The Rusty Nail ran an open mic every Tuesday for twenty-two years. It started in 2001 when the owner, a man named Gary who played bass in a band that never quite made it, decided the bar needed something to do on slow nights. It ended in 2023 when Gary retired and the new owners decided Tuesdays were better for trivia.
I played there twice. Once in 2009, when I was terrible and knew it, and once in 2017, when I was better and still nervous. Both times the room was maybe a third full. Both times there were people who listened carefully and people who didn't listen at all, and both times the people who listened carefully were the ones who mattered.
Open mics have a reputation for being painful — and they often are — but the good ones are something else. The good ones are where you find out what a song actually is. You can write something in your bedroom and think you know what it does. Then you play it for twenty strangers and you find out you were wrong, or right, or right about the wrong part.
The music and honesty work at music and honesty has been exploring this — the gap between what you think you made and what you actually made. There's a related conversation at experimental sound about experimental sound that connects here.
The Rusty Nail's open mic produced, over twenty-two years, at least three musicians who went on to do real things. I know this because Gary kept a list. He didn't advertise the list. He just kept it, in a notebook behind the bar, with names and dates and a note about what they played. He showed it to me once. It was not a long list. It was a real one.
The places that matter work at places that matter is relevant here: the Rusty Nail was not a famous venue. It was a bar in a mid-sized city that ran an open mic on Tuesdays. Its importance was entirely local and entirely real.
The culture and creativity work at culture and creativity has been thinking about this — the infrastructure of creative development that exists below the level of visibility. The open mic is part of that infrastructure. So is the person who runs it for twenty-two years without making it a big deal.
Gary retired to Arizona. The trivia nights are apparently doing well.