Mom: Blog Repetitive

Bates and Thigpen, my second favorite spot. 333 Third Street,

unfortunately was roped off for construction

forcing pedestrians to the other side

I will have to agree with my mom,  who in her first e-mail to me in like three months said that she reads this blog, but finds it repetitive.

Last night was the worst busking experience that I have had in at least two years.
I kind of was expecting it. Sometimes in life, when you least expect it, things go awry.

I have developed a pretty good sense for realising when I am "least expecting" things, and as I walked towards downtown Baton Rouge, I thought to myself "This could really suck."

For the most part, when I go in with very low expectations, things exceed even high expectations, maybe because if I'm not expecting to make much, I am doing it just for the love of music and more prone to do stuff that isn't typical, which will bear fruit, more often than not.

I also considered: "I might have a killer night," asking myself what it feels like to be on the precipice of having a killer night. Usually, it is when I force myself to go out, maybe after having knocked off because things were slow, that I wind up making really good money and then wind up thinking "...and I was ready to quit; good thing I didn't..."

A Day To Eat

I woke up that morning (Saturday, the worst busking night in two years) and went to get an all day bus pass.

Wal-Mart and some frozen tilapia, olive oil, tomato sauce, bananas, corn on the cob, potatoes and a quart of beer later, I was on the bus for Scotlandsville.

I grilled behind the building and stuffed my face.

Insulating the rest of the fish and hiding it along with everything else, I got on the bus for downtown.

Well Fed And Ready To "Suck"

I was running behind schedule; I wanted to grab the AT-T spot before the horn players did.

I had about given up on that, as it was past 9 p.m. when I was within sight of downtown, walking along Florida Street. I got another quart of beer (is this the part of this blog which is repetitious??) and sat and took my time drinking it, content to be heading to my second favorite spot.

Once there, I saw that there was a huge area cordoned off at the building next to it, which was under construction. In effect 80% of the pedestrian traffic crossed to the other side of the street, to avoid it. Only four of them walked across to throw me dollars.

My dilemma was: should I stay in the acoustically superior spot where hardly anyone is walking by but where those that do were more likely to stop and listen, or should I go to the other side, just to be in the flow of traffic, but where I would be half drowned out by a club nearby.

I kind of did neither. I crossed the street, but never took my guitar out because of the volume level.

Then, after sitting there a while while the malt liquor combined with the heavy meal to make me lethargic, I went back and shortly got pissed off because I did "Comfortably Numb" and nailed the vocals and everything, and it resonated in the space where I was playing; but nobody threw me anything.

I have come to expect at least a buck to go into my case the times that I really nail every note in a song; I guess I'm conditioned that way. When you are "on" it usually produces fruit...

But, there are those people, especially college kids who are pissed off because their parents are sending them less and less money each month because of the economy, and want to vent their frustrations over the fact that the "college experience" that they had been raised to think was going to be all theirs ("the best four years of your life" - a regular "Animal House" re enactment) is turning out to be much more subdued.

They may have begun to wish that they had taken up a musical instrument so that they could at least sit on the sidewalk and make 14 dollars on 3rd Street, if nothing else...

Yelling "You Suck!" at a street musician, might afford them this opportunity to vent these frustrations, and the better the musician actually sounds, the more traction their insult might get -kind of like when a pretty girl tosses her head the other way dismissively and my reaction is to say, "You're ugly!"

Of course, blog readers who have been listening to my creations using the Audacity audio editing program, might be thinking "If those recordings are any indication, you DO suck, and I wouldn't even waste a dollar on you, myself..."

Well, one reason that I am posting them is that, when I get it right, I don't want people to suspect that it isn't me. People will know what I sound like, basically, at least my voice.

That being said, I either lost a few readers after not posting for about 5 days in a row last week, or for posting "not ready for prime time" recordings that I am making as I trudge through the Audacity Users Manual...

To Alex in California, in particular; I had come to enjoy reading your previously almost daily comments, which seemed to have stopped. I can really understand how someone into guns and motorcycles might be repulsed by the music that I have been posting, trying to be kind of "artsy."

The idea that I have is: Request a song that is one of your favorites "of all time" and I will use IT to work out my issues of syncing tracks and dropping pitches without changing speed and equalizing an acoustic guitar dropped an octave to sound like a bass, so that it actually sounds like a bass...etc.

If you're still a reader, that is. Leave a song suggestion in a comment, and it doesn't have to be one that, after listening to my stuff so far, you think would be "up my alley" or my style.