K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 11July2015

Quite a night! We started on the Fingerhut corner at 8, moved to the ice cream corner when the Tommies left at 10, and played until 2am.

As I was setting up, I realized that I had cleverly decided to pack the iPad music book somewhere other than the guitar case, and then promptly cleverly forgot all about it and left it behind. Fortunately, I have a backup three-ring binder copy that lives in the van, but I played the whole first two hours from memory. Which, since I suck at memorizing songs, meant maybe 10 songs, and some heavy repetition.

It also meant that the obscure songs that are in the 300+ electronic version were unavailable in the 150-ish paper one. Like the Johnny Cash songs that a guy came up and requested (with lavish tip) to sing. We faked "Folsom Prison Blues" anyway ('cuz, let's face it, Johnny Cash wasn't the world's most sophisticated songwriter), and the guy was pretty good. Just hitting those Cash low notes was impressive. He was back a while later to sing "Sweet Caroline" (also not in the book), and "Piano Man". His big personality and bigger gestures gathered the crowd that had been eluding me at that hour.

Same as the birthday girl who asked to play my guitar and sing "Dock of the Bay" earlier on. Maybe I should consider changing the act to all-karaoke -- it seems to attract bigger crowds than just me all the time...

Anyway, I was feeling annoyed that we're apparently eternally consigned to the "late shift" after Tom decides to go home, but although we did OK from 8-10 on the Fingerhut side, we did pretty well from 10-2 on the ice cream side. Of course, we'd do way better yet if we could play the whole time on the ice cream side...