Post by Gene on Aug 13, 2012 15:44:09 GMT -5
How are you all? Summer is coming to a close, and I’m in the home stretch:
WED, AUG 15: Dixie Saloon, Mackinac City, 9pm-1
FRI, AUG 17: Fab Friday by Fort DeBaude, St. Ignace, 7pm-9
SAT, AUG 18: Noggin Room, Petoskey, 9pm-12
MON, AUG 20: Noggin Room, Petoskey, 9pm-12
WED, AUG 22: Dixie Saloon, Mackinac City, 9pm-1
WED, AUG 29: Dixie Saloon, Mackinac City, 9pm-1
I take on “career musician pace” for a short time with 5 gigs in one week, but I’ll have to enjoy it while it lasts, since I don’t have very much planned for September and beyond. I’ve done a little bit of asking about it, but I’ve been so busy lately that I probably haven’t done enough to get September adequately booked, so it could be a slow month. Since I now have both my daughters going to NMU, and my parents are still around there with no snow on the ground yet, I may start targeting Marquette a little more than I have previously. It’s for personal reasons, obviously, but it may be a good choice with my music career too, since college towns seem to need entertainment at just the times I’m more available for gigs anyway, so it makes a lot of sense in that way, too. Breaking into a new market is tough, but it’s just that outer shell of it that’s hard, and then after that I suspect I will be fine.
I do one last Fab Friday in downtown St. Ignace, this time getting a middle placement where all the action is, so I’m looking forward to that.
One newsworthy thing of note is that, after about 8 years of trying, I’m finally getting my first chances at the Noggin Room in Petoskey! They look to be getting more experimental with what they offer lately, and I guess my resume was finally just getting too long to ignore anymore, or something. I sure would like to get on their “darling list”, since they’re one of the few places around here that hire entertainment year-round, but I’ve seen what I consider some pretty good local musicians wash out there, so who knows what will happen. I’ve observed them for a while and I consider them a pretty conservative music venue, so I’ll try my best to give them what I think they’re looking for. I am going to turn 50 soon, so maybe I’ve naturally grown into being a good fit for there, so we’ll see. Wish me luck!
Past gigs have gone very well, and I quite like playing at the Dixie regularly, and I seem a great fit there. It gets a little silly with the drunks very late at night, sometimes, but that’s part of the “adventure”, I guess! The great attendance really brings out my best, and the excitement is cyclic. Given the higher humidity and the upbeat show pace, I pop a lot of guitar strings at this gig, so it’s obvious that I’m laying into it a lot, but it’s all worth it in the end. I’d like to keep going there for fall, but they will surely be “thinning the herd” in September (if not cutting out live music entirely), and there are a lot of great performers there now, so I’d consider myself pretty lucky be one of the keepers left at that time. If not, I do have other options, so it’s good either way.
I got to see a couple of solo acoustic acts this month, albeit they aren’t what I’d call “local” by most’s definition. I popped into Kewadin at St. Igance and got to see Gabe Couch again, from near Clare. I saw him about two years ago, but he’s made quite a few changes since I saw him last. He’s yet another solo acoustic act that’s relying heavily on very produced backing tracks, but unlike most that do this, it’s less a case of him “hiding behind” them and more a case of him employing them to get done what he needs to do onstage. Contrary to many that do this, he’s quite a hot lead guitar player and obviously doesn’t need the tracks, but these backing tracks allow him to show off his lead guitar skills while there’s still something going on underneath him. Not only that, it wasn’t lost on me that the big beats spinning in the background sure made his act more “dancable”, as many were taking to the dancefloor. By my traditional definition, I don’t think hiring a solo acoustic guy is the best thing for a late-night weekend dancefloor situation, but I see a lot of places that are doing this nowadays, whether it’s because of simple management naivety or intentional necessary budget cutting by not hiring a more expensive full band outright. It blurs a three-way border between a solo act, a band and a DJ, so it challenges traditional roles and rules, for sure. This is one of those acts where I like some parts of it, but I don’t like others, but all tallied up, I have to admit that I was entertained and it was interesting.
I was knocking around Mackinac Island with some family last week, and I finally got to see Kyle White at the Pink Pony’s deck one afternoon. Kyle is a woman, despite a seemingly male first name. The Pink Pony has some high standards and Kyle is one of the place’s darlings, and she makes the trip regularly all the way from Toledo, so given all that, my expectations were sky high for this act, and I was happy to finally get a chance to see her. She is certainly an attractive young woman to look at, and has a beautiful lower singing voice for a woman. That’s about the end of the good things to say about her, though, I’m afraid. She favors playing electric guitar in an acoustic fashion, so her tone was not that great, and she’s a typical “dummy strummy” player, just chording underneath her voice and never venturing past the 4th fret for anything. As an example, she’d do a 70's song called “It’s A Wild World” by Cat Stevens, which has these fun little riffs in the chorus that are the coolest part of the song (in my opinion), except that she’d arrange it to have those riffs removed; So what does that leave? There were a lot of songs like that, and all these riffless, similarly rhythmed songs made all of her material sound pretty samey and droney. I’ve seen many female solo performers of this ilk, it being primarily about the presentation and the singing first and not much otherwise, so unfortunately, I found her to be disappointingly ordinary. She would do well to consider country music as a center genre instead, since her strong suits would serve that much better. Her act worked okay for a background ambience situation, but she didn’t really reveal anything that showed she could be a centerpiece act kind of performer that I’m told the Pink Pony prefers. People look for different things in their music acts, for sure, and I guess she just didn’t have what I personally am looking for. But I’m certain there are many other folks that would differ in opinion, and would like her a lot.
The Marina Pub in St. Ignace is having open mics on Thursdays. I either always have something going that day or I just want to relax after my usual Wednesday gig, so I probably won’t get there until September, and the place will seasonally close soon after that. I wouldn’t mind trying the Wig Wam one in Indian River on Tuesdays again, but attendance was so abysmal the last time I went, and since they aren’t interested in hiring solo performers for fall either, I’m not sure exactly what’s in it for me to make the trip do it. I won’t count it out, though.
That’s about enough blather for one blog. I hope you enjoy the rest of the summer, and I hope you get out and catch some great local live music!
–Gene.
WED, AUG 15: Dixie Saloon, Mackinac City, 9pm-1
FRI, AUG 17: Fab Friday by Fort DeBaude, St. Ignace, 7pm-9
SAT, AUG 18: Noggin Room, Petoskey, 9pm-12
MON, AUG 20: Noggin Room, Petoskey, 9pm-12
WED, AUG 22: Dixie Saloon, Mackinac City, 9pm-1
WED, AUG 29: Dixie Saloon, Mackinac City, 9pm-1
I take on “career musician pace” for a short time with 5 gigs in one week, but I’ll have to enjoy it while it lasts, since I don’t have very much planned for September and beyond. I’ve done a little bit of asking about it, but I’ve been so busy lately that I probably haven’t done enough to get September adequately booked, so it could be a slow month. Since I now have both my daughters going to NMU, and my parents are still around there with no snow on the ground yet, I may start targeting Marquette a little more than I have previously. It’s for personal reasons, obviously, but it may be a good choice with my music career too, since college towns seem to need entertainment at just the times I’m more available for gigs anyway, so it makes a lot of sense in that way, too. Breaking into a new market is tough, but it’s just that outer shell of it that’s hard, and then after that I suspect I will be fine.
I do one last Fab Friday in downtown St. Ignace, this time getting a middle placement where all the action is, so I’m looking forward to that.
One newsworthy thing of note is that, after about 8 years of trying, I’m finally getting my first chances at the Noggin Room in Petoskey! They look to be getting more experimental with what they offer lately, and I guess my resume was finally just getting too long to ignore anymore, or something. I sure would like to get on their “darling list”, since they’re one of the few places around here that hire entertainment year-round, but I’ve seen what I consider some pretty good local musicians wash out there, so who knows what will happen. I’ve observed them for a while and I consider them a pretty conservative music venue, so I’ll try my best to give them what I think they’re looking for. I am going to turn 50 soon, so maybe I’ve naturally grown into being a good fit for there, so we’ll see. Wish me luck!
Past gigs have gone very well, and I quite like playing at the Dixie regularly, and I seem a great fit there. It gets a little silly with the drunks very late at night, sometimes, but that’s part of the “adventure”, I guess! The great attendance really brings out my best, and the excitement is cyclic. Given the higher humidity and the upbeat show pace, I pop a lot of guitar strings at this gig, so it’s obvious that I’m laying into it a lot, but it’s all worth it in the end. I’d like to keep going there for fall, but they will surely be “thinning the herd” in September (if not cutting out live music entirely), and there are a lot of great performers there now, so I’d consider myself pretty lucky be one of the keepers left at that time. If not, I do have other options, so it’s good either way.
I got to see a couple of solo acoustic acts this month, albeit they aren’t what I’d call “local” by most’s definition. I popped into Kewadin at St. Igance and got to see Gabe Couch again, from near Clare. I saw him about two years ago, but he’s made quite a few changes since I saw him last. He’s yet another solo acoustic act that’s relying heavily on very produced backing tracks, but unlike most that do this, it’s less a case of him “hiding behind” them and more a case of him employing them to get done what he needs to do onstage. Contrary to many that do this, he’s quite a hot lead guitar player and obviously doesn’t need the tracks, but these backing tracks allow him to show off his lead guitar skills while there’s still something going on underneath him. Not only that, it wasn’t lost on me that the big beats spinning in the background sure made his act more “dancable”, as many were taking to the dancefloor. By my traditional definition, I don’t think hiring a solo acoustic guy is the best thing for a late-night weekend dancefloor situation, but I see a lot of places that are doing this nowadays, whether it’s because of simple management naivety or intentional necessary budget cutting by not hiring a more expensive full band outright. It blurs a three-way border between a solo act, a band and a DJ, so it challenges traditional roles and rules, for sure. This is one of those acts where I like some parts of it, but I don’t like others, but all tallied up, I have to admit that I was entertained and it was interesting.
I was knocking around Mackinac Island with some family last week, and I finally got to see Kyle White at the Pink Pony’s deck one afternoon. Kyle is a woman, despite a seemingly male first name. The Pink Pony has some high standards and Kyle is one of the place’s darlings, and she makes the trip regularly all the way from Toledo, so given all that, my expectations were sky high for this act, and I was happy to finally get a chance to see her. She is certainly an attractive young woman to look at, and has a beautiful lower singing voice for a woman. That’s about the end of the good things to say about her, though, I’m afraid. She favors playing electric guitar in an acoustic fashion, so her tone was not that great, and she’s a typical “dummy strummy” player, just chording underneath her voice and never venturing past the 4th fret for anything. As an example, she’d do a 70's song called “It’s A Wild World” by Cat Stevens, which has these fun little riffs in the chorus that are the coolest part of the song (in my opinion), except that she’d arrange it to have those riffs removed; So what does that leave? There were a lot of songs like that, and all these riffless, similarly rhythmed songs made all of her material sound pretty samey and droney. I’ve seen many female solo performers of this ilk, it being primarily about the presentation and the singing first and not much otherwise, so unfortunately, I found her to be disappointingly ordinary. She would do well to consider country music as a center genre instead, since her strong suits would serve that much better. Her act worked okay for a background ambience situation, but she didn’t really reveal anything that showed she could be a centerpiece act kind of performer that I’m told the Pink Pony prefers. People look for different things in their music acts, for sure, and I guess she just didn’t have what I personally am looking for. But I’m certain there are many other folks that would differ in opinion, and would like her a lot.
The Marina Pub in St. Ignace is having open mics on Thursdays. I either always have something going that day or I just want to relax after my usual Wednesday gig, so I probably won’t get there until September, and the place will seasonally close soon after that. I wouldn’t mind trying the Wig Wam one in Indian River on Tuesdays again, but attendance was so abysmal the last time I went, and since they aren’t interested in hiring solo performers for fall either, I’m not sure exactly what’s in it for me to make the trip do it. I won’t count it out, though.
That’s about enough blather for one blog. I hope you enjoy the rest of the summer, and I hope you get out and catch some great local live music!
–Gene.