Being an open mike host has it's positives and it's negatives. On the positive side, I get to make a fool of myself up on stage when I host. My wife usually sits on the sidelines while I introduce and move the night along from the stage. It's real good practice for when my wife and I perform our own music. As a host, I've gotten to meet and get to know a good number of people I would otherwise have no reason to interact with. It's given my a real inside view to the whole singer/songwriter culture in the Boston area and elsewhere. There are some real talented people out there!

The single most difficult aspect of hosting an open mike relates to featured performers. Everyone wants to get a feature slot! Everyone wants their favorite musician to have a feature. Both Passim and the Narrows Center for the Arts have eliminated features at their open mikes. I don't know why, they say it's to provide more time for open mikers but I wonder if it's something more. Having a feature slot of 40 minutes or so certainly cuts down on how many songs the open mikers can play. If folks just come to hear themselves play - they don't want to share the mike time with a featured performer. However, there are some pretty strong opinions out there about how hosts should schedule features. You can't please everyone - ever.

My wife, Mark Stepakoff and I try to do a real good job as hosts and we try to balance giving features to good local performers, deserving regulars from the open mike, and professional musicians who are visiting the area. We often get emails and more rarely, face to face questions about our choice of features. That is - why did you have that person feature when there are other people that should be featuring? I get the feeling that some people have the impression that each of us has a master list of musicians within a 50 mile radius and that we make cold calculating choices about who will feature on a week to week basis. It sounds ridiculous when I put it like that, doesn't it? It would really help us, if folks didn't assume we have some sort of feature agenda, and gave us names of folks who they would like to feature. Send us links to their music, and then encourage us by showing up at the mike. We love to bring the features that people would love to hear. Unfortunately, we don't offer features to everyone and it's hard for people to understand why we might not offer a feature to a performer. When it comes down to it - we just want to present the music that people want to hear, or to encourage up and coming songwriters, or to provide an opportunity to hear people from other regions when people are passing through.

Here's the the truth about our kind of open mike. It's more fun when there are lots of performers and audience members present. People come to hear people they know. When we do bring in a feature from Western Ma - the South Shore, Maine, or even farther away - we are taking a big risk! In our effort to bring in features from other areas - we leave less room for our local performers - and it often happens that people don't come to the open mike that night. That's why in my emails to our mailing list I encourage people to go to the artist's Myspace or webpage and listen to their music. Whenever we make choices to have one person feature - there is someone else that will not be featuring that week. We have also settled in on an informal rotation about about two years before an individual features. There are some exceptions but for the most part, it's about two years. There are performers I'd love to hear more often and they bring in the open mikers - but there are in fact a lot of people out there to feature!!

I will continue this when I have more time.