VIRB

On Thursday, October 11, the World Racketeering Squad played another open mic gig at the Green Muse Cafe here in Austin. We've been doing that regularly for a few weeks now, and it's a great time. Jules and John who run it are super cool, and they play great music when they get up on stage. It's a friendly atmosphere of cool people.

There were two major differences in our show this week. We used keyboard instead of guitar, and we videotaped the performance in iMovie on Reed's laptop!

I've been playing keyboard for a long time but we haven't done many recordings with it. We've decided to add the keyboard to our performance at Reed's Halloween party on October 27, so we wanted to take it out and give it a test run in front of an audience.

Overall, it went great! I'm a little rusty playing on some of these tunes, but felt excellent and the audience seemed to really enjoy it.

During our soundcheck I was doodling around with Carole King's "Natural Woman":

Note John waving his arms and singing along! Then our first song was "Esoteric", our ode to They Might Be Giants:

The crowd seemed to dig the false ending. We noticed at the end they waited a beat before clapping--"We're not getting fooled again!" The next song is our extended science fiction opus, "5017". This time we introduced its new opening section, inspired by old-time radio shows and their sponsors.

That one's a little weirder, especially without drums! Next up was "Professor Popinjay", our cute bouncy 1960s/Donovan-style song about an imaginary friend. Reed's been working on the tin flute for this song, and he played it here for the first time on stage!

And we rounded out the show with "Perfectly Disposable", a sort of dance ballad. Not so dancy here, without drums, but still very fun.

It was an awesome show and great practice for the Halloween party. Hope you enjoy the videos!

Jeff