Open Mic

Have I ever told you,
How much I give a flying fig about Cycling?

Like I've said before and here now: I just ride my bike.

But Muse-ic...

Open mic night at Tapped. BJ Griffin singing.

It's not like I like concerts. Music is something I normally do alone. I feel like an ass at a big concert. I'm not agoraphobic, but I can be completely self-conscious amidst a sea of people. "Woooooo!", so far back the band can't even hear it. How long do I have to do this? Three more hours! The 2009 Cold Play concert at the Amphitheater was one of the few I remember enjoying.

But there's nothing like open mic (or mike if you prefer) at Hilltop North (whatever the current name of the place is: Keagans, The Blue Turtle, or now Tapped. You can check who's playing on their FB page). If nothing else the beer is finally fantastic there. Tonight, so was the music. And I enjoyed it for a good three hours.

Don't be fooled by the "Open Mic". They may have day jobs, but these are musicians, and most of them know each other. They're just not getting paid this night so instead of playing the worn out, over-played music a Virginia Beach band is expected to play, they're playing what they want to play—originals or still fresh covers.

These phone recordings don't do them justice. Even the best recording would be nothing compared to being there, so go check out Open Mic night hosted by Jon and Justin at Tapped. ---

If a video doesn't play try clicking the fullscreen icon on the video.

Justin can sing his ass off, either all out like he did tonight or mellower like I heard him a couple of years ago when Luke and Micah hosted open mic night. Here playing Give Me One Reason.

Justin again.

Dustin: Avicii cover - Wake Me Up

Barry?: Dr. Dog cover, The Beach

BJ Griffin is awesome:

Trevor: An original? Followed by a dance

Links

Comments

comments powered by Disqus

Last Notes

Ohhh, I love cycling…kind of. I have a frustrating leg issue — a physician's assistant I know suggested that it might be iliac artery endofibrosis. I was tested for it. The woman who tested me at Sentara was shocked to see me. She was accustomed to testing 60 year old obese diabetics. Because her patients weren't fit enough to use exercise equipment there was none in the room. I was told to do 50 knee bends whereupon the blood pressure in my feet would be retested. No change. Regardless of the cause, the effect is that a 5 to 10 minute near max effort triggers a dead acid-burning fatigue in my left leg that doesn't recover for more than that long at a very easy pace. It's worst and most frustrating in a cyclocross race (high intensity from the start with no let up) while long races are good.

I once had the dumbest conversation ever on facebook where I joked about my willingness to give up my left leg to be able to sing or play like a couple of 14 year old local music prodigies I had just heard. All I can say is that I'd rather write one decent novel than be Lance Armstrong even if he were still admirable. And if you've never heard an amazing voice up close in a tiny venue, you're missing out.

Web page construction notes

Note on web site construction: Recorded on my HTC One S. Video converted for web display using the free open source Miro Video Converter. A more recent version of ffmpeg needs to be installed for use by Miro to make webm videos that work in Firefox. Windows builds of that can be downloaded at Zeranoe and extracted using WinRAR or 7-zip. Then even though it works on your local computer you may find you have to edit the .htaccess files on your web server to include the MIME types for mp4, ogg, webm...
This page which uses HTML5 video, will not work on versions of IE 8 and earlier. The simplest and most browser independent method of embedding video into a web page is to upload to Youtube and copy the embedding code. That will work on old crappy versions of MS Internet Explorer (IE9 won't work on Windows XP), plus you won't use up your storage space and bandwidth on video.