Thursday night at Katie Bloom’s was quite interesting and different than what I expected. I was opening for David Ross MacDonald who I had played at the Sofa Lounge with the night before. Had the night before been any indicator for Thursday night, I would’ve known that the place would not be what it was the last time I played there.
I did my first gig at Katie Bloom’s about two months ago. I had never been there before and didn’t know what to expect. What I found when I got there was a total party place, in the middle of downtown campbell. The crowd seemed to be a mixture of comefuckme’s, can’tfuckme’s and jock supporters. I was scheduled to play with my man, Kaila D’Sa who is a downtown musical hero… Campbell is his domain and he has quite a following in the area. We were supposed to start at 8pm and were all set up and ready to play but there was a basketball game going on. Now, I don’t follow sports; I know the difference between the different balls and pucks used in each game and I can tell when someone sucks and someone doesn’t and that’s where it ends. The jock supporters were in a frenzy over something and it couldn’t possibly be interupted, especially not by a couple hippy guitar players, so we waited and waited and waited for the never ending game to finish.
Now, I many times like to pick my songs on the fly rather than making a set list. This is good and bad: Good because I can leave things to how I’m feeling at the moment and bad because I can often take too long in between songs deciding what to play. This night however, I picked out a few songs that I intended on doing. Big mistake; this crowd wanted to party and I had picked and freshened up a number of songs that just were not party songs. Oops. I can’t stress enough how hard it is to play a song to a crowd of people and not one claps when you’re done. Ouch. My friend Richard, head of Thriving Artists will attest to this as he just called me this morning to tell me about his experience at Coffee Society last night where a similar thing happened too him. He pulled out of it by digging deep into his self and pulling out the courage to keep going and the wisdom of where to go with the music and made what he said was the worst and best musical evening he’s ever had. When the going gets tough, the tough get going… that’s it, no ifs, ands or buts. What I did that night was press on, but I learned a valuable lesson as Richard did, you really have to know your audience and really play to them. If you think that you’re going to change them, you’re wrong. You adapt to them and integrate with them… then groove with them.
So back to the present… Wednesday night at the Sofa was just DEAD. What I neglected to forsee was that this was the week after Labor Day weekend, and people were either burnt, broke, or both, and they were not coming out to party this week. David Ross MacDonald is from Australia and used to play with The Waifs. He’s a very good guitar player but his music is very mellow, sensitive and introspective. So Thursday night, not learning me lesson from the night before was expecting this large party crowd, and I get there and there’s a 1/4 of the people there from the last time I played. I had put together a list of my most energetic songs like Sweet Obsession, Sinner and even started with I Gotta Know just to set the pace. You know what? It just never really worked for me. I kept thinking that I was just playing too aggressively for the crowd. I got a decent response from them and got some email addresses on my list and handed out a couple business cards so it went alright… but I really felt bad for David who played very sensitively and got little response for it. His sound just seemed to get drowned out by the place. I on the other hand was singing so loudly that I over compensated for the noisy crowd and was hoarse the next day.
Live and learn I guess. I’ll try it again I supposed… but next time, I’m making my set list at the bar just before I go on. I think that’s the happy medium here.
