Keith at Two Gigs in HB -- Sunday, 03May2015

I saw an announcement on Facebook of a guy looking for bands. I sent him a message and he was actually looking for a band to play a Mother's Day event in Huntington Beach. I told him that mothers love my stuff, so he booked me.

Turns out it was a "Mother's Day Boutique", the weekend *before* Mother's Day, and I was the opening shift from 12:30-1:30. So I ended up playing the whole time to the six or eight ladies that were there selling scarves, jewelry, and vintage clothes -- and nobody else. Epic fail. I guess I'm lucky it was only one hour...

And to make it worse, the "act" after me was the owner's teenage son, singing his Sinatra imitation to iPod backing tracks. If that's not humiliating, I don't know what is.

But when the booking guy told me that the Mother's Day Boutique gig was only an hour long, I said that I preferred to play longer if/when I drag my stuff out. So he offered to let me play at a restaurant/bar in downtown Huntington Beach called "25 Degrees" afterwards and I leapt at the chance.

It's a trendy little place with fancy burgers, fancy appetizers, and fancy drinks. I was scheduled to play their "Happy Hour", from 3 to 6. It holds about 75 people, and was only about one-quarter full when I got there, but by 4:30 or so, it was so jammed up that people were coming in the door and leaving again 'cuz there was nowhere to sit.

Because it's small and people are there to hang with their friends, it was really, really noisy. I was worried that I was just going to be treated as background music, but people started clapping -- just a few at first (which usually fizzles out), but gaining in strength after every song.

This encouraged me, so I passed out a few song lists to the people that were closest, and started taking requests. I had taken a cue from the music on the house system as I was setting up (and remembered what had probably been the problem at my Tommy Bahama's audition), so I was playing my up-tempo stuff, and a couple of people started dancing! This is pretty unusual at 3:30 in the afternoon.

It was tough, with so much noise, especially since I was playing through the house sound system, and was apparently the only one who couldn't hear it, back in my little corner. But I kept stepping out to hear what it was like for everyone else, and it was pretty reasonable. I just had to play on faith, which, after all this time, I can pretty much do.

A guy came in with his wife and little kids, and after a while he came over to request "Puff" for his daughter. A while later he came back over and asked if he could hire me to play at his party in two weeks. Absolutely!

So, despite not being able to hear myself over the din, I had a great time. And I guess when you're paying $8 for a burger and $4 for fries, you can afford to tip well, so I almost doubled what they paid me in tips.

The real problem was the parking -- the meters wanted $3 for the two hour max, so I had to keep running out and dumping more quarters in. People were having so much fun making requests that they wouldn't let me go and I ended up staying 45 minutes over -- only finally forcefully quitting to hurriedly pack my stuff up to barely get back to the meter in time.

Afterwards, I realized that this was exactly what I've been looking for -- a friendly casual place to play (indoors) where people like my stuff -- and I'd only accidentally stumbled into it. Bring on more gigs here, and more places like it!