MERCANTILE POST-MORTEM...

Performance at The Mercantile in Beaver was very much fun. Packed house—I think the place holds around 80 people, and it looked like every seat was filled—and very appreciative audience. I think they’d like us back. And I’d like to go back. Jane and I only did five songs (more than any of the other performers, though) but I think we were the high point of the show.

I was asked whether one could pull something like this off at the Bay City Arts Center. We do those regular Open Mikes (there’ll be another one the first Saturday in March), but turnout is usually minimal; that big hall, holding over a hundred people, will have half a dozen to a dozen audience folks in it. The answer is yes, I think—but we’d have to do it more like The Mercantile does it. The Mercantile’s shows are not open mikes; the performers were all invited, and at least one of them (not us) is well known in the area, and The Mercantile promoted the fact that all those performers were going to be there. Could the Arts Center do that? Definitely. And it would be fun.

The biggest advantage The Mercantile has that we couldn’t compete with is they have no competition. There is no venue in South County offering entertainment of any kind—or able to—until you get to Pacific City (and there, the Pelican Pub and Kiwanda Community Center don’t seem to do much). People will come from miles around because there is literally nowhere else to go on a Saturday (or any other) night without driving a long, long way on bad roads. The Arts Center, on the other hand, happens to be a block away from a sizable tavern that does have live music on a regular basis, and you can’t schedule entertainment on a night when you won’t be competing for customers with somebody else’s event somewhere else in North County. North Tillamook County is simply more culturally active. Yes, one could still pack the Arts Center—but on top of everything else, what you’re offering has to be better than what everyone else has got—and you still may not get the customers.

The Mercantile did record the performers, and I’m anxious to see how the result turns out. They recorded both the live sound from the stage (with one of those super-fancy omnidirectional mikes) and “lined in” tracks from the little 5-channel PA system, into a Macintosh laptop running GarageBand, where they’ll mix it. All rather primitive and simple, but my Tascam is primitive and simple, too, and I know from experience I can get radio-quality recordings out of it. (I just can’t get them consistently.) I explained to co-proprietor Fred (and a few others) the “Song-a-Month Experiment,” and why I wanted to find places and opportunities to record for cheaply.

This coming week, I’ll plan on going to the Influence Music Hall in Hillsboro Friday night and take advantage of sound engineer Skip Farmer’s 3-songs-for-$15 deal, and see how that comes out. I wouldn’t mind having accompaniment with me, but I’m not going to ask—this is one of those “opportunities” where I don’t know whether it’s worthwhile until (and unless) I do it, and I don’t want to wast anybody’s time. If the me-and-solo-guitar recordings come out good, I will definitely try to get Jane (ideally) to come in with me. Music at the Tsunami Thursday night this week and Sunday night at the Rapture Room.

And I got tapped to schedule the entertainment for the Rockaway Beach Chamber of Commerce’s “Rocktoberfest” this year. That’ll be my third concert-promoter gig—I’m alread in charge of entertainment for Garibaldi Days and for the Relay for Life, both in July. I understand the Chamber is having their thing in October again, and hope that’s not a bad idea—the weather can be (and in fact usually is) bad by then.

Joe