K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 13Feb2016

Quite a night! I got a new Li-Ion battery for the amp that carried us through six and a half hours of play before giving out. I hadn't realized how the old battery arrangement was keeping me from overdoing it -- now I can play until my back is *completely* destroyed! Yay?

Anyway, it was pretty thin at first, though I roped in a pretty big bunch of older couples with a James Taylor run. But as the evening goes on toward 2am, the average age of the passers-by asymptotically approaches 21, in inverse proportion to blood alcohol level, so in the later hours it got pretty crazy.

I brought the drum pedal and it sounds pretty good for some of the faster songs, and I built a tambourine accessory that sounds good for some others. Unfortunately, I could only use it for half the night...

Around 11, Warren was off on a break and two young dudes showed up while I was playing "American Pie". One of them asked "Can I join you?" and I said "Sure" in between lines, expecting that he meant to stand up by me and sing along. But he grabbed Warren's guitar and strapped it on! I couldn't very well stop him, and wondered what made him think he would know the chords anyway.

Turns out he didn't actually play guitar in the first place, and was just pretending to play it, and trying to sing along too -- but he was massively drunk and couldn't keep up at all. His perceptive and sober friend, James, managed to get the guitar safely away from him before Warren came back, but couldn't convince him to step away from the "stage" where he kept entreating me to teach him how to sing. I wasn't sure how to do that, then and there, even if I had wanted to, but managed to eventually tell him that the first step would be to try it when he's sober.

James then asked if he could play a song, and I said that I couldn't let him play Warren's, but he could play mine. He played "Blackbird" quite well, and was an astonishingly fast learner when I pointed out two small errors in his version. I was impressed, and when they started to leave, I thought I'd give him a card. Unfortunately, while we were talking I had hooked my head mic onto my pants pocket, and in the process of chasing James down, it fell out, and I stepped on the wire and yanked it out, dead.

Which put me dead in the water for the rest of the evening -- except! I have a spare handheld mic in my bag for the occasional guest singer, and once Warren fetched a mic stand out of his car, and we were back up (though drum-less -- too much for my little brain to try to work the drum and a strange mic setup at the same time). And a good thing we figured out a way to keep going, too, 'cuz it was just starting to get interesting!

We had a big batch of Woo Girls come by -- perfectly timed as I was running through their National Anthem, "Sweet Caroline". Sadly, they were gone as quickly as they came -- my "place" has a great band, but without a liquor license...

But the unforeseen problem with using a boom mic (versus my head-mounted one) is that crazy people (or drunk ones) assume that they can come on up and take over the singing chores. It's disruptive, and hardly ever works out well (since drunk people tend to sing as well as they walk), but it's fun if it doesn't go too far.

Anyway, it was a crazy, long, fun, night. But finally at a little after 2, when the streets were nearly empty again, the new amp battery ran out and gave me permission to go on home.