Open Mic Night

On Saturday night was the Open Mic. It was in the Summer Camp Lounge which is a dirty old Jamesway out in the Summer Camp area where parties are usually held. There were a few solo acts and a couple of bands. I decided that I would play some of my acoustic stuff as well as with my band which I haven't done before. As usual, all the acts were really great. The girl who put on the whole thing always sings some country/folk songs and has an amazing voice. The first band did sort of a folky/bluegrass thing, which sounded really great. My usual bass player down here, Daniel, went up and played keyboards and sang (first time he did that in public) with a fiddle player and a guitarist. They played some bright eyes songs which sounded great! The second band up played some covers like Hotel California and some Bon Jovi. It was fun to listen to. Later, my "band" went up. I say "band" since we only practiced once. It was myself, Daniel on bass, and then Jon from the Greenhouse on drums. Daniel and I have been playing together for a while so we were able to put the songs together quickly and Jon is a quality drummer so he was able to just dive right in. We played a Gov't Mule song, then Hey Joe, then Red House (both the Hendrix ones). The crowd really seemed to enjoy it. We definitely sounded much better than we were expecting and we all had such a blast up there. A few more acts went up and then at the end of the night, everyone wanted us to play some more so we got back up on stage and just started jamming. We picked up my friend Timon on keyboards so that added some to it too. We hadn't had anything prepared so we just started taking requests from the audience and surprisingly, we were able to play a lot of them. We did stuff from Metallica to the Violent Femmes, Guns N Roses, Bob Marley, etc. it was really a lot of fun. Eventually, we ran out of gas at around 2:30 am and decided to call it a night. The funny thing is that most of the party that stayed until the end were what's called "beakers," or the science people. The station people (carps, heavy machinery operators, etc) usually poke fun at us beakers but we were able to party way harder than them.

It was so much fun to play down here, as it always is. This year though, I should be able to play the big New Year's Eve party. A lot of people are really looking forward to my band playing that.