Re: [Harp-L] Angie's deduction

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Some things never change!

I grew up in Vancouver and many of my early gigs were in strip clubs,
either on the Granville Mall or East Hastings.

And yeah, there were some strippers who really liked the harmonica. I
always tried to play something really slinky for them. (Funny, I can
think of at least one scene in a Clint Eastwood movie where there is a
strip club and a blues band playing with a harmonica solo.) 

Someone wrote that Angie wasn't too sharp. But she saw a guy with his
hands around a microphone, and it probably did look like he was
squeezing it. She evidently deduced that he had something like a
musical rubber duck. 

How much better might most of us fare with a similar lack of
information? I've heard similar stories of people coming up to Little
Walter at gigs and trying to pry his hands open to see how he was
making that amazing sound - they had no idea there was a harmonica in
there.

I wouldn't be too hard on poor Angie - she she was curious and wasn't
hesitant about sincerely expressing her appreciation for Wolf's
playing. As I recall, the strippers were usually pretty nice. It was
the singers you had to watch out for. They would lose time, then get
mad at the band when the music got out of sync. A drummer I knew ran
afoul of a singer in a situation like that - she sliced his face with a
smashed beer glass.

Winslow

--- Wolf Kristiansen <wolfkristiansen@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Not sure this qualifies as "air harmonica", closer to
> "invisible harmonica".
> 
> A long time ago, I joined my first blues band.  I was
> the harmonica player. Our very first gig was backing
> up strippers in a seedy little night club on Granville
> Street in Vancouver, B.C. Six nights a week.
> 
> Most of us drank our weekly wages by way of the
> ubiquitous bar tab offered by club owners back then.
> 
> After a week of playing, I got to be (platonic)
> friends with the strippers.  We were all in the
> entertainment business, one way or another. 
> 
> The youngest one came up to me one night.  She pointed
> to my Shure ball microphone and said (this is the
> absolute truth),
> 
> "I just love how you play that thing, what do you do,
> squeeze it? 
> 
> I resisted the urge to fall down laughing.  I could
> hear the sincerity in her voice and see it in her
> eyes.  Instead, I told her sincerely that all the
> wonderful sound she was hearing came from this small 4
> inch object hidden in my hands: a harmonica.
> 
> She had never seen one, or, apparently, heard one. Her
> name was Angie.  Angie are you still out there?
> 
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