A terrific, record breaking, night. Perfect weather and a summer Saturday brought out lots of people, and they all end up coming past the dead-center Main Stage at some point. And they were all apparently in the mood for some live music, 'cuz I had lots of people in front of the stage, on the planterbox benches, and when I'd remember to turn around, the tables were all full and sometimes there were people sitting on the fountain edge benches, all the way around.
I get lots of requests from the teens for Taylor Swift songs, so I learned her "Mean" song the day before. My wife and daughters came by, so I dragged my daughters up to sing it along with me, and they saved me from getting lost more than once. It's kinda tough to learn to play and sing a song that you've only heard a few times, but I'll get it. It's a cute song and it does seem to go over well.
Later on, one of my patented Kids' Dance Parties started up, and with the volume of traffic pouring by, it quickly snowballed into the biggest one ever. I had 15 or more kids at one point, and with the attendant parents, strollers, etc., we were clogging up the whole plaza to where people could hardly get through. Definitely a new record for "pulled in" audiences.
One of the moms was trying to get her kids situated to take a picture in front of me, so when that song ended, I got down on the edge of the stage to pose for one. Suddenly a half-dozen other moms were out, cameras in hand, rounding up their kids for a picture. That was odd, and fun.
Earlier that Saturday, I had checked my CD inventory and figured I'd better make some more up, just in case. So I had lots, I thought, when I put 22 CDs out. But at the end of the night, there were only 2 left. That's probably a record, too.
The fountain came on full-force at 10:30, a half hour later than last time. But I still had lots of people, so I just turned it up and kept playing anyway. About 15 minutes later, the horrible salsa-jazz muzak came back on, loudly, so I had to turn it up a little more. I was thinking, "Are they trying to get rid of me? What's next, guys with firehoses? Tear gas?"
The fountain shut off entirely at 11, but that just made the muzak more obnoxious, so although I tried to play some more, it was no use. When I finally gave up and quit, there was $183 in the jar, another new record. Also in the tip jar was a napkin-note saying, "You have a beautiful soulful sound. NICE", which is worth way more than the dollar bill it was wrapped in.
At Art Walk last week, a couple of people mentioned the "Fete de la Musique", which I'd never heard of, but turns out to be Laguna's annual street music festival. With only 9 days notice, and almost no web presence, I didn't think I could get in, but the organizer responded to my last-ditch email, must have liked what he saw on my webpage, and offered me a slot -- as long as I didn't need electricity.
I was already planning to build a battery-powered street-stealth amp rig, so I took the offer, and quickly finished the project, but using my real amp, not the little hide-able one. That involved buying a new battery for my battery-powered (but long dead) amp, and trying to figure out a way to power the AC adapter-powered harmony box and wireless mic receiver.
I got it all working by Friday, but that didn't give me any time to do battery-life tests on anything, so I wasn't sure if or when they'd die on me. I had to prepare to play the gig with fall-back setups for every possible failure -- all the way down to just playing acoustically, me and my guitar.
So I was completely prepared for something to go wrong, but it all worked perfectly, and with battery time to spare. And a pretty good time it was, too. I was stationed at the corner of PCH and Ocean, right across from Main Beach and the volleyball court, so I had a lot of foot traffic. And, unfortunately, a lot of car traffic, which wasn't half bad compared to the all-too-frequent Harley traffic... (I wonder what the Harley people are going to do when all vehicles are electric. Play recordings of loud obnoxious combustion engines as they go by? Amplify some 60-cycle hum?)
Anyway, it was fun to play out there and actually be audible. A lot of people breezed on by, but a lot of people stopped to listen. And a lot of people in cars stuck at the red light would roll down their windows to see what I was up to, and clap or give me the thumbs-up as they went past.
I had two little girls who dragged their parents to a stop and stayed to dance for 20 minutes or more. And the cute kids were a magnet for all the grammas going by, so I developed a little crowd for a while there.
And for a while I had a guy who was obviously not hitting on all cylinders, trying to sing along on these songs he clearly loved, but he'd long since lost his ability to keep stuff like that sorted out in his head. So I'd sing a line, which would remind him of the words, and he'd shout out the last word or two in the gap before the next line. It was sweet that he was so moved, but also *incredibly* distracting, and I had a real challenge keeping the song together. He "sang along" in his disjointed way for a half-dozen songs, and finally decided to go back to what he had come down for: holding up a sign in the "Legalize Marijuana" demonstration across the street at Main Beach. Dude, spun-out guys like you are *not* doing The Cause any favors!
The worst part, though, was when I was all done and had to drag the Equipment Choo-Choo back up the cliff to my car. Indeed, dreading the climb, I kept playing as long as I could, just waiting for it to cool down enough. I had to drag it backwards most of the way, stopping every 30 feet (that's 10 feet vertically) to rest. About 3/4 of the way there I decided that the equipment was cheaper than a heart attack, so I tucked it inside a vacant carport, walked the rest of the way to my car, and came back for it. Next time I have the full raft of stuff with me, I'm paying for parking at street level!
Wow -- what a crazy, great, crazy-great night! I started out at Twig, as usual for the First Thursday "Art Walk". Had a pretty good turnout early on, and lots of fun with Susie, her life-of-the-party sister "Don't-Call-Me-Noni", and Noni's friend, all shaking my kids'-giveaway egg-rattles and baby tambourine, and singing along out on the sidewalk to "Don't Stop Believing". It's so much fun when it turns into a party...
But by 8:30 it seemed to be Over, so I packed up and was driving back up PCH by 9:00, and was surprised by how many people were still thronging the sidewalks. I decided to turn up Forest (the main "music street") to see if/who was still playing. As I went by "Greeter's Corner" where Jim & Warren usually play, I saw Warren, but no Jim. And half a block up there was a rare sight -- an empty parking spot -- so I snagged it.
April was holding forth in the Alley, as expected, but like every other time I've seen her, she was busy talking to someone, so I've never actually heard her allegedly great singing. Across the street from Warren was the fledgling Steven & Noah duo. I went over to see how "Jim & Warren" were doing, but it turned out that Jim had gotten delayed enough that it wasn't worth coming out, so Warren was soldiering on as a solo.
Not that he really wanted to -- he immediately asked me to get my guitar which was pretty close-by in my car, and we launched into whatever songs I thought I could remember all the words to without my Book, and could play Loud. I beat my poor index finger to a pulp, using it as a pick and strumming songs that I usually play with, shall we say, a bit more finesse.
Indeed, it was harder than usual to remember the words to the songs because my brain clearly has the words linked to the hand actions, and since I was playing them "wrong", the associations were broken. Weird how the brain works...
But we got through a bunch of classics, to much delight of the assembled cast of characters: Drunk Guy Who Wants to Sing, Crazy Spin-Dancing Lady, Maurice the Foreign Lothario, Mikey the new Greeter (who switches the Crazy Loon character on and off at will), and several Silent and Serious observers who got pulled in by the music. Not sure why this particular, peculiar, crew assembles around Warren and not, say, Steven and Noah right across the street...
Anyway, it was big fun. Warren has a mic on a stand that I was able to sing through while stress-testing my guitar strings. This was nice for two reasons: (1) I could be heard a bit better, and (2) it made me more confident (or less paranoid) about using a mic/amp on the streets. I'm now only 1 for 2, getting busted for amp use, instead of 1 for 1. That helps me decide to build up my own (subtly) amplified rig for street use.
Warren decided that he'd had enough about 10:00, and since my alarm goes off at 5:30, that seemed like a pretty good idea. But I couldn't resist going across the street to once again try to jam with Steven and Noah, despite their down-tuned guitars. They were celebrating a huge-tip night, due to the big turnout and Steven's aggressive approach where he hard-to-ignore-edly just asks passers-by if he can play a song for them. He usually tunes this to who they are, e.g., "Hey lovebirds, can we play a love song for you tonight?" It's way too bold for me, but it was really working -- people who were snagged in by it usually left a tip as well. Important for these guys who are apparently living on this...
After a while of that, I decided that I really did need to get to bed, so I walked back to my car by The Alley, and heard a kid banging away on a solo mandolin and singing old-timey Bluegrass stuff. Wow! I started to put my guitar back in the car, but just couldn't resist putting it back on and walking over to try to lend some guitar support.
I played along to that song and one other, figuring out the chords as we went, since I can't "read" mandolin chords like I can a guitar's. Three fashionable ladies surprised me by stopping to listen to the kid and his "down in the holler" style, telling us how great "we" were (I told them that it was "all him", and I was just strumming along), and asking him his story when the song was over.
His name is Zack, he's 16 (!), lives in Mission Viejo, and his dad taught him how to play. He plays in a couple of Bluegrass bands at festivals, mostly in Northern California. I was ready to play with him some more, but it was 11:00 and his mom pulled up to take him home to get to bed for school tomorrow, providing me with some apparently-needed collateral parental guidance as well.
All-in-all, a crazy fun musical night. Definitely need to do that again, even if my fingers still hurt...
I had so much fun last Sunday that I decided to try playing the streets of Laguna Beach again. Of course, it wasn't Memorial Day weekend anymore, and the gloom that finally burned off inland was more persistent down by the beach, so it was a pretty low turnout. I played from 4:00 to 6, and only collected $7, though the smiles and thumbs-up were plentiful.
And I seem to be getting somewhat famous -- a guy came by who recognized me from my Farmer's Market gigs, and a lady stopped to somewhat inaccurately exclaim, "We saw you at Spectrum last week! You're really good!"
Early on I was visited by another local player, Steven, who probably wanted to set up in the Alley, but since I had beaten him to it, ended up at the Corner. He's probably also frustrated by the (lack of) acoustics over there, but since he strums, he's got a lot better chance of being heard than I do.
But when I quit at 6, I decided to go down and listen to him for a while -- "maybe put on a harmony", in the words of Joni Mitchell. I got there just in time to help another guy, Noah, improvise a shoestring strap for his beat-up old guitar -- he and Steven have apparently started experimenting as a duo.
Steven is quite good, plays well and knows a lot of songs, though not so many of the words thereto. He tends to sing a line of two and make up lyrics for the rest, sometimes consisting of "And this is the second verse of this song I don't know..." kinds of stuff. It's actually kind of charming.
Noah, on the other hand, is all over the map. He knows a lot of songs, and just bashes pieces of them out, willy-nilly. They got into a Beatles jag, but Noah favors the obscure ones (like "Girl" and "I'm Only Sleeping"). Steven tried to steer toward more well-known stuff ("Standing There", etc.), and Noah knows those, too, and sings the high harmony like a champ.
I sat on the bench opposite them, and since my guitar wasn't in a case, I could just strum along and hope to catch the passing tourists in a kind of reinforcing Surround Sound. But that was tricky since they have their guitars tuned down a half-step (presumably to make the songs easier to sing). It's nearly impossible to take songs written in, say, E, and play them in E-flat. But with some creative capoing, I had a blast trying to keep up.
Steven got Noah off of the (chunks of) Beatles tunes and started on a Credence set, playing songs he knew the chords to ("Proud Mary", "Up Around the Bend", and the particularly appropriate "Willy and the Poor Boys"), teaching them to Noah, but having to look up the words on his phone balanced on top of his guitar. He understandably thought I'd know those songs, and I do, but I don't actually play any of them 'cuz Fogerty sings way too high for me.
Anyway, crazy as it was, that public jam for an hour more than made up for the previous disappointing two. But as I was leaving, there seemed to be an uptick in traffic, as the 7pm dinner crowd was arriving. I guess I'll have to figure out by experience when the best times to play happen -- maybe earlier in the afternoon for the beach crowd, and then later on for dinner time?
I get lots of requests from the teens for Taylor Swift songs, so I learned her "Mean" song the day before. My wife and daughters came by, so I dragged my daughters up to sing it along with me, and they saved me from getting lost more than once. It's kinda tough to learn to play and sing a song that you've only heard a few times, but I'll get it. It's a cute song and it does seem to go over well.
Later on, one of my patented Kids' Dance Parties started up, and with the volume of traffic pouring by, it quickly snowballed into the biggest one ever. I had 15 or more kids at one point, and with the attendant parents, strollers, etc., we were clogging up the whole plaza to where people could hardly get through. Definitely a new record for "pulled in" audiences.
The fountain shut off entirely at 11, but that just made the muzak more obnoxious, so although I tried to play some more, it was no use. When I finally gave up and quit, there was $183 in the jar, another new record. Also in the tip jar was a napkin-note saying, "You have a beautiful soulful sound. NICE", which is worth way more than the dollar bill it was wrapped in.
