Quarantine Happy Hour Gig

I had the opportunity last Saturday to play the Quarantine Happy Hour for the first time. They have music everyday and have had since last year. I don’t know when it started and haven’t checked but it has been going on at least all the time that we’ve been locked up in the house playing the isolationist’s game. Well, I had my doubts about accepting the gig because I had not done one in so long but I knew deep down that I needed to do it and prove to myself that either I still could play or that I couldn’t.

I sat down on Friday evening with a pencil and legal pad and started hammering out a set list. “Let’s see, an hour gig means I’ll need…er…3 minutes per song minimum length…12 songs is about 45 minutes with talking so that will be…uhm…19-20 songs. My sponsor for the show was oldtime mainstay Rafe Stefanini and he said that there were a lot of oldtime fans in the 20K members of the QHH and that it would be good for me to play a bunch of the Narmour & Smith tunes I played with Norman Blake on “Gallup to Georgia” so I started off with about 6-7 or the first ones that I thought of. Then I got to thinking about a couple of the more recent tunes I’ve written and thought that they’d be good in the mix and wrote them down. Then a few more, a couple of ‘bluegrass’ flavored originals, one a requested tune that I wrote back in the mid-80’s and another that I wrote over the course of a few years visits to Western Australia (WA), Perth to be exact. And songs, gotta have a few songs to break it up. What can I sing? The only thing that I could come up with was a short sampling of some of the songs Thomm Jutz and I have been working on about my relatives, so that’s what I chose. So, in the end I had 9 Narmour & Smith tunes, 1 Bill Monroe song completely reworked to sound more like a Doc Boggs number, 3 original songs and 6 original instrumentals.

This is really the first time in a long time that I had changed my set list much and certainly I have not put so many originals on the list before. But I felt like it was time to stop mining the same old set list and get some of these tunes out there and I felt strangely satisfied with the list, that it was the right path to choose. I didn’t foresee how much effort it was going to require of me to maintain a decent level of performance because, like I said, it’s been a long time but I made it through it without too much to be frustrated over. When the request came in I played a very loose version of “Evening Prayer Blues” and found some variations that I had not played before. I just didn’t feel much like sticking to the beat, the time, the cadence and just to play the thing as it came to me, to relax and rest from the last song. It was like the muse came along for the ride and showed me some things I’d not thought of before. It worked out that way on a couple other things too. I had a request for “Tall Timber or Katy Hill” which I obliged eventually but played only a couple times around very fast because that’s what the request was really about. Slam, bam, done. It like to have got away from me and I thought as soon as I kicked it off, “This is way too fast” but I got through it.

In the end I felt tired and just zoned out for the rest of the evening. The next day I realized that I had pulled it off, gotten through it in respectable fashion even with all the clams and proved to myself that I can still do this gig though I must say I’m really feeling rusty. My hands felt better than they have in a long time and I realized that what they need more than anything is to be used more frequently to play music instead of typing and working the internet. I realize that a lot of people live on the internet and partake of social media channels regularly, contribute regularly. But I can see that it’s not my best use of time and the QHH gig proved that.

So, I’ll go practice and stop typing. Life is good. MC