right now I'm the emergency room waiting to be seen. Nothing serious just something crawled in my ear while I was sleeping and refused to leave. Anyways....
I have some time to jot down some thoughts that have been going through my mind. I played a show this weekend and there were some observations I made that had me thinking about stage etiquette.
You'd think that a performer would respect the time and space of other performers out some sense of comeradery or at least common courtesy. This is not always the case.
This one guy who was playing went through his set and kept saying things like theres a few songs left in my regular set, this is the last song of my regular set. And when the last song was done he requested a hana-hou (encore) for himself from the audience... In my opinion that's lame and lacks taste. Then, after that was done he took long clearing the stage for the next performers. He was talking to his friends and the next band (3 PC band) was trying to strike the stage and the first guy left an instrument case in the performance area and the guitarist for the next act had to maneuver around it. Not cool. That instrument case stayed on stage throughout the whole following act.
If you're going to SHARE the stage with people..... Be cool about it. Give them the whole stage and give them all the time they were slotted for at the time they were slotted for it. IF the audience wants more, kindly share another with them. Thank everyone and get all your crap out of the way quickly. Just take it off the stage and pack it up nicely off stage.
I'm pretty sure I'm coming across as overly harsh about this but I've seen how much stuff like this can ruin a show or even open mic nights. People's time gets wasted and Jacks up the flow and vibe of the night. Energy in the room is lost and it's just not cool.