Piano Playing Tips

When I first started playing piano full time in 1964 I was having to learn fast. I'd already had a few "fun" gigs while in college, like the Treadway Inn Sing-a-long weekends in Rochester, NY, and the Peabody Book Store (an old speakeasy) in Baltimore, but now with the crowds at the Dakota Inn Rathskeller in Detroit I had to up my game to learn a lot more songs from an era I knew nothing about, learn what customers liked and didn't like, learn highly pianistic tunes from the recordings and piano rolls, and more which I'll go into later. One of the things I learned was this: the customers like spontaneity in music, not stuff that's always played the same way. I also learned that the customers, all of whom claim to "know nothing about music," can easily identify people who play the same tunes the same way all the time (not know anything about music?), or tell if someone's been playing in the same key all the time (they don't have perfect pitch so they just say the piano player is boring), and many other aspects of knowing if the they enjoy the music or not. And, dear reader, that's all that matters in this business. If the customer doesn't like the piano player then you get fired in short order. This next story comes to mind: