One thing we obviously do very differently is that when I made a set list, that list was CAST IN BRONZE. I put a lot of thought into those lists to move the emotion of the crowd up and down, so I would not deviate from it. Part of that rigidity was based on equipment. If the next song is "Yo' Mama", which called for a specific keyboard setup that required a lot of changing, or the guitar player needing to go from Strat to Les Paul, or the front guy to pick up his sax, and I suddenly called an audible to "Yo' Daddy", then I have disturbed the flow of the set and caused dead air. I hate unplanned dead air. Our "break" came dead in the middle of the set, 7 songs down, 7 to go, so we could sip water or just breathe, and had bits of crowd patter prepared.. I often had a funny news clip I cut from the paper (yes, we still read paper newspapers then) or a stupid bumper sticker I could make a joke about... We also did a thing where I would announce "And tonight's lucky number is 4-2-7. 4-2-7. Who has that number?" The bit being that there was no number. And our regulars played along by starting to look around the room for who had the number. Or I'd say "One ONE chair in the room we have taped a business card. If you are sitting in that chair, you won a beer on the band!" Again the regulars played along, and everybody picked up their chairs. There was never a business card, and that was followed up with "Does it bother you people at all that I just manipulated you into looking at the underside of your chair?" One guy thought he was slick and brought up a card he had gotten from us in the past thinking he caught me in my own joke. I smiled and said "Ah. But it isn't SIGNED! Fraud! Fraud!" And bought him a beer anyway for creativity. Things like that. We had a following that was so big that on any given night we would see 50-75 familiar faces. One weekend a bunch of about 50 of them spent a small fortune and rented a bus (a city bus!) and had that bus bring them 90 miles from Cleveland to Erie for the 2 night weekend. Much beer flowed those nights since nobody had to drive home. Wild weekend defined. The bar set a record on Friday for money in the till, and broke that record Saturday.

We also probably played for different crowds than you likely see. With your recurring gigs you probably have a similar following where you know a large percentage of the people, and that's huge when you have that comfort zone of not walking in cold to 200 new faces. Those running gags like the lucky number don't usually play well in cold rooms.

Do you use your dual laptops in an alternating manner where the odd numbered songs in the set play on laptop left and the even numbered songs play from laptop right?