If you want to do a gig like the one we’re doing today, and you want a crowd in your ZOOM performance venue, you have merely to organize your song list from the Beatles tunes that are the longest-lasting pop music in history — in our booth, we got a half-and-half mix of young and old, all asking for Beatles tunes, the tunes with which they are most familiar and that they find the most singable. Here’s the song list I would use:
- Love Me Do
- From Me to You
- She Loves You
- I Want To Hold Your Hand
- Can’t Buy Me Love
- Hard Day’s Night
- I Feel Fine
- Ticket to Ride
- Help
- Day Tripper
- We Can Work It Out
- Paperback Writer
- Yesterday
Note that Yesterday falls at the end alphabetically, and it’s just as well…it’s the song with which you should leave your audience wanting more, not relieved that you’re done with your set.
You can add or subtract songs, but don’t deviate out of the Beatles tune list if you want to keep your audience. If you want to send messages to your audience, expect the audience to be a LOT smaller. I tend to send messages, thus my audience is often reduced to “none”.
Here are some Message Songs:
- Rainbow Race
- Somewhere Over the Rainbow
- Bridge Over Troubled Water
- Bohemian Rhapsody
- Brother Can You Spare a Dime?
- Comfortably Numb
- Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?
- Don’t Worry, Be Happy
- Four Chord Song
- Feelin’ Alright
- Girl From Ipanema
- The Great Pretender
- Hey Jude
- Hit the Road, Jack
- Hotel California
- I Can See For Miles
- I Feel Good
- Imagine
- In My Life
- Layla
- Let It Be
- Light My Fire
- Mama Told Me Not To Come
- Mercedes Benz
- New York, New York
- Nobody Knows You When You’re Down & Out
- Oh Pretty Woman
- One Toke Over the Line
- Purple Haze
- Satisfaction
- Shine On You Crazy Diamond
- Smoke On The Water
- Stairway to Heaven
- Stormy Monday
- Sunshine of Your Love
- Sympathy For The Devil
- Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation
- That Old Black Magic Has Me In Its Spell
- We Will Rock You
- The Weight
- White Rabbit
- Yesterday
- You Give Me Fever
- You Really Got Me Going
- Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again
- Don’t You Want Somebody To Love?
- Last Train to Clarksville
There are more, but this will serve as a basic gig list from which to work out the songs that go across best, but they should also be songs that YOU enjoy performing for an audience and singing for yourself.
Singing should never become a chore. When it does, you’ll experience the usual results, so be vigilant, on constant guard against boredom. I don’t mean to seek out something more exciting; the idea is to avoid boredom with WHATEVER you’re doing at the moment.
Boredom comes from the expectation of pleasure. Exciting Pleasure Circuits is the basic business of the entertainment industry, which extends all the way from books and records to ice cream parlors and porn palaces. It’s all designed to draw in a crowd and extract money from them — Phineas T. Barnum, of Barnum & Bailey Circus fame, perfected the old pick-pocket trick … Tickets are FREE, or only a dime, but you sit way in the far back bleachers, wooden benches, and ONLY when you get there do you find out that better seats cost extra, nicer chairs cost extra, and nice, soft cushions cost extra, until the full price of the ticket is finally, bit-by-bit, extracted from you.
The profit comes when you get hungry, thirsty and bored. You buy junk food, chug down beer or soft drinks, and seek excitement at the rides and games of chance.
People love to gamble, on the off-chance that they’ll become rich overnight, but the cost of gambling has to be just pennies, or they won’t play. 99% of all gamblers play the slots.
We got a new battery-powered amp. On the first day at the fair, we were asked to move, and the move we chose did not include a power hookup. The one by the bathrooms at the stable entrance would have had power, but nobody goes there except to go to the bathroom. Not the greatest setting for music I’ve ever seen.
So we selected a place underneath a giant tree, which puts us in the shade, as long as we keep moving the tents around to accommodate the sun’s movement across the sky, making sure the audience has a comfortable and shady place to sit and hang out, keeping in mind that most folks out there on the common green are in full sunlight all the time.
The battery-powered amp has two input channels, one for guitar, one for vocals, and it has a variety of choices of type of amplifier you want it to duplicate, such as “tweed” or “classic rock” or “distortion”.
The vocal side has its own EQ system and a REVERB, to sweeten up ANY voice on the street, where a cutting sound, a sound that can bust through street noise pollution, has to still be pleasant, not irritating, as are most cutting sounds.
Vocal harmonies are great. If you don’t have a band, you can use the CD INPUT in the back of the amp to play your basic tracks, leaving the LIVE VOCAL as the last vocal track in the stack, meaning that you sing all the harmonies on the CD, and add your lead vocal LIVE at performance. You’ll have to mess with the output volume on your CD player to get the right mix of pre-recorded and live vocals, and you can do the same with the guitar, putting in drums, bass, keyboards, horns, strings, whatever.
Basically, you’d be doing Karaoke over the basic CD tracks, much better than putting the whole mess onto a computer and playing it back through synthesizers. You might as well benefit from a good studio mix, and the sound will be basically the same. Synth is NOT “live” in any sense of the word.
Well, that’s the update for now. I’m back to working on the song lists and working out the issues with the new amp.
Without the amp, the didge was unhearable over the din of the screaming crowds, and no, I’m not kidding. Some performers like to stir up the crowd and get them roaring. I like small, intimate jazz clubs, not 100,000 screaming fans waving little Petroleum-Distillate Illuminated Tubes of Light.
Woodstock? You can have it. Give me Montreaux every time.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby