What Cheer, Netop?

The show went well. I was nervous, as usual. Mark & Beverly Davis, who katylady74 knows, were very good and very nice, and told me they enjoyed my set.

Did anyone manage to listen to it over the Internet? I brought my laptop with me in hopes that I would be able to record the Internet stream of it, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to work.

Thanks to crazyanimallady and elhortez for coming to the show.

( set list )

John Fuzek encouraged me to sign up for some shows at Brewed Awakenings in Wakefield, but having looked at a map I think I will give this a miss, unless someone feels like making a pitch for me doing this. These shows are on Saturdays from 8 to 10 pm.

As usual, what we actually play will probably differ from this.
( set lists for tonight )

because as predicted I am starting to crash. Tiiiired!

I think there were a total of about 20 or 21 people there (including me and the other performers), a mixture of friends of mine, friends of djswifty's, relatives of one or the other of ours, and some other miscellaneous people (my downstairs neighbor, etc.). I think that this is quite likely the most people who have ever been in my apartment at the same time!

I went on first and did about a dozen songs, mostly originals (or songs where someone else wrote the lyrics which I then set to music). Watching Killer Robots Eat Your Head was a big favorite, and "Pumpkin, Mrs Farnsworth" also got a nice reaction. The set list was something like this:

1. Waterbugs
2. Kitten Knitting Blues
3. Ezra's Song
4. Watching Killer Robots Eat Your Head
5. Tear My Stillhouse Down (with Chris Monti on backing vocals)
6. Hybrid Car (with Chris Monti on harmonica)
7. Molesting Yarn
8. I'm A Guy
9. Pickle Postcards
10. "Pumpkin, Mrs Farnsworth"
11. Walking Stick Making

There was a little break, and then Chris Monti played a set for 45 minutes or so; he had me come up to play the piano on a few songs ('Me and Curby', 'The Local Expatriate', and 'Leaving In The Morning'). Then it was MC Copulation time. His parents were among those attending, so he was entertainingly embarassed about singing about his penis with them there.

Having the show in my apartment worked pretty well. MC Copulation was in danger of colliding with one of the light fixtures (because he's over six feet tall), but he didn't, so that was OK. I sort of made a mess of distributing the chairs, but people figured out their own solutions to this problem.

Also, I made some CDs this morning of random recordings I've made over the past couple of years and sold five of them for $5 each. I have a couple left over.

My wrists feel totally fine right now for some reason. Who knows?

At the end of the night djswifty carted away all my old MST3K tapes, so that's one less thing I have to find room for!

Anyway, it seemed like everyone had a good time. I certainly did!

Sleep time now. Good night!

(This is about a show on Thursday August 8; I finally got around to putting together some notes about it tonight. I'm also posting these little commentaries on the Killdevils website, which may or may not be a great idea, but there it is.)

We had performed at this place previously, and although the crowd had been small there had been some people who seemed pretty enthusiastic about us, so we had hoped that word of mouth would get around and the crowd would be a little bigger tonight. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. The owner is still willing to have us come back, but it would most likely be for a percentage of the take or something along those lines rather than the flat fee structure we've had previously. Ah well ...

Despite the small size of the audience, there were some enthusiastic folks there, including a guy who asked for our card and then told us our name wasn't that good. He might want us to play at a party he throws.

After our last show here I had noticed that over the course of the night I managed to get a blood blister on the tip of my right index finger. Tonight, I was able to determine what was most directly responsible for this phenomena; it turns out that I'm plucking pretty hard on the slide solos I take on Folsom Prison Blues, and, well:

Other things we learned:

• Pool tables are really heavy and kind of tricky to set up.
• If you have an air conditioner situated over a smoke-eater, and moisture drips from the air conditioner onto the smoke-eater, then an electrical arc may form, resulting in a loud zapping noise which can provide hours of entertainment for all.

While we were playing one of the last songs of the night, a gentleman came over and tried to strike up a conversation in which he requested that we play Tangled Up In Blue, a song Chris had played about fifteen minutes earlier. He later offered us ten dollars to play it, and finally upped the offer to twenty, but Chris politely declined. As near as I could tell the audience member did not take this personally and instead appeared to take this as some sort of symbol of our incorruptibility. (But I think we were just feeling wiped out -- don't tell anyone.)

( Set lists )

Tonight was my first night officially performing as a member of The Killdevils (I had performed with Chris in some coffee houses before, but that was before we were officially a band). It was an odd little gig.

The place we played in didn't have an entertainment license, so the owner had insisted that we do nothing to promote the event (no posters, etc.) We were allowed to tell friends and family members to come.

The place was really not set up for music at all; it was essentially a pool hall/bar. Chris and I ended up wedged into one corner of the room behind one of the pool tables, me with my guitar and piano and Chris with his guitar and PA. There was also a hockey fooz ball-type game which played rollicking little tunes (like the William Tell Overture and the Charge song) every ten minutes or so, which we nonetheless managed to forget to unplug between sets. Fortunately it was pretty quiet, although it was pretty audible during one of our quiet songs ('Dear Someone'); I had to move away from the mike so people wouldn't hear me laughing.

Although we weren't allowed to advertise the show, the bar owner did put up a notice saying we would be playing. There was a very small crowd, and he thought people might have been spooked because they saw that there was going to be something new and they weren't sure if they would like it. He was interested in booking us again, though, so Chris told him that maybe he also shouldn't promote the show next time.

Despite all of the above, and some major feedback problems in the first set, things went pretty well, especially as the evening went on. During each of the sets there was at least one really drunk guy who was very enthusiastic about us. The first one told us that he used to play piano himself, but he quit when he got married eighteen years ago and had only started playing again recently. "I'm trying to get my soul back," he said. I wasn't sure what the appropriate response was, but thought it probably wasn't "Good luck with that!", tempting though that was. This same guy remembered seeing Chris at an open mike earlier that week and told Chris that he had been hoping to have some luck with a woman he met there, but it hadn't worked out. "She could have ridden my face all week," he said. We murmured sympathetically.

For the last set, the drunk guy was this young guy wearing a tie-dye shirt, who gave out a whoop and jumped around in joy when we started playing 'Folsom Prison Blues', and who later shouted encouragement at us during our solos in 'Bright Lights, Big City', to the extent that I had trouble hearing what Chris was doing and ended up fumbling around a bit in the middle of one of my solos. After the show, he came over and admired my piano, saying, I want to jam some fuckin' Für Elise on that motherfucker, you know what I mean? I nodded and repeated the phrase to myself in my head until I got a chance to write it down.

Another odd thing: Someone requested a song, and we actually knew the song and how to play it. (It was a Grateful Dead song called 'Dire Wolf' which we started playing about a week and a half ago.)

So as I say everything went pretty well, particularly as we got paid. I'm going to be a wreck tomorrow though.

( The set list, for those who care )