In a way, if you’re a Deadhead of my age and appearance, wandering into any place that doesn’t smell like incense is like what it must be like to wander into somebody else’s club house without a business card.
In one week I managed to make it to Clear Lake, Iowa, to the Surf Ballroom to hear Gov’t Mule from the rail and then directly to far-western Nebraska to attend a wedding which technically DID have music, but I don’t know the names of the songs (there’s a recording I could post if you’d like to identify ’em) but mostly the wedding had a Nebraska football game on in the adjacent bar, and the Huskers were getting slaughtered. Not a place for an Iowa Hawkeye hippie to hang around in, unless he very carefully manages his p’s and q’s.
Due to a little mixup, there was no Mule recording but that doesn’t really matter because they themselves sell really excellent soundboards so who needs the home made version? As mentioned, there IS a recording of the wedding which drew me to far-western Nebraska, and that was an interesting outdoor experience. A couple of different sound levels with which to deal, but more than that, there was this train……….. the ceremony took about twenty-one minutes, three of which were train-going-by. I get weddings and funerals confused so I try to play close attention and I’ve listened to this one several times. I try to contemplate whether I’d treasure an audio copy of my own, given the fact that my marriage made me very very angry and confused twenty years in, and I start to journey through my past and the train goes by. It’s a long one, filled with tons and tons of coal and a few tankers of stuff. There are a lot of coal trains in this area, running both directions. Somebody is really burning that stuff.
Not long after the wedding and after returning to Iowa and dealing with some medical complications of someone near me protected by HIPA and attending a thing an hour and a quarter away, I whiled away a couple of days doing actual money-producing work, when all of a sudden I notice……
Ryne Doughty has posted that he’s playing nearby at a venue I’ve never attended despite some various friends playing there, and it’s twenty miles away. I like Ryne Doughty. Well, I like my friends too, but I already have one good Ryne Doughty recording and I figure this relatively little nearby place might be perfect for adding to the collection, so to speak. I go there. I’m the first guy through the door except for Ryne.
We talk about stuff. Sheila, the owner, warns me that there will be some chatter. This is a gathering of some kind of tribe that likes to talk and stuff during performances. So I fret about that. It’s a sort of a square box with a pretty high ceiling and I don’t know how many people are going to want to sit at the tables which are casually arranged around the room. I decide maybe the middle of the room with the mic up in the air a long ways, which invites two different chairs to bump into my light stand legs, one of which is my own, and I check the levels and put the thing up in the air and didn’t turn it on. I did get the second set from a table right in front of the amps, but not without its drawbacks left to your imagination.
I’m absolutely positive that it’s a rookie mistake to forget to start the recording. It’s “YOU HAD ONE THING TO DO” wearing a different dress. Might not have mattered though. Ryne did open with a request of mine and it would have been nice to have that but I have the Pomeroy version anyway. The chatter did bother me. You can’t just barge into somebody else’s room and tell everybody present that it would be nice if they would STFU though. Perhaps they can be trained (grin).
Which sort of brings me to the point (I hear you sighing). So I’m talking to Ryne afterwards about the phenomenon of little listening rooms hosting performers like himself, and the part where I don’t remember that from when I was last loose in the world (I have a story sort of like Rip Van Winkle). I went to sort of big stadium-sized concerts with some regularity up to a certain point, when I Van Winkled, and I went to some big bars that had some really high profile bands but still under a couple of thousand people, but this listening room business is new to me.
Maybe it’s been around a while, but I wasn’t.
Anyway, I’m from a different club house. I’ve been hanging out quite regularly in another room and have started piling up recordings I’ve made there. That stands at around fourteen at this time. I’ve failed to hit the record button before; I’ll have to work on that. Someplace I have an audio clip of that proprietor warning us to “shut the hell up” in a nice way of course, and that makes for a perfect recording experience. Maybe that isn’t the norm. Everybody playing there says the place is different.
BUT if an enterprising fan brought his little entry level Zoom to every show he attended “wherever”, and turned it on all the time, there could be times that performers get control with some really compelling stuff (Ryne did), and then the room quiets down unless they’re a coal train. So is that happening DOZENS of times per week, just in Iowa?
Somebody should be archiving that, shouldn’t they?