THIRSTY LION POST-MORTEM...

ZWell, I won’t say the paranoia about the Thirsty Lion performance was unjustified—butterflies definitely make you perform better—but it did go okay. Big crowd—most seats in the place were filled, because there’d been a Lakers-vs.-Orlando basketball game and most of the crowd stuck around for the music afterwards. They listened (good), and some of them stopped me afterwards to tell me they’d liked the material (and nobody else got that that I could see). I was on first (of four acts, not counting Eric the host), and that was good, too, because the audience did start drifting off after a while. Sold one CD, got a few more names on the “joelist” (including one of the other songwriters who was there).

My new, cheap soundhole pickup wasn’t working (thank you, Guitar Center), so I plugged back in my ancient D’Armand, which does work (despite sounding electric). It’s roughly 30 years old (I got it when I played with the Dodson Drifters); new ones, according to the music store owner in Forest Grove, cost nearly $300 today. I can see why. That thing may last longer than I do.

The competition? Well, I felt I could give them all pointers about writing. Makes me feel like some sort of Elder Statesman—have I really been around the block that many times?—but I guess my insistence on getting feedback for almost everything I do, and on hanging out with other writers and musicians to pick up things from them, has paid off to an extent. I think I can spot at least the obvious what-works-and-what-doesn’t things. I think the other players (one girl, one guy, and one duo—and the guy’s been performing professionally for a long time) have been operating in a vacuum. And we all know what vacuums do.

It would be tempting (and probably beneficial) to sit ‘em all down together and say “Let’s talk about what we’ve written, and poke holes in it.” There’s a songwriters’ group in Eugene (OR) that does that; they’re the only one I’ve found (and I haven’t made it to any of their sessions—they are 200 miles away, after all). The Southern Oregon Songwriters Assn. never did that, but they do something else that’s important: they had tons of opportunities for their members to perform in public, before live audiences consisting mostly of other writers, and you could see what other people did that worked with those audiences, and that, too, helped a lot. (And the Eugene group, for its part, doesn’t appear to do any performance opportunities.) It’d be fantastic to be able to do both.

Everybody in the bar was given little “ballots” with the names of the performers to check off and deposit in a bucket on the bar. To the extent people actually voted (and I don’t know if they did), I probably got the bulk of the votes, even though some of the other performers had fans there and I didn’t. (Most of the people who told me they were going to come never did. I suppose I should expect that by now.) Eric said he’d tally all the votes from all the Tuesday night performances in June, and whoever gets the most votes is going to get the weekend gig. I obviously have no control over what happens those other nights; I know that last Tuesday (when I came in to check out the hall), the crowd was pretty small—because there was no big ball game on. So that enters into the calculations, too, and it’s something none of the writers have any control over.

If I did get that weekend gig at the Thirsty Lion, I would want accompaniment if I could get it. My ideal choice would be Don Johnson, the blues harp player from our defunct Portland band; he’s a novice at the harmonica, but he is good, and he might be free on the weekend. I know I can do okay playing solo (the Thirsty Lion performance was a good reinforcement), but I still think me and solo guitar for an hour or two is a little hard to take. We’ll see if I get the chance to worry about it.

And the job interview Tuesday afternoon? That went well, too—a little short, which worries me, but I’ll find out Friday if I made it to the “next level.” In the meantime, I’ve got more jobs to apply for, and band practice tonight. Never, never, never stop selling.

Joe