K&W in Laguna Beach -- Thursday, 03Apr2014

I've always had bad luck with Artwalk nights -- everyone seems too hell-bent on getting to the next art gallery with a free cup of wine to slow down for some street music. But it was (around?) Spring Break, so I thought I'd give it another try.

And it was mostly a pretty big fail. I'd even decided to pander to the Party Girl crowd by playing all strummy rock and roll instead of my usual soft stuff. So I spent all day relearning a bunch of dance tunes.

This turned out to be a good plan, but not because I was right about the rock and roll working better It was because our old nemesis Sanchez set up across the street and was playing *really* loud. So I had to be equivalently loud just to be heard over his incessant droning D-tuned din.

Still it was kind of fun to play different types of songs for once -- all those rock 'n roll tunes, "867-5309", "Wake Up, Little Susie", "That Thing You Do", "Don't Stop Believing", "Amie", etc. And it worked for some folks...

A guy came by with a hand drum and asked if he could "sit in". I said, "Sure -- can't make it any worse!" He was actually quite good, and sensitive to the tempo and style of the songs I played while he was there. A while later, Warren's fiddle-player friend Doug Miller came by and tried to play along, too, but the rock stuff in non-fiddle-friendly keys I was playing didn't work very well for him.

Later on some people were sitting on the bench (including this cute steampunk girl) and I was feeling embarrassed by the lack of finesse of the songs I was playing (I always feel stupid playing rock and roll on an acoustic guitar with no bass nor drums), so I explained that I usually play softer songs, but that, because of the noise across the street, I had to play these loud ones to be heard. They said that they could hear me fine, which was hard to believe, but I took them at their word and tried some of my usual quieter stuff (but with the amp up pretty loud, of course). Apparently they could hear me better than I could, and *not* hear Sanchez as well as I could, 'cuz they seemed to really enjoy them.

Anyway, by 9:20 it was all but dead, and since I knew this was the first of four gigs in four days, I figured I'd better give my fingers, back, and knees a break and go on home.