Date: Saturday 15 November
Venue: Leaf & Bean Coffee Co., Chili NY
Duration: two hours (8:00 PM - 10:00 PM)
Proceeds: $7.00. Seven. Fucking. Dollars. (More on that later)
Wore
black jeans
black shoes & belt
white button-down long-sleeved shirt
wolf-hammer-cross pendant
Fancying myself a jazzman, I considered, for a while, wearing my suit, or perhaps just the gabardine slacks and a decent tie—collar open, of course. Trying this look out in the mirror, I had an epiphany: This doesn't make you look like Miles, or even like Harry Connick Jr—it makes you look like a drunken salesman singing karaoke in the airport lounge while waiting for his flight back to Topeka.
The Crowd
Good, as it always is here. Older people, engaged, chatty, well-informed, and a scattering of young families—all the sorts of people I can engage with, during the set and at the break.
The Rundown
Sweet William has rearranged the room since the last time I played here, so the performer ( and the performer's tip-jar) is now at the back, instead of, you know, right by the front door so as to catch each patron both entering and leaving. A stunning innovation, this, allowing you to play a great show, fill the house, and STILL MAKE NO MONEY.
I don't know—I can see the point, as it divides the room neatly into a comfortable, intimate space to see music and a more chaotic space in which to order and consume food & bevvies; but it also make it much less likely that a casual customer will drop a buck in the basket, as doing so entails making a trek back beyond the room-divider. Last time I played this room, I was upfront—and though I played a show not as good, to a house not as full, I made four times as much money. Why? Because you had to walk past the basket on your way into or out of the house.
In my church-musician days, I once met an organist who would only play instrumentals at the while the offering was being taken—never anything that people had to sing. Why? Because, he said, the take goes down when the congregation has to sing at the offertory: "They can't reach for their hymnals and their wallets at the same time," he said.
Lesson: People may sincerely wish to contribute to a good cause—but their generosity fades if you make it difficult for them to do so.
Highlights
Start with the lowlight first: "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" was a slaughter—mutually assured destruction: I destroy it, and it kills me. Kills me dead. And I so, so wanted it to be good; it's a rolling-and-tumbling groove with a sweet little Django-style stinger of a solo, melody punctuated by fat crashes of ascending chords. But my fingers, so nimble and relaxed in rehearsal, are thick and stiff. Playing too hard. I think—I think—that the amplification problems that will plague me throughout this set begin here; that I can't hear my own guitar well, which leads me to overcompensate. A nasty trifecta—a new song, the first fingerpicked song of the night (after the strumfest of "Sweet Thing," this is, in effect, a soundcheck), and a fucked-up cable connection conspire in disaster.
Introduce "Baby Just Cares" by saying,"The end of the year is the time we remember those who've died—much as I'm doing up here..."
Pull out one of my favorite absurdist between-song riffs; "I'd like to introduce you to the band..." Long pause. "...ah, maybe later."
"Join Together" is always a treat for me (I can hack around in drop D all night); a mess, but a joyous, ramshackle mess. But the fun is slightly dampened by my guitar cable giving up the ghost entirely at the second chorus—it literally falls out of the guitar's body. Am I deterred? Reader, I am not; I lean hard into the instrument mic and saw the bastard through. Over the long vamp, I call out, "Everybody, look at the person to your left... now the person to your right... See, I told you I was gonna introduce you to the band!"
At the set break I assess the damage: the cord's okay, but the CC67's own jack assembly—which is held inside the hollow body by a nut and washer around the jackhole—is coming loose, as it has a tendency to do. Now, I've had the nut fall off the outside of the guitar, and the jack assembly fall inside the soundbox, and it is a bitch to get back in place—you've got to unstring the whole thing and fish around trying to get the plug lined up with the drill-hole—and that's assuming you haven't lost the little nut in the first place when it fell onto the floor and under your fridge... I've no desire to repeat this, so I finger-tighten the nut as best I can, and soldier on.
The second set begins with The Dessert Challenge, a trick I swiped from Dan: I pledge to buy the dessert of choice for anyone who can identify artist who originally recorded the song in question (in this case "Winter Song"). The challenge, tonight, goes unanswered.
"Might As Well Be Spring" redeems me for "Don't Get Around," I think. It's a lively little bossa nova (my version owes a lot to Astrud Gilberto's, from the Carnegie Hall concert with Stan Getz; knowing that Getz was having an affair with Astrud at the time makes some of that record's spoken interludes downright creepy, as when Getz introduces Astrud as "the wife of the great artist")—played breakneck but deft; it lilts—and it's the best "jazz" moment of the night.
It's got the best spoken intro of the night, too. See, at the turnaround the lyric uses the word gay, in its original sense—I feel so gay, in a melancholy way—and for a while I felt kind of strange singing it. I knew, intellectually, there was no real reason that should be so, but there it was. And rather than try to gloss over it, or push those feelings aside, I turn it into a riff on language and sexual stereotyping, starting with an affectionate crack at Queer Eye For The Straight Guy (with its dodgy premise that basic life-skills—grooming oneself, cooking, dressing, keeping a home, and handling oneself socially—are somehow gay-specific, rather than simply prerequisites for grown-ups of all orientations), into the familiar linguistic culture shock we experience in high school when we read a 19th Century novel (sample sentence: "The fading light revealed a queer figure, bent, as he was, beneath a bundle of faggots..."), and at last into the admission that Here I am, straight, married with kids, and singing show tunes—all bets are off, folks. The crowd, God bless 'em, keys right into it; sometimes, you just dial the right wavelength.
Some guy makes the mistake of asking me why "Downtown" is the greatest song ever written. I don't think he's quite expecting the answer I give him.
I've been playing "Walking The Long Miles Home" at or near the end of my sets for some months now. It's one of my favorite Richard Thompson songs, successfully blending several modes of songwriting—and it's Richard's songwriting that I value far more than his much-vaunted guitar-playing. He's a fascinating case for tracking a songwriter's progress; he's been performing and writing for so long (35 years!), and so prolifically, that you can chart his growth by decades. He's never produced an album that didn't show some flash of brilliance, but he's always suffered from inconsistency. 1986's Daring Adventures was a nadir of sorts; 1999's Mock Tudor (from which "Walking" is drawn) may have been a peak—all killer, and, for once, no filler.
Richard's always been a great character writer, and he's always been capable of great humor, and he's always had an ear for a great tune—but he hasn't always been able to bring the three strains together. The lighter moments on his earlier records tended toward cheap laughs, whimsy, even outright inanity; not so "Walking The Long Miles Home." Though it's a funny song, there aren't any boffo punchlines—it's more of a wry, affectionate character sketch.
And it's a joy to play—loping country-blues rhythm; tasty double-stop licks that let me show off a little, but which never outstay their welcome; drop D fingerpicking with alternating bass in a loose, lazy groove. As always, I end with a smile on my face.
What I Learned
Goodwill does not translate into cash all by itself. In gigging as in busking as in real estate; location, location, location.
Take five minutes to take an actual, honest-to-Allah soundcheck. Check your equipment thoroughly before you go on.
Self-deprecation is only an effective defense if you don't actually suck.
An audience likes it when you talk to them, but they like it even more when you listen.
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