Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 11Feb2011

What a great night! Most pure *fun* I've had in ages. At the risk of besmirching my 56-year zero-drugs policy / record / reputation, I think I was a bit high on cold medicine and Mountain Dew, and feeling completely uninhibited -- or as uninhibited as an old suburban white boy gets.

Now, I've been playing almost every weekend for nine years now, and I'm completely over the whole stage fright thing (except to just get that first song started). It doesn't even phase me to make mistakes anymore -- for one thing, "Hey, nobody's perfect", and for another, "It's too late now!" But I still have enough pride to want to do the best job I can with each song, so there's always the self-induced pressure to get it right.

But this time, even that seemed to be out the window. Not that I was playing sloppy and screwing up a lot -- but apparently, after all this time, I can play those songs more on automatic pilot than I think I can. And being able to just let it go and "let 'er fly", is, well, exhilarating.

I felt like I was connecting with the songs more than ever, and really giving them more oomph in the singing. And, of course, it becomes a feedback loop -- the more I gave the songs, the more people were tuning in, which makes me give it even more. And actually (hopefully?) it may have been entirely that audience feedback, and not the pseudoephedrine/caffeine cocktail.

It was a nice night, and I had the feeling that there were people really listening, basically all the time. It's odd -- the audience is kinda far away. This time, I got two opposite feelings about it: 1) They're so far away that it doesn't really matter what I do, and 2) They're so far away, I can't tell, but they might be really into it. Either way, I was swingin' for the fence.

And lots of people responded. I had groups come stand up close, so I *knew* they were listening. A big clump of 8th graders came and requested songs, and then were requesting the next song even before the previous one was half over. Uh, guys, I can only sing one song at a time. Lots of families with little kids dancing, so I flipped to my new "dance tunes" section in the book and went for it.

And toward the end, when I'm playing for the "don't want the date to end" crowd, I got into a set of sentimental stuff and was really laying it on thick, and they were eating it up. I was really cranking, and it was really working.

Or maybe that's the cough medicine talking. But, like a drunk who thinks he's funny -- please don't tell me different.