Wysiwig--

Christ, you know it ain't easy. Given your invitation to ramble on, there have been several different situations in which I have honored or not honored requests.

If somebody asks for a song which one member of the group knows well enough, and it's either trad folk or at least compatible, we'll go for it. Actually we've "discovered" songs which became group standards in just that way.

Our rule of thumb is that we don't do anything written after 1901 unless there's a Real Good Reason. That's not to say no good music has been composed since, it's just that if we do the same stuff that is available elsewhere, we defeat our own purpose. On that reasoning, we have declined requests for Neal Diamond & John Denver. I'm working on a brief and seductively smoothly delivered sentence to the effect that while X is good music, we have not rehearsed it and don't want to ruin it by doing it badly, to be recited convincingly while the other half of my brain is saying, "Yeah, right." Sometimes that line would be true and sometimes just convenient.

In another case, in our last gig we kind of got cornered and had to do a Willie Nelson to get a rather persistent a--hole out of our faces. I was about to do Pancho & Lefty but two colleagues started "On the Road Again," which was OK by me, and sort of a hint, though I think our p.a. was too chemically induced to pick up on any hints. "Security" was being kind of obtuse about it all, as "security" usually is when you need them.

Woops, gotta go--but that's about it anyway, I guess.

CC