Recap: 2nd State Lounge October 23, 2014
I played guitar while my friend Brian Foy did percussion at 2nd State Lounge on 4th & South last week. This guy Paul Kurrey runs a sort of anyone-and-everyone music night on Monday and Thursday nights. He invites musicians or sometimes if someone contacts him adds them to the list of players. Despite the way I just described the nights, they are very structured.30-45 minute sets, and the musicians are booked in advance, even though Paul had once used the term Open Mic to describe it. Monday night is acoustic night and Thursday night is when the bands join in.
The venue is a newer version of Lickety Split, which I’d known about for years but never visited. The downstairs has great pizza (and it’s the size of your face!) and the upstairs has a cool dive vibe that I dig. The stage is tiny, though, so full bands would have a hard time making that place work for them. I’ve been playing a lot of cover songs lately, even under the band project name Your Secret Identity, but usually it’s just me on acoustic and a percussion player. I kind of threw in a bunch of my own songs, and was originally asked to play for an hour to cover for a guy who may have been late. The set was to open with a couple of my own (which I dropped to one because I didn’t want to sit there retuning on stage), with the rest at the tail end of the set. The guy who was going to be late arrived on time so it became a 45-minute set, and all of the songs I wrote got cut. Of course, I didn’t get word until I was about 45 minutes in. If I stayed I could have played another set at the tail end of the night, but I didn’t stay that long.
- And By the way (Will You Be There?)
- Ticket To Ride [Beatles]
- Beer for Breakfast [The Replacements]
- I Ran [Flock of Seagulls]
- (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me [Naked Eyes]
- Bad Romance [Lady Gaga]
- Free Fallin’ [Tom Petty]
- I Melt With You [Modern English]
- Psycho Killer [Talking Heads]
- Name [The Goo Goo Dolls]
- Laid [James]
- Daydream Believer [The Monkees]
- Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood [Elvis Costello]
- Just Like Heaven [The Cure]
I caught Marc Lancaster before I left and he is a damn talented on guitar and vocals. It was a cool night, getting to listen to Paul play a song that sounded like an old Marshall Tucker Band song (and hearing a fascinating story behind it). The place fills up nicely later on in the night. And if you go outside, you can hear the music from about two blocks away on a quiet night. I’d love to play there again. Perhaps I should talk with Paul about setting up an original music night with acoustic players.
