Clever ways to reference your tip jar?

[Finger Stylish]

I play mostly at venues that have no cover charges. If management agrees, I set out my Tune Tips Buddy. People love the container. (a good use for a First Act Guitar)

I play for no fee for Non-Profits and allow them to feed my Tune Tips Buddy if they choose.

When I play for fund-raisers/benefits; Tune Tip Buddy stays in the case.

As a musician playing restaurants, Always tip your servers well.

When people drop in the box while you're in the middle of a tune. Fit in a thank you.

Make tips fun if you engage in that.

If you think it's somehow beneath you, don't engage.

Another thing; If you play mostly covers, encourage your audience to go to I-tunes and be a patron to these great artists and songs we enjoy.

[Twitch]

Over the years we've had/seen many signs:

BEER MONEY
VOICE LESSONS
GUITAR LESSONS
ALIMONY MONEY
HELP - I NEED A NEW HAT

These days we just stick to a simple "Thanks!"

[Wade Hampton]

Jaybones wrote:

Originally Posted by jaybones

Then there's the drunken fool who screams FREEBIRD! between every song. If I had that policy he could put something in the jar and then I'd have to play it for him.

Back when I was making a living playing Irish music in Chicago, we got booked into a place in Marquette Park on the South Side that was supposed to be an Irish bar (the owner was from Ireland, the clientele was not.)

Marquette Park was where the American Nazi Party had its headquarters, a tough working class white enclave, and when we got to the venue it seemed like everybody in there was wearing black leather jackets with "White Power!" patches sewn onto them. More than just a couple of swastika tattoos, too.

My musical partner and I looked at each other and wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into....

Well. the twee little Clancy Brothers songs that were the bulk of our repertoire didn't go over very well, so we were desperately trying to come up with every rock and roll and country song we could think of. Many of these on-the-fly arrangements were "approximate," as in "I think I know the words to this one" approximate.

Anyway, there was one guy who was literally swaying back and forth, front to back, as if he was on the deck of a ship in heavy weather and trying to keep his balance. He kept shouting "Bird Free! Bird Free!"

This went on for a while. We'd finish a song and he'd sway forwards and backwards and yell: "Bird Free! Bird Free!"

Finally, I figured out what he was carrying on about and said on the mic: "Do you mean "Free Bird?" "

He started yelling: "Free Bird!! Free Bird!!"

We sure DIDN'T know that one. I mean, I could have probably bluffed my way through the lyrics, but as two acoustic musicians we weren't going to be able to bluff our way through the eight minute eighty mile an hour guitar solo at the end. So I said: "Sorry, we don't know that one, but here's another Lynyrd Skynyrd song with a lot of the same notes in it!"

And we launched into a totally faked version of "Gimme Three Steps." Which seemed to placate him.

It suited our mood by that point, too:

"Oh, won't you
Gimme three steps, gimme three steps, mister
Gimme three steps toward the door?
Gimme three steps, gimme three steps, mister
And you'll never see me no more."

That's what we were hoping, no, PRAYING at that point.

And that was the only time we played The Upstairs Downstairs Club in Marquette Park. At the end of the night I told the owner: "Uh, this isn't working out. Just pay us for tonight."

And he did. And they never saw us no more....


Wade Hampton "Bird Free!!" Miller

PS: The moral of the story is: try to check out a venue in person before you agree to play there. That isn't always practical, but it would have saved us in this circumstance. One look at the "White Power!" patches and the swastika tattoos would have alerted us to what we needed to know.