The Manjammer, Unpacked
BY JOEY SWEENEY | Dateline: West Cape May, NJ, late August. There are places in the world, usually in America, and usually near a beach, where the usual offerings of happy hour aren’t enough. Drink specials, small plates and the like are great, but there is a whole school of beach bars where it’s not happy hour unless there’s something extra on the scene.
That something is a manjammer.
What’s a manjammer? Don’t act like you don’t know: It’s a person (often a cis man but certainly not exclusively) with an acoustic guitar playing and singing a breezy selection of rock and soul faves of yesteryear. Generally, they’re pulling selections from the more rootsy strains of the classic rock radio canon: James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, Creedence, you get the drift. Some also specialize in easygoing cult faves like the Grateful Dead or Jimmy Buffet. And come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a single one who doesn’t know “The Weight.”
The manjammer runs the entire gamut of musical professionalism: Wander into any bar here in Cape May at 5 p.m., for instance, and you’re as likely to hear a lifer pro-gear-pro-attitude manjammer as you are a junior from Stockton State giving it a go with Sheryl Crow. The manjammer speaks a universal language of whiteness even when the selection is a soul number, and that’s not a judgment so much as it is a fact of the musical style. That’s the gig.
That being said, the manjammer is essentially in the service industry, same as a waiter or barback, and the service they provide is familiar, unobtrusive, light-acoustic guitar music that everybody knows and which does not get too impassioned or too loud, unless the crowd demands it. (See: “Sweet Caroline.”) A manjammer who’s good at his job should be like a musical butler: You should never even notice he’s there unless it’s your pleasure to do so. (If I’m honest, I have a manjammer preference. It’s a dude, he’s never under 50, and he gives off just the frisson of Matthew McConaughey in The Beach Bum.)
Are there bad manjammers? Of course there are; look around you, there’s bad everything. But there are also good ones, really good ones, and these are the ones that truly know their material and their audience and who know how to become a vessel of one to the other. These are the manjammers I’m interested in. These are the manjammers that I love. These are the folks who make manjamming a trade.
And that’s the thing: There is a business of being a manjammer. If you hustle, you can make it work. But evidence suggests you will need to hustle hard. Here in Cape May, the town magazine Exit Zero has a columnist named Terry O’Brien who’s something of a manjammer performer and impresario — he books lots of them. From a recent column, where he sheds a little light on this business of jamming man:
“By the time you read this, I will be just over halfway through the Terry O'Brien 13-gigs-in-12-Days Challenge I've been complaining about so much recently. If I were reading this to you it would sound very much like Harvey Fierstein. If were singing it to you, Joe Cocker. As Entertainment Manager for Exit Zero Hospitality I am responsible for booking nine gig slots per week times two venues from a roster of about 40 musicians (and for which I have been paid a grand total of $1250 in gift cards since 2018, but that's neither here nor there). As such, several times a week, I am forced to replace one act with another for mostly sore throats and Covid, or being totally fried because it's August and you need a day off so you pretend to have a sore throat or Covid, which I totally get.”
So you’ll still need a day job. However, a good manjammer can make between $100-$200, and a good place will give you a small but reasonable food and drink tab. But, if you’ve got our pal Terry’s sense of hustle, you might make ends meet enough to live the manjammer dream: Ply your trade in the winter in Key West, for as long as it still exists.
Like any other career on the stage (even though manjammers rarely play in places with stages), manjammers have to watch out for a whole set of pitfalls. One is doing too much of the same thing. Right now, there’s a guy down the street playing “Two Of Us” by the Beatles and he’s making it sound like Toby Keith. He makes everything sound like Toby Keith. It made my blood boil, until he then made “Wonderwall” sound like Toby Keith, at which point I had to laugh.
Variety is the spice of manjammer. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t develop your own signature. My favorite manjammer I’ve ever seen didn’t even play guitar: He played steel drum with a karaoke machine instrumental backup track. Not a manjammer, you say! Wrong: Same material, same gigs, same vibe. His “Margaritaville” was exquisite.
