Here’s a semi-secret about open mics: you almost never find them in the bougie part of town.
My open-mic-tourist’s assumption is that upscale joints are risk averse. They don’t roll dice on amateur entertainment, and nurturing emerging artists isn’t part of their business plan.
(With the glorious exception of Busboys & Poets in DC and Maryland. You should totally go there.)
The vast majority of shows bring the open mic tourist to a humbler quarter: the college neighborhood, the semi-revitalized industrial park, the warehouse district.
Which is why, on the night I headed for my second Detroit show in two nights, when the Lyft driver fussed about our destination zip code, I wasn’t surprised….mildly concerned, maybe, but mostly on behalf of my companions. The way she carried on was enough to alarm even a seasoned road warrior and a military veteran.
Not my seasoned road warrior and veteran friends, mind you. You guys are the Actual Best. But I digress.
Turns out, this show makes its home in one of the Motor City’s Green Light districts — so named because of the flashing green lights visible atop real-time police surveillance cameras installed in partnership with local businesses. Generally, cameras like that get installed where there’s a perceived need. But while I respect our Lyft driver’s perceptions, I respect open mic a helluva lot more.
Call us intrepid. Call us naive. Neither I nor my friends were daunted by the driver’s sales pitch of panic. We debarked from her car at the corner of Mack Ave and Beals, stepped into The Commons as she sped away, and found…
…an abundance of neighborliness, goodwill, and creative joy.
Community spaces and arts collectives FTW
The Commons is a laundromat. It’s also a cafe with tasty sandwiches and a community space with flyers about utilities relief programs, tutoring for kids, voter registration, and local assistance programs.
Upstairs is a big, open room banked with windows. This is where The Vision Detroit, a nonprofit collective that supports Detroit artists, makes its home.
Walking in, we were met with a long table laden with paper and markers for doodling (which, as I learned the night before at Navi O’s, is an excellent way to calm the open mic jitters). To one side of the stage, a live painter. Next to her station, the night’s featured vendor with an array of custom T-shirts.
Basically, a feast of visual arts married with an evening of performance arts — like ya do.
Chairs make the room
At The Vision Detroit, they set the chairs up wedding style, with an aisle down the middle. Trivial as that sounds, it set their show apart from all the others I’ve seen to date — by dramatically changing what’s possible for performers.
See, some open mics have what I call a true stage. These are almost always bars, like Joe’s Grotto in Phoenix and The Parlour in Providence, or purpose-built spaces like The Venue on 35th in Norfolk or the Nuyorican in NYC. Sometimes they’re in a community center or even a church basement.
Most shows, though, aren’t that lucky. Instead, the organizers have to create the idea of a stage.
Having a mic on a stand is a great start. Reinforcing the idea with lights or a rug helps a lot. Also orienting the chairs with purpose.
See, by leaving an aisle down the middle, The Vision Detroit creates an open invitation for performers to roam. And they double-down on that invitation by defaulting to hand-passing the mic from host to performer. (They did have a mic stand off to one side, but because you had to take a beat to fetch it and set it up, most performers didn’t.)
Much to the audience’s delight, a couple people took the invitation. A terrific young female rapper danced halfway down the aisle during her slot, and a guy-with-guitar managed to lap all the way around the art table and still get back to the stage to bow out before his song was over.
By making shenanigans like that possible, the organizers kept the whole room awake and in the moment, wring out our our backs yoga-style to watch their moves.
Rappers delight
After 38 states and 50+ different shows, I’ve seen a lot. I know that open mics held at live music venues will usually attract bands. Coffee shops are almost always acoustic only. And bookstores and libraries are usually all or almost all poets.
At The Vision Detroit, I learned that if the show has an online sign-up form with a place to upload music files, you’ll see more rappers.
As a poet, I hadn’t paid much attention to that field on the form. But during the show, I saw that the organizers — note the plural…it takes a small village to make an open mic happen — had each rapper’s tracks all set to roll from a laptop connected into their sound system.
That may sound like a small thing, smaller even than the chair arrangement and that hand-passed microphone. And it is.
But an open mic is made of details. Every choice you make (or fail to make) adds to or detracts from the experience.
Wishing for a checklist of choices for organizers? There’s a book for that.
For the rappers and the audience, The Vision Detroit hides the seams, making what is often a clunky transition at other shows — including my own, where it’s BYO device and everyone has to wait while we plug in.
And so much more
No blog post can highlight every amazing or straight-up weird thing that happens at open mic. It would take hours to write and hours to read and you’d still see only the faintest shimmer of what it was like.
I’d much rather see you close this screen and search Meetup or Eventbrite or your local independent weekly for a local scene with an upcoming show so you can get in on that open mic scene as it unfolds. Real time. Slot by slot. Performer by performer.
One ephemeral act of community at a time.
