My band and I went to play open mic night last night and it was by far the worst place we've ever played at. After our first song, one of the employees asked us to ""keep it down"". There was only me on bass and the guitarist, and we were plugged into their amplifiers at the volume they put us at. We both had mics, also set at the volume they put us at. Our drummer had only her snare drum, bass drum, high hats and 1 crash cymbal. The drummer tried to play her set as quietly as she could (which is a challenge enough), and then some guy walked up to us, and stopped us in the middle of our 2nd song and told us we had to stop playing because we were too loud. So we stopped our song right in the middle of it, and had to pack up and leave. Even customers sitting at their tables yelled that we weren't being too loud and that they wanted us to keep playing. As we packed up and left, a group of 4 kids with guitars and microphones and a FULL drum kit came on and played their whole set without being to ""quiet it down"". Are you kidding me? We could hear them down the street.
The bartender (who was actually really, really nice to us) out on the patio talked to us when we were leaving and he pointed us in the direction of the owner of the restaurant (who apparently had sent someone else to stop us instead of telling us herself) and told us that we should talk to her about ""what was actually wrong"" so we could fix it and come back to play. We decided to skip that because there's no way we will ever come back there to play, or to even eat their mediocre food.
On the way out, we passed the manager who looked surprised to see us, and gave us the most awkward and unfriendly smile, not bothering to even say sorry or to explain anything to us.
more