Musicians and stage acts... Stage acts and musicians... the debate rages on... and where do the Bilge Pumps fall in these classifications?

We're that strange hybrid of musicians and a stage act. Most entertainment directors at festivals like to place us with the musicians because we're always playing music, but anyone who's seen our show can testify that what we do on stage can't always be classified as "music" and we're a much bigger, louder, goofier show than 99 percent of all ren faire musicians. That means a lot of musicians tend to frown upon us because we're so goofy and can be off-key and off-color. We're run across a few that think we're "ruining" Celtic and folk music with our antics. We don't pay much attention to them, though.

On the converse side, other stage acts tend to think we're weird because we're not really doing a scripted show, there are no Vaudeville overtones, and we're not gearing our entire show to getting tips from the audience. Just one song. yuk yuk.

I, personally, view us as a comedy stage act that happens to do a musical show. We're not musicians in the sense that we can function as background music while people eat and drink their food in peace. We demand your attention when we're on stage. We're whores that way. We put on a full, audience interaction show that gets laughs (most of the time) and can give you a full 30 minutes of fun for your buck (sometimes more)

However, festivals tend to lump entertainment into the categories of musicians and stage acts and ever since the Bilge Pumps have been in existence, we've been lumped into both, though never at the same time, thankfully. Ironically, we crave the perks that both categories receive, attention-starved bastards that we are. We want the big stage with lots of seating because we can draw a crowd and hold them there while we do our madness and we also want to hang with the other musical acts at the end of day pub sings at the festival so we can have fun and goober around with the people with actual musical talent.

Hmmm, I'm not sure what the point is of this rant today, but it was on my mind and I thought I'd write about it.

Because it's all for me blog. Me jolly jolly blog.
....Maroon