Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 28Jan2011

Weird, crazy, fun, but somewhat disappointing (and cold) night.

When I first got there, there were some people messing with equipment on the stage. Oh no, not double booked again! But, they were tearing down, not setting up, so no problem except for the heart attack...

So I set up my stuff, and then noticed that the "house music" was even louder than usual, so I called the Maintenance guys to get them to turn it down. Their response: "It's a new system, we can't turn it down." Really?

Unbelievable. Seems like every time this gig starts to get reasonable, they come up with a new way to screw it up. Move the stage to someplace stupid, shut off the power unexpectedly in the middle of the show, and now, loud 80's rock playing almost as loud as I am. And this on top of them telling me that "due to the new layout and increased interest", they're going to start charging $50 to play on this stage, like they do for the other one. I don't think they'll get many takers if they can't figure out how to turn the music down...

It was doubly annoying because I had set up a bunch of video cameras to record with, but the recordings would be useless with the "second sound track" running through them, so there was no point in starting them up (except to catch the images here).

But there was nothing I could do about it, so I just powered through. While I was playing, of course, I was way louder than the house music (at least where I was standing), but as soon as I'd end a song, there it was again. Not sure how it sounded to people who were standing halfway between the house speakers and mine, though -- but I didn't see anyone edging away from the wall with the speakers on it, so it apparently wasn't as bad "out there" as it was on the stage.

Anyway, for some reason, it turned into "Guest Star Night". Early on, a girl came up and asked if her friend could sing. This seemed more joke than serious offer, and this idea seldom works out since all my songs are transposed into my vocal key, so I said, "Sure, but I only have one mic". Oddly, that seemed OK with them, so she came up on stage and wanted to sing "Time After Time". This was an even worse plan than almost any other song I do, because my arrangement of it is quite a bit different than the recording that she's used to, but we plowed through it, and since nobody but me could hear her when her version diverged from mine, it was no problem, and she seemed pleased to get to try. Go figure.

Later on, a kid carrying a guitar broke loose from his pack of friends, came up and asked if he could play a song. Nobody happened to be listening just then, and I was freezing, and getting not inconsiderably annoyed with the house music, so I said, "Sure". His guitar didn't have a pickup in it, so I gave him mine, and strapped the mic to his head, and stepped off the stage.

He started up a song I've never heard before (I decided later that he probably wrote it himself), stopped and fetched a lyric sheet out of his pocket, and finally managed to get through it. Couldn't hear a word of it, and his singing wasn't the greatest, but it took guts. As I was getting the guitar back, his friend asked if he could play one, too, and I couldn't see any reason not to let him, so he fired up a kind of speed-metal superfast strummy thing, did about half of it and quit. Thanks guys, that'll be plenty.

And then, almost at quitting time, a young Persian lady marched straight up to me from way across the quad. I said, "You look like somebody on a mission!", and she said that her husband had dared her to sing a song. Probably they had seen the proceedings earlier on, and decided that this was OK. She came up and I strapped the mic on her, and asked what song she wanted to do: "Let it Be". I strummed a little of it, and she decided that it was a bad key for her, so I mentally transposed it back to the original key, and fired it up. She wasn't bad, though a bit matter-of-fact, but I was mostly pleased to be able to play it through in the "wrong" key -- looking at one set of chords, but playing another, without completely crashing her.

Ended up with $44 in the jar, which is low for this place, but not bad, and understandable considering how cold it was. I did *not* split it with my co-stars...