- 24 Dollar Thursday
- More Videos On The Way
A lady walked up, who appeared to be in her late 40's and who appeared to be a bartender (she just looked like one; I could picture her saying: "It's last call, you need anything? as she wiped a bar in front of me) and probably a pack a day for the past 25 years smoker, and handed me a 20 dollar bill around midnight last night.
I look at these things (scheduled performers at big-time events) usually with a couple of regular thoughts in my head.
One of them has to do with my feeling that I have fallen behind the times, still listening to 1960's era music (or Sting, for that matter) while the whole world has moved on, with all the performers who might have played at Woodstock having been supplanted by the likes of the above. "I'm going to have to Google all these artists, check out their music, and in doing so, bring myself up to date..." I might think.
The second thought is usually: "I'm going to be so jealous if I see any musicians that I know on here."
The sight of him reminds me that, if you play a weird instrument, not only do you have less competition for being one of the best in the world at that particular weird instrument; you have a better chance of finding a niche in the Jazzfest lineup.
He is kind of an anti-establishment country artist (if that's not too much of an oxymoron). A "You can shove that Country Music Association award up your ass, because it's all politics!" type of country music artist.
Is "Sturgill" a special snowflake name, or what??
Bartender Looking Lady, Cont.
"Here, put this in your pocket," said the lady from 3 paragraphs ago.
"Wow, thanks. You must work a job that pays better than mine!," I said.
"No, I'm poor, but you just made my night," she replied.
I then thought that, perhaps, she had in turn, just made my night, and since my night was already made, why not call it a night?
That tip had brought my total for the night to 24 dollars. Not bad for a guy who went out with only $1.42 on him, and who needs toilet paper, cat litter and kratom.
 |
| Oh, I see how Shimabukuro does it! |
She had hidden herself somewhere, and I had thought that I was playing for nobody, and decided to just free-style.
I had mentally prepared myself for making only something like 9 dollars, before going out.
It was the cerebral: "If you have less than 20 dollars in cash, you must go out to busk!" thing that drove me out there.
"Wow, and I had actually considered staying in!," I have said to myself after similar nights, especially after the 175 dollar ones.
On my way past the Lilly Pad after having dropped my milk crate back at The Quartermaster and gotten coffee and cat food, I saw Brett the cello player just sitting down on Lilly's stoop. Wow, he's just starting at 1:30 AM, and here I am taking my 24 dollars and getting the hell out of Dodge... I thought.
"Oh, wow," he said upon seeing me, and started to grab his cello case as a prelude to leaving.
"Oh, I already played -did pretty well with the key of A minor," I said and rode on.
Brett has an understanding with Lilly that I have dibs on the spot. It wouldn't be right for me to try to keep other people from playing there during the 23 and a half hours when I might not be there on such a day.
It being Jazzfest, it behooves me to try to get there at 9:30 PM tonight, and to play straight through until 4 in the morning. I do still need toilet paper and kitty litter...
I suppose that, when he hadn't seen me there by almost midnight, Brett might have thought that I wasn't going to arrive.
The Next Video
The next video that will come out of the session in the park will be a version of "Computer Geek Blues," that I managed to sing most of the verses of almost well enough to go on the final production.
This one will involve cutting and pasting to make the song and video repeat, so as to accommodate the extra verses, solos, etc. something I haven't tried yet but which seems to work "on paper," at least.
Jake Shimabukuro is a good uke player, but there are a lot of good uke players out there. The key to his success is he's (a) Japanese, and (b) from Hawaii, which the Japanese have a real thing for. They've tried to take it from the US two ways; by sheer demographics, getting mail-order brides sent to them from Japan (they'd come ahead under the guise of being agricultural workers, then after a few years quit and started businesses etc.) and in the early 1940s, all-out war.
ReplyDeleteThey like a lot of "modern traditional" Hawaii things, like the uke, invented in the late 1800s, white prostitutes (read up on Hotel Street, where white gals were kept hooked on opium/heroin, this also goes back 100 or so years), gambling (very illegal in Hawaii, but there's a lot of underground gambling, getting to shoot guns (there are actually ranges, one right in Waikiki where you can go and for an exorbitent fee, get to shoot guns) and ... the ukulele. It probably helps that the uke fits small hands better than the guitar, and takes less space to store.
So they can look at Jake and think, "Yes, this is how it would be if the world were a just place and we, along with our Nazi allies, had been able to take over the world, and we owned Hawaii, and Jake could be any one of ours' sons."
If this sounds like the Japanese by and large, as assholes, yeah that's the idea. Their basic outlook on life and other peoples is similar to the Germans during their Nazi era, or Southerners before the Civil War.