I was hoping/expecting to have my fiddle-playing guest star there again, but she'd had finals the week before and hadn't had time to practice, so she begged off.
Still no sign of sweetie-pie Manager Sally, for several gigs in a row now. Maybe she's on the day shift now, or maybe she got transferred. It was fun to play with her there - she's a huge James Taylor fan, and was on the verge of getting the nerve together to come up and sing something with me. That would have been fun. Oh, well.
I was hoping for a great night, musically at least, since the last two gigs were out where it's loud and obnoxious. But it takes a decent audience to make a good night, and we were little short in that department.
We did have a young family come by, but the kids were too young to know any songs -- although the little boy had apparently heard some James Taylor, oddly enough. Other than that, nobody was very interested, so we just plugged away for awhile. I did get some decent takes of a few songs on video and posted them to YouTube, so, not a complete loss. Just kind of disappointing.
I guess the other silver lining is that, since nobody was listening, I got to try out some new songs: "Peoples Parties" (might be OK, but very obscure), "Suzanne" (pretty, fun to sing, but I think it's kinda boring to listen to), "We Can Work It Out" (works fine when I play it on electric, but my un-strummable Ovation makes it unlikely), and "Imagine", which I learned specifically because a lady asked for it at this store a few weeks ago. I'm trying, only partially successfully, to imitate the piano part on the guitar, but it's pretty tough. Might work out, though, with more practice.
Well, not as good as last time, that's for sure. We had a sudden cold snap, and the turnout was a lot smaller, since this is an outdoor mall. We made about half as much in tips, but it was probably half as many people, so maybe that's OK.
The bigger problem was that I didn't expect it to be quite that cold, and hadn't brought a jacket. I'm usually OK up (down?) to a point, just from the excitement, but towards the end, I was shivering, and my fingers were getting too stiff to play. The upside is that my fingertips were too cold to feel the pain of playing for 3 hours straight, and my stomach muscles were so tight that I had great breath support for singing -- although you could hear the shivering in my voice at times...
When we played at Brea Downtown last November, I brought a space heater -- I'll definitely be sure to do that again when we play on November 1st.
We did have a few people tuned in. A guy from work promised to come by, and actually did. And a nice couple sat down for the last hour or so, requested several songs, and hung out until the bitter (cold) end. The husband even went out to the car and fetched their jackets so they could stay and watch me turn blue. And a couple with a baby girl were there when we got there and stayed for a really long time, until the baby was yawning and clearly needed to get home to bed.
I'd learned a few new songs during the week to try out, and did so with Joni Mitchell's "People's Parties" and The Searchers' "Needles and Pins". But I usually keep untried and imperfectly-learned songs until near the end when there's less people around, but last night my fingers were too frozen to even attempt anything tricky, so I didn't try out "We Can Work It Out" and "Imagine". I guess I'll get to those next week at South Coast Plaza.
My voice was pretty ragged most of the night for some reason, but the acoustics are terrible anyway, so I'm not sure it mattered. Having to play so loud makes it impossible to really put any finesse into the songs, though I'm not sure why. It would seem like you could just play and sing like always, but have the Master volume knob up higher, but there's just so much background noise, the people and the fountain and all, that it's more like a shouting match than a song.
But that's OK, it's fun in a different way than the gigs where I get to feel like I'm really making music. And, especially at this place, I keep flashing on the wonder of what a shy boy like me is doing in such a public place, making such an amount of noise, in front of all these people.
I took some video, but there's nowhere to put the camera, so I hung it from the amp itself, and the audio was blown out. But I had also recorded the audio with my new iPod, as an experiment, so I laid the iPod's not-bad audio track onto the not-very-good video that my little camera grabs, and made a barely-passable movie of "Peaceful Easy Feeling", which is available here. (That's http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_mi2wZEMLzA if the link doesn't work.)
