Keith at Long Beach Towne Center -- 23Feb2013

I got an email from a guy who saw me at Spectrum, and he also plays at malls and gave me the email address of the lady who books Long Beach Towne Center, Riverside Plaza, and Chino Spectrum. I emailed her my interest and webpage address, and she immediately booked me to fill a cancellation in Long Beach, just on the basis of the MP3s and videos there. Cool!

That all happened Thursday, and on Saturday, even before I'd played the gig, she offered me some more gigs, so I got two more at Long Beach and one in Riverside (which pays actual money, which is good 'cuz it's pretty far away!).

Long Beach was interesting. There's a huge permanent stage, with cool roof/sails and real lighting. And they send, incredibly, a Sound Guy with really nice equipment. Big speakers, and a big monitor "wedge" pointed back at me. It sounded *great* -- noticeably (and covet-inducingly) better than my stuff.

But it's all set up along a cross-traffic walkway, across which is the food court. People who wanted to listen would stop and stand in the middle of the walkway, or sit at the tables of the food court, or along the raised edge of its floor, or on the wheelchair ramp, or on the stairs themselves. None of those places are very close, or inviting, but I snagged a pretty good number of people to hang around anyway.

It feels a lot like the (now extinct) food court stage at Irvine Spectrum -- more of a "wander by" kind of crowd than the "standing in the middle of traffic" feel of the new stage at Spectrum. The other strange part is that they have two bands per night, one from 6 to 7, then an hour to change out the equipment, and a second band from 8 to 9. I was the first one, and maybe more of the older folks are out for the "early shift", so a lot of people stopped to listen a bit.

Long Beach is pretty close to my mom's house, and my aunt and uncle live really close, so they came and stayed the whole hour. That made it easy to get started in this unfamiliar place, to have some friendly faces to sing to, right from the start. After a while, a lady sat down who was really liking my stuff -- she'd applaud after the first few notes of a song when she'd recognize what it was going to be. James Taylor gets that for every song, but it sure doesn't happen for me, that I can remember! When I introduced "The Boxer", she squealed and clapped at just the name of it. And I was about to make a joke about nobody knowing that song's real name...

When 7:00 rolled around, I was prepared to quit (despite it seeming like I'd only just started), but the sound guy was OK with my going over some, since the next guy wasn't even there yet. That was nice because when I said that I was going to have to quit, someone started shouting "Encore!".

I played one or two more, and then the sound guy gave me a "three song warning". I did "Carolina In My Mind", and then "Desperado", and then realized that those are two of the longest songs I know. I thought I'd better do a short one for the last song, but someone in the audience shouted out "Hotel California" -- which I had done as my opening song (like always), but figured it was a good closing song, too, despite it being, whoops, probably the *longest* song in the book. Fortunately, the sound guy didn't seem to notice or mind.

So I probably only got to play for an hour and twenty minutes, and made $50 in tips (not counting the *outrageous* over-tip by my not-so-sneaky mom), so that's pretty good. It does seem a shame to go to the trouble of driving up there and getting all set up, only to play for an hour or so...

Afterwards, I packed up as quick as I could and had dinner with my family in the food court. They went home after that, but I wanted to see what the second band sounded like, and what kind of reception they'd get. It was a young guy doing that hipster neo-folkie kind of stuff, and, well, I was the only one listening. He played and sang OK, but it all sounded the same, and wasn't familiar to anyone (originals, maybe?).

Anyway, it was cool to have a new place to play, despite the quirks. And it's great to be "on the list" for some more gigs at even more places. And, of course, having gigs at places makes you more appealing to yet *other* places, so hopefully I can parlay this into even more new gigs!