35 Dollar Thursday After Christmas
It really looked to be packed like sardines when I gazed at the webcam image of Bourbon Street, at around 7 PM -the one which is 3 blocks from the Lilly Pad.
It was still somewhat so when I got there about 10:30.
I made 35 bucks after being able to play pretty hard even when nobody was in immediate sight.
The biggest problem I am facing now is not knowing nearly enough songs by various artists; or more specifically, not being able to think of them on the sopt.
Enter an alphabetical list of every song I ever played; laminated and on 12 sheets if it has to be. But, I really could have used one tonight; I could have played a Prince song at one point, for one particular tourist. I didn't think of that until I was on my way home, that it would have been better than whatever I did play..
It really looked to be packed like sardines when I gazed at the webcam image of Bourbon Street, at around 7 PM -the one which is 3 blocks from the Lilly Pad.
It was still somewhat so when I got there about 10:30.
I made 35 bucks after being able to play pretty hard even when nobody was in immediate sight.
The biggest problem I am facing now is not knowing nearly enough songs by various artists; or more specifically, not being able to think of them on the sopt.
Enter an alphabetical list of every song I ever played; laminated and on 12 sheets if it has to be. But, I really could have used one tonight; I could have played a Prince song at one point, for one particular tourist. I didn't think of that until I was on my way home, that it would have been better than whatever I did play..
Thinking up what to play on the "sopt" is hard for me too.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I've noticed it, you never know who's listening. The only way to tell there's really no one around is when you're getting no tips. But that you played and thought you were alone but got $35 is fine.
The reason that family has gotten by OK with their hand clapping is, they're a family with cute kids, and they're black. That's what tourists came to see - they can see a skinny white buy playing guitar anywhere. But New Orleans, thanks to Louis Armstrong, is all about black people playing jazz or blues.
My pal Leroy, not God's gift to the saxophone, still makes more than a white guy playing at the same level, because a black guy playing sax is this "iconic" thing. It doesn't hurt that he's a really sharp dresser so he doesn't look like a bum.
I read somewhere, maybe in Max Karnofsky's "My Life In Jazz", that a black guy could play jazz and be the most regular, family-oriented guy, dress decently, treat it like the job it is, but for some reason if you were white you had to be some kind of a bohemian degenerate, the kind who rooms with several other guys and whoever gets up first is best dressed, etc. A real bohemian degenerate.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's kind of like the way, when I was a kid, if you were an adult and picking shells at the beach for a living, you were a real drop-out, a hippie, etc. But for me, given the paucity of other ways to make money, picking shells was perfectly respectable, and in fact it's by picking "nii'ihau" shells that I bought my first decent surfboard.
For a "local", rather than the mainland transplants the hippies were, making handicrafts out of shells, sea urchin spines etc., was perfectly fine. A guy behind us had a wife and kids, and made really neat little tiki god things out of pencil urchin spines, for which he got $20 from a local gift shop.
Get a package of those "page protectors" then keep a Notepad/Wordpad file on your computer desktop that you can add to and edit on a whim. Keep a list of songs you can play on it, and print out the latest copy and keep it in the page protector(s). You can get page protectors in a dollar store or drug store etc.
ReplyDeleteI have a good stock of page protectors, thanks to Alex of California, who sent them, along with the markers and pencils and other art supplies; but, yeah that would be better than laminating something that is going to hopefully (if I am ambitious about adding songs) be updated every other day.
ReplyDeleteNow, I am faced with the dilemma of whether to name my next band "The Bohemian Degenerates," or "The Pencil Urchin Spines."