I don't care for the song and I really hate playing the bass solo. It draws attention to the bassist for no good reason. It's an awkward moment. I imagine all the bassists in the audience snickering and thinking "Wow, look at Jaco up there!"
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What's wrong with 2023 audiences?
- Thread starter Lance Bunyon
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I'll tell ya a story. I had a headliner spot at this little club with one of my mostly original bands. We played the middle set, and somehow we needed a closer for the last set and my husband's band ended up in that spot.
My husband's band was a weird little swing band that played a lot of old-timey music and mostly gigged in nursing homes. But here we were all doing a show together in this somewhat more contemporary club.
I'm done with my set and I'm sitting at the bar. His band is playing. A group of 20-somethings walk in just as the band is launching into this weird song where the bassist is singing in this awful, bad Tom Waits impression on some song no one has ever heard.
They saunter up to the bar, get ready to order, he starts singing, and they look at each other and wordlessly walk back out.
I am determined that I never want to be that band that makes that happen.
My husband's band was a weird little swing band that played a lot of old-timey music and mostly gigged in nursing homes. But here we were all doing a show together in this somewhat more contemporary club.
I'm done with my set and I'm sitting at the bar. His band is playing. A group of 20-somethings walk in just as the band is launching into this weird song where the bassist is singing in this awful, bad Tom Waits impression on some song no one has ever heard.
They saunter up to the bar, get ready to order, he starts singing, and they look at each other and wordlessly walk back out.
I am determined that I never want to be that band that makes that happen.
This has been an interesting and engaging thread, I'm impressed with the fact that civil discourse has prevailed for the most part. For me, it has come around to rethinking the title: "What's Wrong With 2023 Audiences?" I think a better question is "What do I need to know about 2023 audiences (and venues) to further my success in the music business?"
LOL I'm adding Wagon Wheel for a private party I'm doing next month. We're doing a whole mini-set of overdone country-ish songs that our all-ages audience will probably like, and I'm ok with that. I don't mind featuring a few songs like this as schtick, and that song actually has amazing harmony on it that my guys and I can pull off really well. But if I don't have three sets to fill, it's unlikely to make it to my list.
Old Crow is so good at this song no one else should even! We do it almost ever show (since we're on the cusp of NC and SC and Darius Rucker had a cover hit with it and he's a local).
The song has an interesting history. Dylan one offed one of the lyrics during a live performance and Old Crow wrote a song around it. They insisted on sharing songwriting credits with Dylan who kinda resisted but eventually said "ok what the f@@ if you insist"...
Their version was very Americana. Darius Rucker had the hit with it for a reason but I think both version serve their primary audiences well.
Had a very talented vox, imv, contact me to arrange a gig for today. I rate him as good as anyone currently available here in terms of vocal ability but when he sent over the set I was really bummed.
The fact that I had been chasing it for weeks...and it turned out to be the same old tosh we did 5 years ago...which was his last gig, iirc, means all that 'talent' is useless.
Nothing new...I think he is incapable of learning as i gave him loads of busker ideas and he ignored them all.
Complete waste of space and I'm aware of past baggage but I know the circumstance and it cant be a 'factor' anymore but he will dig up a 100 other excuses to not do anything i consider worthwhile.
So, I binned his 'favourites' and he hasnt spoken to me since. Could be a frosty gig but I'm done with this time waster.
So poor set and poor work ethic are big inhibitors to getting anything decent going.
The fact that I had been chasing it for weeks...and it turned out to be the same old tosh we did 5 years ago...which was his last gig, iirc, means all that 'talent' is useless.
Nothing new...I think he is incapable of learning as i gave him loads of busker ideas and he ignored them all.
Complete waste of space and I'm aware of past baggage but I know the circumstance and it cant be a 'factor' anymore but he will dig up a 100 other excuses to not do anything i consider worthwhile.
So, I binned his 'favourites' and he hasnt spoken to me since. Could be a frosty gig but I'm done with this time waster.
So poor set and poor work ethic are big inhibitors to getting anything decent going.
My pet peeve is jam sessions where nobody can think of what song to play so it turns into a half hour long blues jam.
Or how about an extended version of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb where the guitarist wanks on and on during the guitar solo!
Good point! It tells me that here is a band that goes for the low hanging fruit.
One TBer posted that they make BEG part of a medley so they get it over with quickly. Clever!
A band I know was looking for a drummer so I showed their set list to a drummer friend and he was disgusted by the material - all the overplayed, uber commercial stuff. It was a hard NO from him!
We played an interesting venue last night, an ice cream parlor in a 130-year-old, former general store on a town square in McKinney, Tx. People started filling the place a half hour before downbeat, and it was packed with folks who stayed the whole show. It was a diverse crowd in terms of age, and everyone was highly engaged.
At one point, the BL called up a woman from the crowd and got her to sing the chorus to BEG with us. Now her whole table was part of the show, and the whole crowd was smiling and laughing. By the end of the tune another hand full of people walked in off the street and sat down.
I think we did a Willie Nelson song after that, maybe one by CSN&Y.
No one left.
Aside: Those folks seemed to be having an impressively good time for being in an ice cream parlor. The sax player finally enlightened me, "It's a booze ice cream parlor".
Oh. Well duh.
To my point. It's not just the other songs that matter. IME it's been more about engagement. Our BL is a home-spun teller-of-tales who's comfortable in his on skin and extremely engaging without ever being cringe; He's the opposite of the kind of BL who stays stuck in his own heads.
He's also the godfather of the far-north-Texas music scene, has a following and draws a good crowd.
Speaking for the band members, our approach has been "let's make the song exciting and dynamic regardless of what gets called".
In this context, BEG is always a pleasant surprise in how well it works.
'Course it's only one of about 400 songs that we may do.
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Yeah.
Problem with songs like Hideaway and Pride and Joy is not just that they're overplayed in the blues-jam-band idiom, rather that they're overplayed badly; without feel, complexity or dynamics.
I've come to believe there aren't as many boring songs as there are boring presentations.
Yep. Audience participation requires songs that everybody knows. I'd like to have more of this sort of thing in my band. We do a good job of engaging the crowd from the stage, we get them involved, we chat them up between sets, and we give them fun things to do. We take pictures of them from the stage area and encourage them do to the same for us, but we rarely- if ever- have guests join us on stage. I'm certainly not against it, though I know some folks like to mumble about other people using their gear.
It wouldn’t matter to me how or who played Mustang Sally - my head would still explode like that scene in the movie, “Scanners”.
It wouldn’t matter to me how or who played Mustang Sally - my head would still explode like that scene in the movie, “Scanners”.
Sounds engaging/entertaining. Can you rinse/repeat each night?
We're not much on having other musicians sit in, at least not with my Fri/Sat band. We get people to come up in sing with us though.
A LOT of people like to sing.
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