Blog #10: Tour Diary 10.18.24... The Blur...

I believe this entry may be a bit on the short side, as the past few days have been a blur. I am struggling to remember which show was which and what happened at each one. I will try to remember some highlights, but I can't make any promises. I made a mistake not giving myself more days off. I am a fool.

I had a day off after Pittsburgh, which I considered, despite the challenges, to be one of my best shows yet.

After St. Louis was Chicago, which I'm told I said was the best show I've ever done and the most fun I've ever had on stage. I feel like I remember it being a fantastic time but I'll be honest I don't remember much of anything. But I don't remember any great challenges either. Except for mid-way through my meal realizing I was eating my merch guy Austin's Kung Pao Cauliflower which made me feel terrible.

Covington Kentucky was last night, and I spent the entire show unsure if they liked me or not. At the end, a few folks in the front row gave a standing ovation, but when I started the show the moment I began telling the story there was a drunk girl in the back of the room howling "nobody gives a shit!" Through the rest of the show I got the distinct sense nobody gave a shit, even after getting some big laughs. But alongside many of the bigger laughs, I also got strange inscrutable screams where I couldn't tell if it was positive or negative. I also had the highest rate of "heckles" and callbacks of the whole tour, at least one of which was someone seemingly trying to argue a political issue with me. Other than asking security to get the drunk girl in the back out of the venue, I ignored everything else. But still, the crowd largely reacted oddly negatively to things that I expected blue areas to be more sensitive to, but I've come to feel like red areas have more trouble with. The "edgier" or less "PC" parts of my material seemed to make them feel threatened, whereas usually my fans enjoy it quite a bit. I don't mean the Jesus jokes, those go over fine in red areas. I have my theories as to why that might be, but the number one operating theory is: "I dunno man, people are weird."

It was a tiny room; 140 capacity. When I started booking this tour I had entirely different intentions and interests than I do now, so I kept insisting to my booking agent that we do shows under 200 cap. That slowly fell by the wayside, but this show was one of the ones that I was clinging to keeping extra small. The thought process originally was that doing a 21+ show in a small-cap room, with phone pouches, (which we haven't been keeping up with since Syracuse) I would be able to workshop new material as part of a writing process in ways I hadn't been able to utilize in years. I figured we'd have an older and more mature audience, and when I decided that workshopping new material wouldn't be part of the tour, I still was banking on that as making for a positive show experience either way. I think I made a crucial mistake - and that is that 21+ shows may require an older audience, but they are often at bars that can't be mistaken for theaters, and sometimes encourage more drinking. Drunk adults are as bad as children if not worse when it comes to having an audience that is decently respectful.

My show cannot be performed in a bar, it just can't. But here's the thing - the photos of the venue online did not show the room in the venue I'd be playing in. It only showed photos of the main theater, which is very much the kind of place where this show could be performed. The theater looked much smaller in the photos, so I thought we had found a wildly unique little theater. Turns out my fans were going to be wedged into narrow dive bar in the room next to a theater and sold alcohol past the point of sickness. There were several visibly highly intoxicated young people there refusing to sit down, and apparently on at least one occasion one drunk kid spent a while vomiting. I tried to keep up with the energy, but even trying to meet them where they were still felt vaguely like defending myself from them.

It could have been that during the meet & greet someone made sure to remind me of the time they heckled me at my last Kentucky show, and basically tell me how proud he's been of it ever since. I don't remember the interaction, but apparently I jokingly told him he was my mortal enemy or something to that effect, and he's had that as his twitter bio ever since. I don't think he realized that while my response was a joke, that doesn't mean I was enjoying the interaction, which is part of why my new baseline policy is to ignore. I think that might've gotten me off on a wrong foot that ended up with me being (for lack of a better word) suspicious about the crowd. When those suspicions were confirmed, I armed myself.

The walls never really seemed to come all the way down. Not until the final moments anyway. The show is structured in such a way where the amount of vulnerability can increase over the course of the story, with the beginning of it firmly based in cagey character work and one-liner style goofs with a fairly explicit character-dropping moment. But I never felt entirely safe during the show, and I'm not 100% sure why. Maybe I never fully understood the audience, maybe the "mortal enemy" dude or the particularly rude and humorless heckle at the beginning caused me to lose faith in them, maybe I just botched too many lines and riffs. Might have been a combination of factors.

It's strange, it was clear by the end of the show that the audience didn't hate me the way I felt like they did, but I still can't shake the feeling. It was by far the most painful experience of this tour, but onwards and upwards. I am not sure what lessons to take from the show. I don't know how much of the vibe was from anything within my control.

But I do know that 21+ shows will not guarantee a more mature audience, and frankly in hindsight it was foolish for me to think otherwise. Smaller crowds won't either - as a matter of fact sometimes smaller crowds allow for heckles to get more attention, and bars are a bad idea generally speaking. Now that I've done this show so many times, and I know I'm going to have to perform it for almost 700 people in Tucson, I've decided I'm going to make some changes. I'm not so scared of big rooms anymore, and I don't feel as much need to protect myself.

My booking agent is currently trying to bump up some upcoming shows to much larger venues, and drop at least one from 21+ to 18+. Stay tuned for more information on that. Seats are gonna open up by the hundreds for some west coast dates.

Tomorrow I'm playing a show I've been nervous about for quite some time - the venue in Kalamazoo oversold so it's going to be 400 standing people instead of 200 seated. So I'm going to play it by ear but I think most likely I'm going to just be playing songs, maybe throwing a couple bits in here and there. I doubt they'll be seeing Slouching Towards Branson, but I think they'll be happy to be one of the few shows on the tour where I'll be playing certain songs, it'll be good Patreon content later on for you guys, and I think they'll be stoked to be getting a very unique show that's different from any of the others on this tour. When I think about it from that perspective I stop feeling quite as nervous and start feeling rather excited instead.

Anyway, I hope this wasn't utterly incoherent and jumbled and messy. I feel those things right now. I definitely need a good night's sleep at a decent hotel tonight. Especially after going to the Kentucky Creation Museum this morning. I'm feeling smote.

Thanks for the support, as always, and thanks for reading. Goodnight, Michael.