The Living Rockumentary

Warning: Long post:

Open mic at Harry's has only two more weeks left and then it is over.

When I first moved back to Northampton, I would spend my nights sleeping on the floor in Lord Russ’ apartment above Hugo’s. It was the summer of 1995 (I think) and Eddie Holly had just started hosting the open mic at The Baystate Hotel. His predecessor was Charlie Nakajima (Sp?). Russ and I would go there every Tuesday and play songs either together or separately.

I was still pretty green when it came to performing. I had played in a few coffeehouses over the years, had played a total of four full rock band concerts, and had sweated my way through a few piano recitals, but that’s about it. I was still pretty nervous when it came to being on stage. I had plenty of songs and a bunch of 4-track albums but I wasn’t used to the whole live thing.

Soon, Russ took over the open mic and I was a back-up for the nights when he couldn’t make it. I started to feel more and more comfortable on stage as a solo performer. The Baystate was a perfect place for this gradual education since it was so small and intimate and lots of times nobody was even listening anyway.

Russ hosted the open mic for a couple of years and then he quit the Baystate altogether and I took over. It was great. There are down sides to being a host of an open mic, besides the obvious one of having to sit through some unbearable performances, though

The hardest part is having to sometimes kick people off of the stage. Sometimes it is one of your friends who has thrown back a few too many and loses count while playing three songs. Sometimes it is a crazy scary guy who looks like he’s ready to punch you right in the face and sometimes it is a drunk loud whining girl who makes it half-way through an a capella version of Amazing Grace and wants to start over when she belches out a wrong note.

Other cons to hosting an open mic include being trapped in a horribly smoky room for hours, playing to a completed disinterested group of noisy sports fans at the bar, having to ask people to keep it down a little while they are screeching out a drunken mantra during some poor performers quiet heart-felt ballad, and being ask by your friends if you can move them up on the list even though they came in and signed up half an hour before last call.

But the pros out weigh the cons. I guess that’s obvious or I wouldn’t have kept doing it. What are the pros? I already mentioned the education and experience that I got while hosting, that is the biggy really. Not only do you have to become comfortable on a stage you also have to learn to do things like introducing people and how to gauge a crowd. You learn when to talk to the audience to lure their concentration back to the stage and you learn when to just be quiet and let the individual performer take over. You learn a lot about mixing the sound system for different kinds of performers (the ones who have never sang into a microphone before can be a real challenge). You even learn to judge before hand, what kind of show a performer is likely to put on.

The hardest thing to learn, and I still have trouble with this sometimes, is starting out the night. There is nothing as intimidating as the first few words you utter on a stage in a room where people seem perfectly content in their own conversations. It’s really hard to start a half hour set of music when you feel like you are more bothering than entertaining the people there. I’ve said it before and I’m sticking by it, playing an open mic is the ultimate lesson in humility.

I did the open mic at the Baystate once a week for almost two years before it went out of business and shut down (I like to feel my open mic is somehow played a part in that.)

In that time I saw a lot of people come and go. I saw a mess of wonderful performances and an unrelentling number of not-so-good ones (even the not-so-good ones I mostly enjoyed, trying to look on the positive side and imagining how excited these people must feel to be up there in front of an audience for maybe the first time.)

I remember a new guy named Kevin O’Rourke who sang these very pretty subtle songs. I can recall Russ, Connolly Ryan, and myself telling Kevin he reminded us a little of Donovan. He thought we were making fun of him. Of course, he went on to start an incredible band called Lo Fine.

Adam Greenberg’s music was introduced to me through the open mic. Who’s this new kid with the voice and the amazing songs? Not much later, I was in a band with him called the Greenbergs.

It was at open mic when Chris Collingwood and Brian Marchese asked me if I wanted to be involved in this new band they were forming with Philip Price and Lloyd Cole, this became the Gay Potatoes.

I saw Chris and Lloyd play great sets there.

I remember how much of a treat it was whenever Thane Thomsen or the Figments would play a song or two. He would sit and quietly play his perfect songs at a tempo slightly slower than that of the audience and I was amazed at how he was able to do that.

I watched and often accompanied Connolly Ryan (something I hadn’t done since our dorm days together back in 1988 and 1989) do his mind-blowing poetry performance art.

I remember Eugene Farrarri singing the Pixies’ Caribou, and Mike Ruffino almost falling off of the table he was standing on while playing bass, his head just inches from the ceiling fan.

I can still picture Philip singing that Elton John song “Sugar Bear” really beautifully.

I came to know by heart original songs by Tara LaDore, Patty Magill, Jason Simon, Alex Johnson, Evil Bill, Jellybone Rivers, and countless others.

I remember Junko, now of Cyclub, appearing out of nowhere one day and winning the hearts of everyone in the bar with her gypsy punk music and her accent.

Timmy T and Jeff both were always ready with cover songs when we were burnt out on originals.

I got to see Tony mystify the audience many times over and Ari Vais play his songs from the front (usually I was behind him in the band Humbert). I saw Brian play guitar for the very first time at Thane’s birthday (he holds it backwards.)

And I got to experience the wonder of John Euclasia (Tony knows what I mean)

Of course, I also was lucky enough to join many of these people on the stage and hang out with them off the stage. I must have sang a thousand songs there.

The Baystate closed and thanks to Don Rooke, the open mic moved over to Harry’s where it has lasted a little over a year. Harry’s introduced some huge improvements and few set-backs to open mic.

The biggest set-back was that a lot of people decided to hate Harry’s simply because it wasn’t the worshipped Baystate. The other set-back was that Harry’s is so big that it lacked that intimate closeness of the Baystate.

The improvements were a far superior sound system (I know people don’t remember it this way, through their rose-colored ear drums, but the baystate sound system was pretty rough, muddy and full of feedback, broken monitors and blown-out speakers), a nice professional stage with lights, and it is less of a smoke trap.

Harry’s gave people who would normally never taste it, experience in a professional stage setting. It also gave people who were on their way, practice playing with real monitors and lights.

A lot of the regulars from the Baystate moved on over to Harry’s. In the last half year or so of the Baystate’s open mic the attendance had been way down. This was partly because a Sunday night open mic had been added to the roster, it was also partly because that old crowd simply moved on and open mic had yet to catch on with the newer people in town. Tuesday open mic at Harry’s never caught on too well. It did a little better than the Sunday night one, which ended a little while ago, but it never became huge.

A bunch of new performers found their way into the Northampton music scene at Harry’s on Tuesdays, though. Chris Pureka, Shawn Germaine, Cameron, Bob, and Dennis Crommett often graced the stage.

I enjoyed Harry’s open mic because I got to really make people sound as good as possible and also because the room was so big I got to run around sometimes. We set up candles, we pulled the tables up closer and the room became much more intimate. It is still a huge struggle to get people to venture away from the bar and closer to the stage but that ain’t ever gonna change.

Open mic was struggling, though. Not enough people were coming and buying drinks to make it worth while for the bar. In an effort to switch things up, we introduce Harryoke and it was a good success for about 4 or 5 weeks and then people once again started trailing off. I loved Harryoke.

We went back to the normal open mic after Harryoke but the crowd was even thinner than before. Now it is pretty much over. I’ve been hosting (which includes playing usually a half and hour of my own material – sometimes more like an hour) every week for almost three years. That’s about 150 open mics, not counting all the times I filled in for Russ at the Baystate.

In that time, I have improved hugely as a performer, singer, guitarist, song writer. I can listen to old tapes of the early open mic performances and hear an astounding difference. I am hardly ever nervous before a show now and a have a much better command of an audience. It was great experience all around.

One good thing about the Open Mic Open Mic ending is that people won’t get sick of my songs so they might enjoy SFTD shows more. Why come and see a show at the Iron Horse when you can hear the same songs every single Tuesday at Harry’s, right?

So, yeah, there you go. Open Mic.