Washed-Up Blogger Does Mick Jagger At Karaoke, Brings House Down

Last week when the Chiclets crew was down Philly for work, we went to local institution McGillin’s for a few pops after the Flyers/Caps game. And it just happened to be karaoke night at the city’s oldest watering hole. Now I’m not one of those people who absolutetly has to go up and strut my stuff every time I’m in the presence of karaoke. In fact, I can’t even recall the last time I did it.

Regardless, by the time we got to McGillin’s I had the right combination of intoxication and irrational confidence to show my co-workers and the fine people of Philly just what all of my friends have seen for over 30 years now—my Mick Jagger. I’ve busted it out at countless weddings, parties, and random occasions over the years and even won a Jagger impersonation contest while on vacation in St. Pete 20 years ago where the prize was two Stones tickets. However, when I’ve done my Jagger over the years, there’s hardly been any singing. It’s been 99% lip-syncing and parroting the legendary front man. So my degree of difficulty was increased (i.e. trying not to run out of breath) but I was ready for it.

After a suspiciously interminable wait in which I sucked down more liquid courage, I was finally summoned to the performance-restricting 3×3 stage to give my rendition of “Dead Flowers”, the cheeriest song ever made about heroin.

Without trying to sound like a braggadocio, I think I pulled it off pretty good for an out-of-shape podcaster who is closer to 50 than 40. I think I looked at the teleprompter once. Not to mention, I had to stifle Jagger’s patented stage-crawling and rooster moves, key parts of the Jagger experience, while keeping myself contained to the phone booth dimensions. As for the singing, it’s not something I can do in my natural voice. At all. So I decided to just sing the country tune in a full-on twang.

As for my performance getting inexplicably cut in the middle of the song, I have no clue what was up with that. After getting bumped a few times, the audio just happened to go out during my song after not doing it once prior to that. Biz thought the guy was fucking with me even before that and after seeing the clips again, I’m inclined to believe him. Either way, I couldn’t end on that shitty note so I went full a capella to take it home.

Whit gave me props for the show but took issue with the song choice, saying that I should’ve picked a better sing-along song. Which, to me, defeats the purpose of karaoke. Karaoke is about getting waffled and being a ham-and-egger in public expressing one’s creative impulses not pandering to the crowd with some “Sweet Caroine” bullshit. You’re going up to sing not sing-along. Still, I got dusted in the poll about my song choice.

I don’t care. I’ve always been an ‘against the grain’ guy and stand behind my song choice. “Dead Flowers” is a fucking banger and hopefully I turned a bunch of people onto “Sticky Fingers”, the masterpiece album it appears on. (Shoutout to the folks who said I should have gone with “Sympathy For The Devil”, a six-minute-plus song that has long patches of no singing.)