Try Too Hard - Pink (mp3)
Chattanooga recently opened up a new karaoke bar downtown. “Sing It Or Wing It.” I know what you’re thinking. “What town doesn’t need another karaoke bar??”
The exciting part is that the bar has added to the closest thing Chattanooga has to a Nightlife Strip. We have approximately 14 bars and restaurants over a stretch of eight square blocks. Compared to any number of stretches in actual cities, this is laughable and pathetic, but for The Noog, it’s practically Bourbon Street. There’s even a stretch of about 30 minutes each year when there’s enough of a crowd in all these bars to, like, totally populate a McDonalds or something.
Anyway, Sing It Or Wing It is clearly a nascent bar crafted by someone whose heart is in the right place, but who didn’t quite grasp the true complexities of making a Great Karaoke Bar.* And by “Great Karaoke Bar,” what I really mean is “All karaoke bars should aspire to be Cat’s Meow.”
* -- This bar, as best I can tell, is all karaoke, all the time. It’s not one of those bajillions of places that rent an emcee and set-up for one or two nights each week. Karaoke is what this bar does, all day, all night, angels watching over me my Lord. It's like those dueling piano bars, but requiring less talent.
(1) More than One Mike on Stage
Drunk tone-deaf people prefer performing in packs. And, honestly, an audience much prefers a large group of stupid goofy drunk people making fools of themselves over a sad solitary soul, drunk or sober. Watching one person sing off-key to “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” doesn’t do anything but make you either want to drink more or wish you were at Chili’s.
(2) Give The People The Words
Yes, it’s important for the person singing to have the words and to hear the music. But more important, in a land where more singers suck than dentists prefer Dentyne (that’s 4 out of 5, for those born after 1985), is providing the almost always sympathetic audience with the lyrics as well. The audience wants to sing along. Even the people who don’t want to get on stage want to sing along. It’s why we go. To mock, and to dream. Some dream on stage. Most just dream haphazardly on their barstool. And that’s OK. Karaoke bars need those people to thrive. So give them what they want, which is the fucking words!!
(3) Two More Decent Speakers
As we sat and listened to the performers, the toughest part was making out the music. (No, not making out TO the music... just hearing the stuff.) While in a relatively narrow and acoustically powerful space, the speakers blasting the music were insufficient to cover the area. Further, when it comes to a bar, you don’t want people incapable of conversation. The perfect volume is one where people can, with a little extra gusto, enjoy their standard barroom convo without wincing too painfully about that lady who thinks she’s Trisha Yearwood. If the sound is limited to just a few speakers in the front and in the back, the only way to get the right volume to the folks in the middle is to deafen the corner areas. Add a couple of good speakers to the middle and avoid that problem.
The most important feature at Cat’s Meow -- which, admittedly, is packed and full of willing participants every night -- is the beloved chalk board to the right of the stage. It tells you how many people are in line. It tells you how long you’ll have to wait. It tells you everything. Granted, it’s gotta be a pretty successful bar, so maybe SIOWI isn’t there yet. But if you know you can rely on a decent crowd, it helps people to know where they stand in the que. How many beers they’ll be able to enjoy before they shame themselves. How many different places they can go before coming back to sing. Whatever.
(5) We’re Not All Alright
I know it’s the 21st Century, and I know Stuart Smalley is our hero and god, but the terrible awful no good truth is that we can’t all sing. Even more, there’s good, there’s OK, there’s bad, and there’s ugly. Unfortunately karaoke bars make a significant chunk of their profit off the people who make possums weep, who give baby kittens nightmares, who kill mockingbirds with their tonality, so they can’t shame them, and they can’t ignore them. But you can keep their performances in check and properly measured. I think a decent karaoke bar needs, at the very least, a Good-Bad-Ugly pattern. Know your crappy regulars well enough to make sure they’re properly spaced.
This last one is for down the road, once the owner knows she’ll make her money back and wants to hit that next level where karate masters get that sublime glow that covers their bodies and make Sho’Nuff wet his pants. What a karaoke bar needs, badly, is a captivating and talented emcee.
Cat’s Meow lets its emcee(s) perform every other song, and that’s too much unless you’re on Bourbon Street and never suffering for patrons, but a talented and charismatic emcee can help stack the deck in times when the Good-Bad-Ugly pattern is falling apart. Someone get up there and stop singing or suck? Super Emcee to the rescue! Need an upbeat number? Step up, Super Emcee! Revive that crowd!!
SIOWI has a little time before this becomes essential, but if they maintain a crowd, they’ll need to find some talent behind that mike. And I don't mean to poop on the lady who emcee'd last night. She was fine, and she thought everyone did a great job. But eventually, when you've hit your stride, you're gonna need some serious pizazz running the show, the karaoke equivalent of Tom Cruise in Cocktail.
Good luck, SIOWI, and to all you readers out there, Support Your Local Karaoke Bar and help keep the pathetic off-key loser goobers in one centralized location!
For those who must know, I did go up and sing. I sang "Superstition," the Stevie Wonder version. It's way out of my comfort zone, but since I knew no one there but my dear wife, I figured why the hell not.
