Christmases notwithstanding), I get to do a personal arrangement of them. Meaning, of course, that I can play them "in my style", which means "down at my level of (in)ability".

But it went great. We had all those friends out there, paying attention, and lots of other folks were right there with us, too. One guy was in the comfy chairs when I got there, and we talked while I was setting up. He had to go, though, before I got started, even though he thought he (and his daughter) would like my stuff. About an hour into the gig, he showed up again, with the daughter, and did, in fact, seem to like it.

The whole night shot by. Having the additional 10 or 15 songs to play meant that we did that many fewer of the Usual Songs, which was a nice change. Makes me want to have another 20 songs on the list so the ones we play at any one gig can vary from week to week. That's a bit easier said than done -- (a) I can't think of another 20 songs that (a1) are great, and (a2) I can play, and (b) the best 40 or so always percolate to the top of my "want to play 'em ('cuz they work the best)" mental list, and the rest might as well not be there.

Anyway, we actually do have another Christmas gig, a week from Friday, but it's in generally-unreachable Yorba Linda. We won't have any friends there, but, hopefully we'll get lots of shoppers that need a little break.