Warren meant to meet me down there, but he was detained by a sudden work emergency, so I was solo. There was, of course, almost nobody out anyway, especially early on, except some locals zooming by. But hey, once the stuff's all set up, it's fun to just play.
The dilemma, when nobody's listening, is whether to play instantly-recognizable stuff to try to drag in the passers-by, or whether to just have fun playing new and/or obscure stuff for my own entertainment. I chose the latter, for a while, but when more people started to appear (after dinner, I guess), I started playing my more popular stuff.
The last hour or so was actually pretty great -- I had one *very* appreciative guy (who left a $10), and a nice couple of ladies who clearly had somewhere else to get to, but who I detained by playing some of their favorites. They even bought a CD. And I had a lady come up and tell me that it was her 31st anniversary, and could I play "their song", which was James Taylor's "Up on the Roof", which I do happen to know, so that was pretty sweet. I followed it with some more love songs and they stayed and cuddled for a while.
Had a few odd requests: One guy asked me if I knew the theme from "Love Story" ("Where do I begin, to tell the story..."), which, yeah no. Another lady asked me if I knew "that song from 'Ghost'", which is "Unchained Melody". I've looked into that song, actually, and considered it, though it's so "showy" that I'm afraid that I'll never have the chutzpah to do it in public -- kind of like "Bridge Over Troubled Waters", which I have in the book, but seldom perform. And a little foreign dude asked for "Moonshadow" (which I've poked at, but is hard for me because of the odd guitar style), but he settled for "Wild World".
I was surprised to find $50 in the jar, most of which had to have appeared in that last hour. Now that there's nobody else trying to play down there, I'm thinking that I could still "get" The Corner and do almost as well, audience-wise, even if I show up at 7 or 7:30, and just play that "sweet spot".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment