Have a great show and perhaps you should reconsider that tatoo while you are there in Austin. I dont think you have thought it out fully. Just kidding!
I hope some of the Austinites on the board will check em out tonight. They have a nice sound, especially when you can hear the violin .
We are going to try to go, have a dinner reservation at 7pm, will try to get there to catch some of it. DD
Jeff, We got out of dinner late, and came over at 9:30pm, I figured we might at least get a chance to say hello, but the door guy said you guys all bailed straigth away. I looked around for a long haired guy sans tattoo, but did not see anyone. Sorry we missed ya. We left as the mean age of the clientelle was a lot younger than my wife and I, went to Pete's Piano bar, and had a blast. I hope you had a good set. DD
What was it with restaurants last night? An early Valentines day? We were told 35-45 min wait and it was over an hour. We'll try to catch you next month, Jeff. What's the date again?
We did have a good set. We were done at 9 and on the road by 9:45. At 9:30, we were probably around back hauling gear. The crowd was fairly young, but the other bands were good. The one after us was a fun band to watch and I've seen Podunk - they are excellent. Not sure when we will be back in Austin. I was supposed to do a couple of gigs with a friend of mine who lives in San Marcos, but she found a guy to work with her who lives there (I'm glad she did), so the next gig back in Austin probably won't be until April. The sound guy and people at the club liked us, so I don't think we'll have a problem getting invited back. Maybe next time we can go on later. Thanks for making the effort!
How did the crowd like you? Would you say most of them had never heard you before or you had a following there? Also, what kind of feeling do you get on stage performing kind of knowing your doing what most in the crowd will never be doing? Their in the position of envying you and your the envy receiver...err...or something. Just curious. I've always wondered what it would be like to be the one on stage playing the lead guitar. That feeling...feeding off the audience...does it make you play better? Also, do you tend to mix it up in the songs you have(ala improvise) or do you tend to play like you recorded it? I need to check out your tunes. Do you have them on a website? Surf
Being that it was 8:20 when we started, there wasn't much of a crowd there - I'd say under 20 people at that point. By the time we finished, there were probably 50 or 60 and they responded well. They seemed to like us and we got $34 in tips - pretty good considering we only played 40 minutes. There were only a handful of people (under 5) that knew us there. We don't really have much of a following in Houston yet, let alone Austin. I've played in bands in front of thousands and in front of nobody. If you really love the music, it often doesn't make much difference. Personally, I prefer clubs that are jammed to the gills. I played in a band back in the mid-90's and we played the Satellite Lounge to a completely sold out house. I mean, you couldn't walk in there and the fire marshall started turning people away at the door. People were crammed up by the stage and it was awesome. That is the most fun to me. When I've played larger gigs for a couple thousand, they are often 5 or 10 feet from the front of the stage and it's hard to make that connection with them the way you do with even 50 if they are smashed up at the front. I've rarely played in bands where the crowd knows the material at least not in the sing-a-long kind of way. They might recognize things, etc, but never had that following that knew everything that was coming. Personally, I like it when they do know, but you have to have a following first. I'm not a lead guitar player so I couldn't answer that question for you. The energy of the audience does make a difference but, ultimately, you have to be great if no one claps or if they all scream their lungs out. I've played in places where the band was generally liked and got very little response because the band was frustrated by the lack of audience participation - not good. I've also been in situations where you seriously expected the crowd to start heaving tomatoes any minute but, by the end of the set, they were screaming their lungs out because the band was great and they appreciated it. You just have to be good (I know it sounds simple, right) and care about what YOU are doing more than you care about what the audience thinks. It is entertainment, but you have to be there for yourself first, your bandmates second, the music third and the audience after that. I wouldn't ever go as far as turn my back to the audience like Miles Davis did, but I understand the reasoning - if you don't care so deeply about what you do that you'd play for nothing with no one watching, why would anyone pay to watch? We don't really improvise. We're a pop/rock band. Our songs average about 4 minutes in length and that's the way they are supposed to be for this music. We improvise within the structure of the song and we'll do extended endings - we have one in particular that runs up to around 8 minutes as the guitarist goes off at the end of a 5 1/2 minute song - but, generally, we play the songs as is maybe changing fills here or there or slightly altering solos, but the parts are mostly the same. You can hear clips on the songs at http://www.orangeisin.com/ . We are writing like crazy right now and hope to be back in the studio doing a full-length CD in early summer. We've actually got two months off after a show we are doing next week at Sidecar Pub. That will give us a chance to get a bunch of new material together before we do three gigs pretty much right in a row from mid-April through early May.
