Saturday, February 26, 2005
A Slightly Flatulent Universe
Andy Martello, welcomed a bit of hate e-mail in his Blog today. I think he should ignore cheap shots. The reasons are numerous. But besides having the ability, at least, to make you feel like unscooped doggie poop on the sidewalk of life, it's just not very useful. I welcome constructive criticism. I want to know who doesn't like my performance or my writing but I want to know why and I want to know who. I want to know the center of my audience and not worry at all about the fringes which may or may not include deaf subway dwellers and Mongolian rappers.I wrote last month about my annoyance with a pair of septuagenarians who requested forties songs from me for an hour. They told me I couldn't cut it with them and left without a tip. They advised me to play nothing but that stuff if I wanted to draw that crowd. It was only the non-tipping that annoyed me. Not that I needed the fifty cents they might have separated themselves from at gun point, but at the rudeness. I even tip a bad waitress, for instance. I was grateful to them for helping me realize that I didn't want to appeal to that crowd. That's not who I am. That's not what I do. There are a lot of old folks who stumble into my dinner gig at Althea's and like my usual stuff. They sometimes even buy my CD if the Social Security check is freshly cashed and swelling in their handbags. So it taught me not to waste my time learning material for what for me would be a fringe group.
I get lots of requests that I can't or don't want to do. If I learn all that stuff, my song list will approach five hundred. I can't remember all that. I have to read a lot of what I do now when it comes to cover tunes. I'm moving closer and closer to just doing my own material with a few covers I really like in between. That's my goal for some places I play, like Bella Luna Cafe tonight. My dinner gig at Althea's is fun for other reasons and oldies covers are fine. I toss in my own stuff if it fits. I love it when they ask me who wrote that. Then later when I do a cover that they don't recognize they ask if I wrote it. That's welcome confusion and good feedback. Drive-by one-liner critics are just the universe farting.
posted by Bud @ 7:48 AM
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