The Experience: Giving a Hoot

From the country’s most renowned old folkies to the city’s hottest young band, everyone has found a place at Seattle’s open mics. Even this author.

For most, an open mic night isn’t a reason to go to a bar so much as a reason to stay away. The notion of allowing any human unfettered access to amplification has its pitfalls. It always has. Folk legend Pete Seeger cited a common complaint about open mic events of the 1950s: “Some of the material is good, but some is amateurish, and the whole thing is so sloppy that it is painful to watch.”

I don’t exempt myself from this prejudice. A month ago, if you’d said “open mic,” I would have thought, “dirty hippie hangout.” But now if you say “open mic,” I think “music scene necessity.” And “scariest five minutes of my life.”

Illustration by Sean Alexander for City Arts

In the course of visiting Seattle’s most popular open mics (and performing at one) I heard from musician after musician how open mics helped them meet people, perfect their songs and learn the art of performance. That band the Head and the Heart everyone’s got their panties in a bunch about? They met at a local open mic. Hell, Bob Dylan got his start playing open mics. And here’s something you might be surprised to learn: The open mic, now duplicated on every habitable continent on Earth, originated in Seattle.

“I was really averse to the idea of open mics,” says Bryan Appleby, a singer-songwriter. “I did a few, and I hated it.” But at the weekly Sunday night event at Ballard’s Conor Byrne Pub, one of the longest running and best known in town (the Head and the Heart met here), Appleby has found comfort and community.

After six months of performing a different three-song set every week, Appleby’s confidence and body of work have blossomed. “The open mic became the batting cages,” he says. “I could try songs and sometimes they would flop. But I wasn't just sitting in my room and playing them; you have live interaction.” KEXP’s Hannah Levin saw Appleby at Conor Byrne in August and calls him “one to watch.”

Approaching the Ballard Avenue bar on a gloomy Sunday night, I pass a young guy with a wild crop of black hair practicing a song on his guitar in the empty doorway of a closed shop. Next doorway down, a young woman is doing the same. 

Inside the long room, patrons line the 108-year-old bar, many ordering a beer that’s even older: Pabst Blue Ribbon, born in 1893. The building and the booze may be ancient, but the crowd is young and hip. The slender young men wear distressed jeans and tight western shirts. The slender young women wear tight leggings and distressed cowboy boots.

Clusters of chairs point towards a four-foot-high stage. A series of performers passes across it: An older guy plays Zeppelin-esque riffs on an acoustic guitar. A wide-eyed young woman sings optimistic songs about relationships. A young backpacker with a gravelly voice sings a set in his native French. The crowd listens politely.

“It gets loud in there, but there's definitely potential to get the people in your court a little bit,” says Appleby. “It's somewhere in between an open mic and a proper show.”

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger would be proud of places like Conor Byrne. In 1941, the two folk legends came through Seattle and scored an invitation to a fundraising party for the leftist Washington Commonwealth Federation. The Federation called the monthly event a “hootenanny,” a word that at the time had roughly the same meaning as “whatchamacallit” does now – though, strictly speaking, Guthrie and Seeger’s hootenannies may have been the first-ever open mics.

“The Seattle hootenannies were real community affairs,” Seeger wrote. “A drama group performed topical skits, a good 16-mm film might be shown, and there would be dancing, swing and folk, for those of sound limb. And, of course, there would be singing.” 

Seeger and Guthrie continued their weekly hootenannies on their return to New York. But at these events, they invited members of the paying audience to perform their own numbers. In 1962, the Greenwich Village club the Bitter End started holding Tuesday night hootenannies. Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell all played there early in their careers. 

The word “hootenanny” ultimately disappeared (ABC used it for a decidedly non-leftist 1963 variety show, destroying the old definition practically overnight, according to Seeger), leaving us with the duller but more descriptive term open mic. Still, entertainment-starved bar owners the world over have picked up on this homegrown concept. 

From Wednesdays at the Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos, Texas, to Mondays at Guitarman Bar in Chiang Mai, Thailand, open mic opportunities abound. Time your plane travel right, and you might also make Sundays at Cafe Szafe in Krakow or Tuesdays at Club Soundd (yup, two d’s) in Nairobi. Open mics are a worldwide phenomenon.

Seattle’s other long-running open mic, at the Hopvine in Capitol Hill, is itself an international affair, having attracted musicians from as far away as Germany and Sweden. The bar’s twenty-by-twenty-foot main room gets rearranged slightly every Wednesday night to allow for a soundboard, an amp and a chair. Anyone who wants to can play two songs. Frequently, anyone does.

Jeremy Summer, one half of the band the Whiskey Swillers, sits with me on a long bench facing the Hopvine’s stage, where he’s played since 2006. “I don’t like open mics, generally,” Summer tells me. 

Summer’s band has gotten gigs and booked weddings through people he’s met at the Hopvine. “It’s a place where you feel comfortable and people might appreciate what you are doing,” he says.

I’m not so sure I appreciate the guy who’s onstage at the moment. Bedecked in a “Let Freedom Ring” tee, he’s warbling an a cappella version of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin classic “Rocket Man.” He’s a regular. “That guy annoyed the shit out of me for a long time,” Summer says. “But now I fucking love him.” 

I don’t exactly feel the same way. As “Rocket Man” bleeds into a screeching “Killing Me Softly,” I’m thinking I might have to call this an early night. 

But then a new performer approaches the microphone. A muscular fellow wearing a tight grey tee and jeans, he wields a Dobro guitar that’s worth more than my car. After a brief explanation of the development of American blues music, he plunges into a technically brilliant take on Robert Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman.” I decide to stick around, accepting that an open mic is like Russian roulette with guitars.

Singer-songwriter Ali Marcus moved to Capitol Hill in 2004 and has played the Hopvine open mic practically every week for the past six years. Marcus, a solo folk guitarist with a political bent, has released three albums and toured the country since she started at the Hopvine. At the open mic, she says, she got used to playing solo and learned the tricks of playing on an iffy sound system. But the main thing was the people.

“Almost all of my musical relationships in Seattle have come out of the Hopvine open mic,” Marcus says. “No doubt about it.”

This is the key: Open mics are less about the music and more about the people. Without the kindness and support of open mic regulars, my own turn on the Hopvine’s stage would have been disastrous. OK, more disastrous. 

“If you want to see what the Hindenburg looked like in person, come see me perform at the Hopvine's open mic tonight,” I posted to Facebook just after deciding to cave in to City Arts editor Mark Baumgarten’s insistence that I personally perform at an open mic or this piece would be incomplete. I knew he was right – which made me hate him even more.

It will help you to know that I have never played an instrument in front of more than one person. I play banjo, but mostly for my own amusement (and, occasionally, as punishment for others).

So this open mic was daunting. But thanks to the friendly advice of Ty, the Hopvine’s usual open mic emcee, and my friend Colt, who has performed there for years, and the support of my friends, I felt loved enough to get onstage and torture a live audience. Luckily for me and everyone in the bar, the Hopvine was so noisy that night you could hardly hear the music. 

After I struggled through what may have been the worst single rendition in history of the folk ballad “I Wish I Were Single Again,” everyone was astonishingly nice. “Great job, man,” Colt said, grasping my hand in a firm handshake. “You were great,” said my friend Austin. “Nicely done,” said editor Mark. Later that night, as I smoked a much-needed cigarette outside of the bar, some guy told me I’d sounded like Townes van Zandt, which I think is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Also the most dishonest.

I recommend a new policy: Don’t avoid open mics, seek them out. You’ll be supporting a critical part of Seattle’s music community. You’ll be paying homage to our city’s musical tradition. And, who knows, you might see the next Dylan – except younger, so he will probably actually know where he is. •