Dressing Room – Crow’s Nest – Santa Cruz, CA – 10/6/13

20131006_210114[1]Despite the rather uninteresting bathroom I had to get dressed in, I was pretty excited for this gig.  Why? 

Well, I’ve been playing the Crow’s Nest for years.  First as an MC.  Then worked my way up to feature.  And this show was my first time headlining there.

I’ve never done a lot of MC work, so this is the first place where I really started at the bottom and worked my way to the top spot.

Ironically, the evening’s MC, Susan Jones, is an established headliner from Seattle.  She was only doing the gig so the guy she was traveling with with who was featuring could make some money on the way home. So I was moving up and she was slumming. 🙂

The way I got the gig was kind of interesting. I played this room back in January as a feature.  The booker either forgot to send my check or it never arrived for some reason. Either way, he was going to have to take a bunch of time to find the check or call the bank or whatever.  So I told him, “Look, I’ve been doing well there.  Let’s forget about the money from the January show if you’ll headliner me at the next one.”  And he said, “Done deal.”

Sometimes you gotta give to receive. 🙂

The Crow’s Nest is a notoriously weird room to play.  The crowds are either loud and obnoxious or quiet and low energy.  I can handle loud crowds pretty well. Low energy ones, you just do the best you can.  And that’s what we had at this show.  A quiet and very PC crowd.

Vince, the feature, tried some off-color stuff that didn’t fly.  And even with that warning, I tried a couple myself. 🙂  But overall my set went pretty well.  It wasn’t the show of a lifetime or anything.  But I think I put in a pretty solid showing.  I had even rewritten and rehearsed some newer stuff and didn’t even get to it.  My 45 minutes blew by pretty quick and I ended up doing mostly doing a greatest hits set.  Which was ok since that particular audience was unfamiliar with me.

Nice compliments and some decent merch sales on the way out.  And home I went. 🙂  The next gig is a at a gay bar in San Francisco.  Let’s see what kind of dressing room they’ve got….

 


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