Let me inject an item here so you'll know the whole day didn't go badly for me. There was a service call for a printer trouble. They were clicking on the wrong button. Since it was a government office, I charged them half again the going rate and took the rest of the day off. Then, to rub it in, I rode my bicycle across FEC (Florida East Coast) private property. Nobody can say I didn't fight in the revolution.
There is more bad news, or I guess you could say poor news. Have you ever been fired from a place you didn’t work? I just did. The Show-Off called and decided they didn’t want any entertainment “until September”. That’s a crock, because I was working there for tips. You can’t find anyone to work for less than free. I treat the staff great – a lesson learned years ago when one waitress complained that the money in my tip jar should really be in hers. Mark my words, it is something along that avenue.One thing that does not bother me is competition. My show will remain unique for a long time. It requires such investment in skill and equipment that I truly have nothing to worry about in Florida. Hell, I have yet to meet another musician here who can rip a CD, much less calculate the hardware and software requirements for an act like mine. One thing you may not expect is that my operation is not expensive to operate, only expensive to create. There are far more costly Karaoke rigs. Lots of them, too.
Later. This just in. The real behind the scenes at the Show-Off. It seems the manageress who hired me was answerable to the real owner, whoever that is. Didn’t know that before. It looks like a case where she was told to make improvements but not change anything. She put up the posters. From reliable sources, the owner came in around noon today and saw them. He ripped them down in a towering rage. Why? Because he complained he was losing the juke box revenue (around $6 per hour) if there was a live musician on the premises. This type of sheer stupidity is actually quite normal in Florida – I estimate my show easily brings in $90 per hour in extra (yes, extra) revenue and it is hard to fool me on something like that. The crowd stays longer and spends more.
The word is to wait a couple of weeks until he grows up but by then I hope to have moved on. Either way, the price for them went up, I will not play there for tips any more. Tonight I played Jimbo’s and made just $7 in tips, although that is not why I play there – I am working on my act and finding I still have equipment problems. (Feedback, harmonics, and the PA has no standby switch, things like that.)
I get a lot of guitarists coming up to the stage. I don’t think I’ll waste any more time with a duo. Not worth the aggravation. My show is short 16 tunes, which coincides precisely with the time spent working with the last guy. The best chance a guitarist has with me now is to surprise me by learning all my tunes without being asked. That Bill guy whose axe was in the pawn shop is starting to hover around but he’s missed the boat.
That plus he uses awful language around me, words like “Neil Young”.
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