confluential concertions

In my growing life as a musician, i gave two concerts this week. Sort of.
I've not yet done a "proper" solo concert, but this week was big. I was the featured performer at the Hotel Utah's open mic, doing a thirty-minute set. The Utah was voted San Francisco's best open mic, and it's the most magical one i know. It somehow combines high energy and reverence (open mics can generally have one or the other, but not both).
The previous longest gig i'd ever done was ten minutes. I'd been waiting and hoping for this slot for nine months. Considering my minor struggles with stage fright and the fact that i'm still in my first year of serious self-accompanying songwriterly intent (i'm basically a fifteen year-old guitarist trying to squeeze a five-year growth curve into one), this was huge for me. I'm at the point where most of my stuff sounds nice when i'm practicing alone, but in public it still takes so little to rattle me. On the Utah's website, you get to choose whether you want your archived performances to be available to the public, and of the twenty-some i've done, almost half haven't been acceptable to me, due to my own gaffes.
Of course, the performer is only half of the equation that goes into a performance...but at the Utah the audience is almost always ready to be a part of brilliance.
My set went...well. In some ways, fantastically. My playing and singing were near-perfect. I don't think i bungled a single lyric, even in the new song (i had my sheet music, but as soon as i started playing, i realized i had positioned the stand ineffectively...yet still nailed every word). During one song i felt a bit concrete-fingered, but was still hitting the right chords. I only had one major fuck-up, on my final number. Maybe it was self-conscious relief that i had made it all that way so perfectly, but i suddenly COULD NOT REMEMBER how the song began. No clue! I knew the words and chords, but not the construction. I just started hitting something and hoped that it would fall into place. It did eventually, but wasn't nearly the show-stopper it's been elsewhere.
Still in all, a great night. There were spikes of huge audience delight, and some humbling feedback from crowd members afterward. I didn't maintain that pin-drop vibe throughout the entire concert (during one song, it felt like a few people were talking about shopping lists), but there were fantastic moments of audience/performer connection. My patter was spot-on, my visual gags great. It renewed my eagerness to do killer, mistake-free longer sets. My voice was a little raw the next day, which is something i'll have to learn how to prevent. I can do a concert full voice in practice with no ill effect, but i guess the excitement made me push.
The other concert came a couple nights before.
I went to the local laundromat, to do my clothes. I brought my ukulele to practice while waiting, as i love the acoustics there. I ended up doing all my songs, which took far longer than my laundry required. I suspected i might do that, if the place remained clear of patrons who might be annoyed by a uke-playing singer. That can go either way. Most adore it, but one got uptight in the extreme.
For almost three hours, i was the only official patron in the place. My audience consisted of two people who were perhaps both homeless. I think they were there because it was warm and dry. The homeless presence is fairly mild on my street, but has become a bit more marked in the year i've lived here. The first person came in and sat down, opening some reading material. The second came an hour or so later, and she was obviously in deep distress, likely drug-related. A very, very bad trip perhaps? She paced around, occasionally letting out cries of pain, or banging on metal.
The first person spoke to her perhaps once, though not memorably. Mostly we both just let her do her thing. After half an hour, she walked back into the night.
The first person seemed friendly enough. Or self-contained, rather. Minding his own business. I hoped he might dig what i did...yet i was concerned that my more risque or blasphemous material might put him off. Or that he might be offended by some of my pieces in which it's not always obvious to audiences that i'm doing satire. He was african-american and not young, and i pegged him as possibly christian. Was i racial-profiling? Maybe a little. I was trying to sense his energy, but he wasn't giving much away.
Until finally i noticed his feet, ever-so-slightly moving to the music.
I became self-conscious about so many of my cover songs being by white artists. But not all - i had adapted a michael jackson and prince song over the past year, partly because i loved the songs or had a brilliant vision for them...but also partly because i wanted to be sure i had at least one black cover in my set (just as i'd made sure to have at least one female cover). My own interior affirmative action? That's a bit unfair...several of the non-white male songs i've covered have come from pure inspiration.
But in this world, one thinks of such things. At least i do.
As i played on, to this silent person who never looked my way, i couldn't help smiling at the thought that someday people might pay real money for tickets to my show, and here this fellow was getting the most free, intimate concert of his life. Could he possibly be digging it, even more than his possibly subconscious toe-tapping let on?
When i finished, i gathered my things. Would he say anything? I wished him a beautiful night. He looked up at me with bright eyes, and told me i was brilliant, and that i was going to very big places indeed.
I'll skip the Hallmark ending, and not tell you that i enjoyed that moment far more than the crowd-pleasing set a couple nights later. While there may be a touch of truth there, making a crowd of strangers laugh or squeal is a rush like no other. Perhaps that's partly about the affirmation and adulation we all crave in this ego-driven celebrity culture of alienation.
But i forgot to mention...the other person in the laundromat spoke to me too.
Her anguished reality coalesced into conscious thought and coherent words for a moment, when she looked my way and told me she loved my music. Then she went back to her crying.
Life in the big city.
Life in a broken world.