GRETCHEN HASSSE: What's it like playing in clubs here? Is there any sorts of issues of power and like how do you...?

JESSE GREIST: Oh yeah. I mean it is an adventure. I play a lot of restaurants, a lot of kind of restaurants/bars, and most of them have therie own PA systems, but largely, playing large PA systems that they keep, that the restaurant owners here have them piece together, so a lot of times there's a learning curve for me because I get there and the owner's too busy to help me set up so I have to figure out what goes in where and where the XLR cables are going to plug in and all of that.

And, the biggest thing is we do have frequent power outages here, so being an acoustic musician, quite oftentimes what I try to do is amplify myself as minimally as possible. I will usually use the PA as an augmentation of my own voice and my own guitar because usually during a two-hour/two-and-a-half-hour gig, I can expect for the power to go out one to two or maybe three times during the course of the gig, and you just keep playing, you keep smiling. All of the restaurants here keep candles or lanterns on the tables for that purpose, and so yeah. I mean it's an adventure.

We blow fuses all of the time so most of the PA's will have like it's own bag of fuses, sitting in one of the pockets so I can, you know, "Oops! Sorry folks. I got to take five minutes and, you know, change the fuse in the PA system."

GRETCHEN HASSSE: So changing the string is not the big issue? It's changing the fuse in the PA?

JESSE GREIST: Right. Right. I mean you know you'll have to change strings every once in a while but changing fuses. I work --There's one place in town where I work. I won't mention the name because I don't want to defame anybody but there's one place in town where I play where quite often they have a microphone where the XLR, the clip that holds the cable in, is completely gone, and so the cable has to be held in with several pieces of duct tape that have to be put in there every time, and every once in a while it will slip out so I'll lose the vocals and you know I have to stop and shove that thing back up in there. So yeah, duct tape, fuses, and, like I say, a huge learning curve for operating systems.