Karaoke Forums

It is the same place. A friend was working the night you visited, we used to split nights at two different bars. The crowd at that place is way too big for his supply of patience, so he is really happy to be at "his bar" all the time now, and while I complain about the large number of Saturday singers at mine, I would rather work there than any of the other bars in town.

I have tried to steer the Saturdays there more towards dance music and away from karaoke, and it was working really well, lots of dancers, still a lot of singers, and I divided my time about 50/50 between the two. I had a month of the busiest and least stressful Saturdays in ~2 years I have been there. Then a PITA friend of the owner complained repeatedly that she "got skipped" (not true, but when you ask to sign up at 1:30 AM behind 40 people you will not get to sing, and I told her that.) So he instructed me to not play "dance music" until I had gone all the way through the rotation. This is when he realized how many singers there are, as I usually get to play a few songs about midnight, and after that, there is no more dance music, it's different singers all night until 2:30 last call. Amazingly, 120 minutes is not enough time for 50 singers unless their songs are each 2 minutes long, who would've thought.

I had a really easy night last night. It was a crowd that was a little less on singing and more on drinking. Easily 150 customers, about 35 singers at peak, and around 1am I stopped taking new songs unless the person clearly understood that "I probably won't be able to get to your song, but I will take it just in case a lot of people leave and the list gets shorter." I think this was helpful and I will start doing it more often. I still had about a dozen singers who never got a chance to sing, but only one complained to me, and she seemed to understand that she waited until the list was very long to sign up, and agreed that she had not seen the same singer twice since she signed up.

I guess some nights are easy on me and some just aren't. The security men, on the other hand, had a stressful night. I guess my job could always be worse, I could have to throw large angry drunk people out every weekend like they do.

_________________
Jeff Wheeler, moonlight DJ/KJ