Last night was yet another interesting night of music and friendship. St. Elmo’s is a standard coffee joint, and save our respective constituencies, this seemed like it was going to be your standard coffee-shop gig (the type I’d sworn off 4.5 years ago). There was some mix-up between Exit Clov and the shop management, and thus there was no PA system. I was bummed for the sisters, since they have very soft (albeit very beautiful) voices. You could see they were pretty bummed about the whole thing…I would be too if I hadn’t already experienced this type of thing 100 times before. One thing you can say about playing live music, it is hardly ever the same thing twice.
They played a shortened, acoustic set, a small croud of attentive ears grasping every note.
I, of course, “Don’t need no electricity!” With my big ol’ Guild acoustic and my voice, I filled up the little room pretty well.
My set changed little: set 1: American Dream Town, Numb Us, Just Say Yes, The Future That Was, Lukewarm, Gospel Song, Closed for the Year. set 2: Hallelujah, American Dream Town, The Future That Was (abridged). I just realized I forgot about Really Need a Chorus.
Jake Stephens also performed, and also played mouth harp on some of my tunes. The guy to the right in this picture was one of the casual coffee-shop patrons who moseyed over and sat through my whole set. He had this look that said that he either got-and-appreciated all my satire (see lyric samples from yesterday’s post) or got-it-and-thought-I-was-a-smartass. Either way it was good to be heard. :)
The cool thing about gigs like this is, because everything got f’d up beforehand, you don’t really care about your set so much, and are free to laugh, comment, screw up, and just be yourself. I think it makes for a better experience.
Of course I read some stories.
We ended up hanging out with Jake, getting kicked out of the joint after they closed, and hanging out and talking outside for a while (the weather is so nice! yeah spring!).
Tons of thanks again to Exit Clov for inviting me; to another Mike for coming out; to Ken and Lynn; and to the handful of strangers who listened.