Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 11April2009

Well, as much as I was hoping that Spring had sprung, apparently it hasn't yet. I was hoping for a mild evening and a bigger turnout, but got neither.

Fortunately, I remembered last weeks shivering, and brought a sweater *and* my jacket, and had asked them to bring out a heater too. There was no heater when I got there, but I soldiered on hoping that it would appear as it got darker and colder. It didn't, but I had put the phone number for Maintenance in my phone, and at 8:00, when I realized I was already cold and had two hours to go, I called them. Fortunately, the guys are real friendly and brought one out right away. That helped a lot with the cold.

But didn't do anything about the crowd, or lack thereof. I'm starting to get the impression that a gloomy day (understandably) just turns people off of coming out to outdoor malls. I assume that the stores' receipts would show the same trend as my tip jar does.

Right off the bat, though, a group of "rocker dudes" showed up to sit and smoke. I thought I'd have a hard time with them, but despite the tattoos and all the hard rock band logos sewn onto their no-sleeve jeans jackets, they seemed to honestly like my stuff. One dude literally asked for "Fire and Rain" -- non-ironically! And the "hardest" of them all (most patches, tattoos, and hair) asked for Willie Nelson's "Always On My Mind" and then Sting's "Fields of Gold"; two of the most romantic songs on my list. They stayed for over an hour, and before they left they came up and basically dumped all the change in their pockets into the jar -- over 3 dollars in small change. You just never know...

After that, I played to almost nobody the rest of the night, until Daleen and the girls showed up at 9:30 or so. I had been "saving" my new Beatle songs so Acacia could hear them, so I ran through lots of those, and then it was time to go.

I had my movie camera set up again, but I was playing pretty poorly, and the camera's "aim" was off most of the night. The girls fixed it up for me when they got there, and having someone to play for makes me play better, so the last bit was somewhat usable. Here are links to: Graceland (better than (and replacing) last week's)
Carolina In My Mind
The Water Is Wide
Hey, Jude
If I Fell

I brought in $22 in tips, which is, I think, a new low for Spectrum, but which would be a darn good night at a Borders, so I shouldn't complain. My bigger concern is the (now) two crappy performances in a row. Last week I had the cold to blame it on, but this week I'm going with the intimidation of the movie camera, and the lack of people to play to. It really makes an embarrassing amount of difference to my playing and singing if there's someone recognizably listening or not. Oddly though, the camera, representing *lots* of potential people actually listening, makes me play worse.