Brad Spurgeon's Blog

AUSTIN, Texas – There has been a gap on this blog not because I’ve been up to nothing lately, but because I’ve been up to too much! Travelling from Paris to Austin, Texas, attending the U.S. Grand Prix for the last three days in preparation for watching tomorrow’s race, catching up with a friend who moved to Austin, catching up on a massive number of stories to be written for my job, eating a goat’s meat burger and other Austin food… the list goes on and on. But for the moment, the only open mic news to report is my failure to make it to the open mic I set out to attend last night, because we got lost.

This is not the first time I have got lost trying to find an open mic in some obscure place like Austin, Texas 😉 but it is always still disappointing. I’d found out about this open mic on Friday night presented by the Austin Songwriters Group at a place called the Mockingbird Café. I’d discovered the announcement through a Facebook page that announces open mics in Austin, called the “Austin Open Mic Music Network.”

Unfortunately, however, in driving to this place using the GPS in the car of my friend, we came to an area of what looked like closed businesses and warehouses way out in the middle of nowhere. So we decided that the address was a mistake of the google maps. We looked up the Mockingbird Café on google and found a completely different address. So went to that one, only to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere again – or almost – but at some kind of half-dead mall. We decided to go into what was the only business that appeared still open, a Mexican restaurant, to ask if they had any idea where the Mockingbird Café was located.

At the bar I asked someone who looked like a manager and I also asked a customer. The manager kind of guy had never heard of the Mockingbird, and the customer told me that she had lived in the area for 10 years and had never heard of it either. Then a waitress spoke up: “This here restaurant used to be called the Mockingbird Café,” she said.

So we had our answer: The Internet had likely failed us for the second time that night, as we had found an old reference on the web to what used to exist, and we went there and found it gone.

It was clearly time to give up, and forget what looked like it could be a great open mic. Maybe I’ll be able to update at a future date once I find out where the joint is!