Two Open Mikes in One Week. 08.2011

Last month I made my annual summer trip to upstate new york to visit family and friends, and squeezed in not one but TWO open mikes in Saratoga Springs.
Open Mic #1 was at Caffe Lena, a career-launching coffeehouse venue for some well-known songwriters, Bob Dylan and Ani DiFranco among its distinguished alums. Growing up in that area, I heard much about its reputation but never worked up the nerve to go play there during my high school days. 
There's a two song limit (two! I'm used to just one song at the Freight) and I had made an arrangement with a high school friend of mine, R.F, to do a collaboration on one of them. This was R.F's first open mic, and I guess first performance of any kind, and certainly our first time singing as a duo... and we had about one hour to put it together before the open mic. For all that, it went pretty well I think, and for the second song I played a modified version of one of my own songs. I'm learning to work with limitations- namely, nervousness causes my throat to tighten and my fingers to sort of become unstrung, so I don't go for the high notes and I simplify the more demanding parts. That way, I'm much happier with the result than if I had hit a bunch of flat notes and fumbled the chords (been there, done that). Baby steps...

Open Mic #2 was just down the street at Gaffney's, about five days later. Gaffney's is a proper bar, and they allow three (three!) songs per person/group. I had another collaboration in the works with a cousin of mine of my Dad's generation, MJ. Like R.F, MJ had never played an open mic, but she's a pretty talented guitar player and she wanted to do a cover of Neil Young's Old Man. I learned the song the day before (thank you Iphone and YouTube) and again, we had less than an hour to put it together, but it went smoothly. I played the same two songs I had played at Caffe Lena (cheating, I know, and when I finished I saw that the owner of Caffe Lena had just walked in- oops!)

It was really fun to play with MJ at Gaffney's, but I have to say I enjoyed the Caffe Lena experience more. Gaffney's was full of people in town for horse track season, drinking and making a lot of noise; also the sound system gave me some nice feedback (ouch) which really makes me want to run off the stage. After getting off the stage at Lena's a gentleman leaned over and said "your song was so good it gave me a seizure! Now I don't know if I can take my turn." Is that good? I don't think I want to be giving people seizures...