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Karaoke and Sake in Arizona

Friday night some friends from work and I got together at a Sushi/TV/Sports bar (yes, it actually says all that out front) in Gilbert to drink and sing karaoke. Now, knowing this bar was in Gilbert, Arizona, where I used to live before moving to the oh so much more fashionalble South Chandler :), I wasn’t expecting much. However, to my surprise, this bar had various forms of junmai gin jo sake and they were actually pretty good. So, after sharing my love of dai gin jo with a few of my more open minded friends, we proceeded to listen to the karaoke skills of the resident Gibert crowd.

Let me first say that karaoke in the US is far different than in Japan. In Japan, usually the karaoke bar is much smaller than the bars in the US. Part of this is due to the expensiveness of space, but part of it is also due to the fact that with 50 people in a karaoke bar, all of them convinced they are the next American Idol, you just don’t get a chance to sing as much as you do when there are say 5-10 people in the bar. In our case, we put our songs in somewhere around 9:30 and got to sing them anywhere from 11:45pm to 12:15am…

In anycase, since we were in Gilbert, not only was I not expecting very good sake or sushi (wrong on both counts – argh!), I wasn’t expecting very good karaoke either. Boy was I wrong! Not to say that there weren’t cringingly bad song moments where you pray the person trying to strangle the cat will PLEASE DEAR GOD STOP!!!, but they were surprisingly few and far between. In fact, several of the people there were AMAZINGLY good. I’m talking American Idol kinda good. God I hate American Idol, but it is useful to illustrate this point. 🙂 A couple of examples stand out. A cowboy looking guy sang a great rendition of a Frank Sinatra song, a strange tattooed blond girl sang Give Me One Reason To Stay Here (Tracy Chapman) as well or better than Tracy did, and another guy sang a Temptations song really, really well. The highlight of the night though had to be a couple of white guys who rapped their way ALL THE WAY through a (rap) song, completely changing EVERY SINGLE WORD and doing it really, really well. Way cool, and I am not really a big rap fan. All this and good sake too.

So how did WE do, do you ask? Well, the girls did a decent rendition of Abba’s Dancing Queen (which, lets face it, is DAMN hard to do). Then I did a fairly rockin rendition of the King’s Blue Suede Shoes (yes, I know one should never assume one can sing well, but people WERE DANCING while I was singing, which, I was told, is a sure sign of better than average 🙂 ), then we all did Love Shack, with me trying to get that wierd fake brit accent that the B-52’s male singer has… not too bad, but not great. It would help if I actually had read the words on the screen… oh well.

Bottom line – much fun had by all. Must do again soon. But have less sake.

2 comments to Karaoke and Sake in Arizona

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