This is the “members only” sign from the Veterans club on Dixie. I spent a few hours cruising the area looking for gigs. Some musicians may turn up their noses at playing in such places but I don’t exactly see them getting swamped by groupies at the places they do play, contrary to what they’d have you believe. The other sign that says “2:AM” is also wishful thinking, for they close down much earlier if there is no business.
The day was taken up by computer maintenance and logistics, but I got a lot done. I tore piece after piece out of Dickens Win 98 computer until it finally worked with Win XP. After a few hours messing around with that Sony VC-20 I am ready to throw it out the door. What junk! It has so many copyright protection features built in that I can’t get it to burn an ordinary home movie. The manual is equally useless. Most annoying features: It will tell you there is no disk in the tray when there is. It will format a disk automatically and then display a wrong format message. It will do everything correctly for two hours and at the very end will tell you there is a problem. Or, it will perform apparently correctly but the DVD will not play. Hooray for Sony.
Howard called, he has an article written for Wikipedia (an on-line encyclopedia that will take most “experts” at face value). It seems they won’t accept a word processed document so I converted it to a pdf (Portable Document Format or Adobe) file. I’ve looked closely at the types of work I have to do in this area and I am so tempted to check out an Apple.
Who remembers the black actress that was in the shop? I do, but not her name. She barged in on Fred, for it seems she is a finalist or something in a Heinz jingle contest but needs some video work done. Fred doesn’t do this kind of work. I’ll talk to her without any guarantees, but she has made the offer that if she wins the jingle, I would get half. That is $28,500, so I will take a look anyway, probably next Tuesday. That would be a very strong case for an Apple.
The cancellation at Show-Off hurt doubly because I did not have another place lined up. The Holiday Bowling Lanes are back in the picture. This is the place over which that Jeff religious idiot got into a flap about last February, was it? The “holy day” goof. Anyway, I set up in the lounge and played a three-hour demo set. Now they know that I can do it, and that I don’t charge a lot. It was a mostly empty room, but my rule of thumb ($1/patron/hour) held true. So I get a store-bought breakfast tomorrow.
On the way home earlier, I also got the contact information from the VFW on Dixie and Washington. My act is still evolving although eventually the changes have to taper off. I don’t have enough material, we already know that. My act is geared toward an adult drinking crowd and the Holiday is a lounge. Ah, but families with children regularly cut through from the north-side parking lot. Around a half-hour of my list becomes instantly unplayable right there.
Conclusion: I need an hour of fast new music, easy and rated G. In this situation that means I have little choice but 60’s and 70’s Country. My mind goes blank except for Johnny Cash, but I’ll get refreshed with Limewire. In the past I have played Orbison and similar artists. If I learned it once, I can do it again. This puts almost everything else on hold. My thinking is that it will be most worth it to do the act now. The trade-off is that I know acts rarely change much once they are in operation so be careful what gets pushed through.
I suppose I could pad the sets with CCR and a dozen ten-minute acid trip tunes but I don’t even like to think like that. I might consider Louie Louie, but not House of the Rising Sun. English bands are always a good bet. To have an all-purpose show with an encore set, I am going to need up to 120 tunes. Double what I can muster today.
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