THE FAILED ECONOMY SHOW...

The Failed Economy show is done. Fingers are sore (and I broke the D string again), but I can still type. A quick post-mortem:

The crowd wasn’t as big as I’d have liked, but they stuck around—danced, even—and were generous. The Food Bank was ecstatic, and the City got some cash in the toilet-shaped piggy bank for the Sewer Discount Program, too. The video lady didn’t show, but we got good video with Dick’s camera, I think, with sound fed from John’s new mixer (and that should be good). The 21 songs went for 2 hours and 10 minutes.

A big surprise was the number of people who were up dancing to the Southern Pigfish song, “For Their Own Ends.” I know Chris the drummer and John the bass player like it—it’s rock ‘n’ roll, and both of them come from rock backgrounds—but I had no idea the audience would like it, much less be out of their chairs dancing to it. Other good dance numbers: Woody Guthrie’s “Dance a Little Longer” (which we had deliberately arranged as a dance tune), Gem Watson’s “Final Payment” (another surprise), and Gene Burnett’s “Things Are Getting Better Now that Things Are Getting Worse.” (I’ve sent congratulatory notes to both Gem and Gene.) When you got people dancing, you know you’ve got a keeper. These are keepers of the first order.

People also liked our ragtime version of Coleman & Lazzerini’s “So 20th Century,” Stan Good’s “Un-Easy Street” (they listened raptly), Betty Holt’s “Our Own Little Stimulus Plan,” my bluegrass “Free-Range Person,” and Woody Guthrie’s blues number “Aginst the Law.” All are probably includables in future sets, whatever the subject matter.

It was good to “do” the hall early; since we had the Dance Floor for the weekend, we started setting up at noon, and spent four hours at it, getting everything perfect. We had two sound systems—the “live” sound configured for the Dance Floor’s rotten acoustics, run through the Friday Night Group’s PA, and the “recorded” sound, picked up from two overhead mikes set up out in the audience, and re-mixed with John’s new mixer and fed to both the audio recorder and the video camera. Tested everything repeatedly. Then we all got to go home, shower, eat, nap if we wanted, and at Gig Time, just had to flip a switch and play. Allowed us to come across as very professional.

I was approached by Wayne, the lead guitarist I know, offering to fill in any time we were sans a lead player; he said he wouldn’t need to practice (I heard that from another lead guitarist recently—is this a genetic thing?). Wayne is very good; I tapped him to play lead on a recording of the old Gospel hymn “Turn Your Radio On” for a contest a couple of years ago—his country-barroom lead was and is a perfect fit for a hymn, the more so because it’s so unexpected. He regularly plays on Friday nights at City Hall with the Friday Night Group and Saturday afternoons at the Library, so he’s familiar with a lot of my stuff.

And I did get one suggestion for a band name. (That means somebody read the program—I didn’t mention it anywhere else.)

Next step, I guess, is to see how the video came out. If the sound is good, we’ve got a promotional tool. The fact that we did the Failed Economy Show should get us in a lot of doors—people may not remember the show, but they’ll remember the publicity.

Lessons? (There are always lessons.) We need someone separate from the band to run sound; I’ve heard that from professional sound engineers before, but the show underscores their point. It’s impossible for someone in the band to both play and deal with levels at the same time. Recent practice is a good idea; all the songs that we practiced that day—under the guise of testing out the sound levels—came off really good in the evening’s performance.

Next scheduled gig is at the Garibaldi Museum, last Saturday in June (unless we get one before then), and I think everybody’s up for it.

Joe