honea byrne

  Tuesday Night before Christmas 2020   You play bad enough, stay gone awhile, come back able to work around some basic chords people notice you, well, notice me. Yea you probably have more sense than to come back to a place to play after you sucked so bad that everyone left. The jam tonight, should be the standard thing. Only me, and a couple musicians, that I’ve seen here before, and I’ve seen em in the openmic loop in Ocean Springs. The open mic loop in Ocean Springs is The Julep Room, The Field, and The Grocery. The Grocery hasn’t opened back up sense Covid started.   Well, I finally got over wearing ‘…sunglasses at night.’ Corey Hart reference. I’d wear glasses, so that I couldn’t see the crowd. On most openmic stages, the lighting is dim. Then again, I do still have the capacity for Majickal thinking: If I don’t wear the glasses someone, and or many, in the audience, might steal my soul by piercing my windows to the soul-Naw just joking. Done this assor...

Four Saturdays Before Christmas  It’s not every day that I have an opportunity to get a paid gig. Therefore, I had to be at my best. I practiced about an hour a day for two weeks on whatever Christmas jams I could find on the internet. Even did my standard, of recording myself, to know exactly what I sounded like. Sonny, the guy who gave me the gig, told me to play the same five songs over and over again. How would I be able to pull that off for four hours. Sonny told me “This is not going to be like it was when you did the comic book sale at the store last year. When only a few people show up. There could very well be a crowd of fifty to a hundred.” I can’t afford to mess this up. It can’t be like those nights, more then I’d like to admit, when I play a set and I’m the only one left in the bar.   The place was big. It used to be a Food World Super Store. There were ten rows stacked full of comic books in two hundred and fifty per box. They also had toys, costumes for cos...