Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 6Dec2008

I remember playing/singing at Tully's with a cold, but I've managed to avoid getting one for the last few years -- until now. The sore throat started Monday, and I was hoping to get over it (and I held off canceling), by Saturday night, but no such luck, but I forged ahead with lots of pseudo-ephedrine, couch syrup, and lemonade. I figured I would be able to sing at least for a while, and just quit whenever I fell apart.

I got there kinda late, stalling for the drugs to kick in, but there weren't many people there anyway. In fact, it was by far the smallest crowd we've had there yet, all night -- despite it being a fairly mild night for December. That was kinda bad for me, but bodes even worse for the retail industry...

But there were several friendly happy families out, and I played my Christmas tunes for them, and got some good response. Sold a Kid CD, even. In my delirium, I hadn't even remembered to burn any of my Christmas CDs, but it didn't really seem like anybody would have bought one, anyway. (I'll bring some next week, though.)

Later on, I had some uppity teenagers who vacillated between wanting me to play some songs they'd like, and being Too Cool hecklers. I think I managed to mostly win them over, ultimately, despite not really being in any mood to suffer idiots.

I guess I'm not really sure what the official schedule is -- I think they give us 4-hour blocks, but we've never figured we could/should fill it all. I thought I was supposed to start at 6, but I really started at 6:30, and by 9:30, I was getting pretty raspy, and announced that I was gonna do one more song. I thought I had done pretty well to survive that long, but a friendly college-age kid came bouncing along just as I was announcing that, and was begging for more -- especially Beatles. Well, since my last song *is* Beatles ("Golden Slumbers"), I figured, OK, I'd do a different Beatles song, then that one, so I did "Something" first, then "Golden Slumbers", and by then his friends had shown up, so I did *one* more, "All My Lovin'". It was nice to close with some people still "wanting more", as they say.

And I came home with $46 in tips, plus a free movie pass, tossed in by a kid who said he "didn't have any cash, but here's a movie". Seems like that's about the same (in cash) as last time, but with far fewer people, so, pretty good.

But I'm glad I decided not to bail out, as I was tempted to do. Even to empty tables, I had real fun playing those Christmas songs, though a lot of those are only sellable with a best-as-you-can Bing-it-up vocal. Maybe next week I'll be well enough to do them half-justice. But I also got to try out my new-this-year "Christmas Waltz". I've always liked the Hofstadterian self-reference in the lyrics where it informs you that it itself is in "three-quarter time", but upon learning to play it, I'm also impressed that it's an almost-constant (boringly overused standard) 4-chord loop, all through the song, until almost the end where it throws in one extra chord and a fermata... and finishes out with the lines being one half-loop out of phase to the lyrics. Accident, or genius?