Keith at Uncorked -- Friday, 11Mar2016

Pretty great night at the wine bar. Right at the start a couple came in that was music savvy, loved my songlist, made dozens of requests, stayed almost the whole night, and promised to be back again for my next gig there in two weeks. They even demanded the bar manager to bring me back every week. Out of the blue, the bar guy asked me to play "Puff, the Magic Dragon", which was the one song that the wife insisted that I *not* play, since it was her hated nickname in middle school. Weird.

Late in the evening, the guy, Terry, came over to ask me if he could sit in on harmonica, if he found one in his car. I said sure, and his wife came over while he was gone to assure me that he was a "professional harmonica player" (and had cancer, however that was relevant) and wouldn't embarrass me. Unfortunately, the only harp he found demanded songs in G, and I don't have a listing of what key my songs are in, so all we managed to do was me playing a little blues loop for him to jam on. And he was quite good.

That encouraged the owner to insist that a lady named Heather, who apparently is a regular on Karaoke Nights, to get up and sing with me. This seldom goes well, since my songs are, surprise!, written out in my vocal key, which tends to be a bit low for most women-folk. But, coincidentally, I had just learned Gloria Gaynor's disco hit "I Will Survive", just for such an occasion (though I thought it would be some drunk Woo Girl down on The Corner). Heather was a bit young to have heard it often enough to get all the words fit in, but she held her own.

She wanted to try something slower, so I suggested Linda Ronstadt's "Long, Long Time", which she thought she knew better than she actually did. After a few more songs she got up to try again, and managed to do quite well singing Carole King's version of "You Got a Friend" against my James Taylor version backing. I'm not sure it's a great precedent to let random people come up and sing -- since I've found that quite often, people who think they can, really can't -- but it made the owner happy and seemed to liven up the place.

The place closes at 11, and I'm supposed to play until 10 when it usually clears out anyway, but this time a group showed up just around 10 and kept me playing until 11 -- which is fine with me. And the owner went ahead and booked me for two more gigs in April, continuing my every-other-Friday pattern. If I'm not careful, all this just might give me ideas/confidence about trying to get booked at some other places...

The new amp worked really well, with almost no feedback issues, and wonderful sound. Not to mention a much easier setup and teardown from my old "full rig" with its two tripods, too-heavy amp to lift up and down from one, second speaker and its extra trip-wire, and requirement of two trips to the car, each way. Win-win!