Month: September 2007

It was a nice, big stage.

When I was young, trying to make a career of music, I rarely got to play on such a big stage, for such a large crowd. Often I found myself on cramped little bandstands like the narrow little strip of wood at The Flying Jib in Redondo Beach, where I was playing hard rock for two weeks and standing so close to the crash cymbal that a whole range of high frequencies were permanently canceled from my right ear. On the other hand, that’s where I met Diane. But I’ll tell that another time.

Now I was standing with my four-piece band on a stage big enough for a medium-sized orchestra, letting Kevin the sound guy make a few last-minute adjustments, and looking out over an audience of maybe a hundred music lovers, most of whom had arrived in the last fifteen minutes. I was hoping they were music lovers.

It’s hard to explain why I started this band. I quit the business in the mid-eighties, because I needed money and I needed to get away from the near occasion of sin. I was deep in the hole to several banks and the IRS, and I was a bad, bad boy, another story for another time. I had produced a five-year succession of high-quality products, I was working with the best musicians, drinking Stoli by the quart and taking the best drugs. I felt like a rock star. I was this close.

But I didn’t know how to sell it, and I was too selfish to let anyone else sell it for me. In the end I was addicted, depressed, frustrated, angry. I walked away from the whole thing. What the hell, I thought. I can do it all again when I feel like it. Turns out I didn’t feel like it for a long time, and when I woke up, clean and refreshed, the train was gone.

I lived without it for years. I discovered I was married. I had responsibilities. I got a job. I used to call them “day jobs,” but this one went on and on, day and night, night and day. I was wearing neckties, commuting, taking vacations, buying life insurance. In some ways I was back from the dead. In other ways I was dead.

After maybe ten years I started to throw a big party every year, inviting a lot of musicians to come and jam with me. It was a huge thrill for me. I’d re-string the Strat, stock in a lot of beer and burgers and we’d party all night. It would take days to recover from these, and then I’d be a drone again for another year.

One day I found myself shopping for a new guitar. I don’t remember how it started, but I just felt like I needed a new guitar, even though I was hardly playing at all. Once I found the Blackjack and fell in love again, I wondered if a new amp would help the sound any. You can read that story if you click on the link, but let’s just say I ended up with a new guitar amp, and after that I had to find some guys to play with, because, well, that’s what you do with a new electric guitar and amplifier.

I didn’t give the process a lot of thought as I was doing it: re-equipping myself, getting back in practice, finding some players to work with, booking time at rehearsal studios, making an audition CD and finally landing on this stage, looking into the lights, listening to the room hum. But when I think about it now and try to explain it to myself, what I think is that I just didn’t want to die as a drone. I’m not that dour nine-to-five guy shuffling papers. I’ve done it for a long time, but it’s not really me at that desk. I’m an artist. I’m a happy goofball who loves making noise, who’s been there, done that, and wants to share the joy.

Playing rock’n’roll for people is a major rush. Those who think it’s maybe not quite as exciting as skydiving — you should have been there Wednesday night. At ten after eight (I’m always late) I went up to my microphone. My heart was beating very hard and fast. I thought the thumping might be visible through my shirt. The audience seemed to have doubled in size, but I’m sure that was just my imagination. I said “Hi everybody,” and they said “hi” back. I told them the name of the band. I thanked them for coming to hear us.

Then for two hours we played loud and nasty, soft and sweet. It took only seconds for my butterflies to go away. I was proud of the band. They were just tight enough, just raw enough. Here was all the stuff we’d been working on, coming out as we’d hoped, song after song, rockin’ the house. It might be a stretch to call it a triumph — that’ll happen some other time.

But we owned that room and that crowd for those two hours, and for now, I’ll take that.

Pretty much everything happened as it should have.

I started to get jumpy about ten o’clock in the morning. By noon I had serious butterflies. I started to have ridiculous premonitions, scenarios in which I had forgotten all the lyrics, or forgotten to bring my guitar, or the bass player got sick and couldn’t make it. None of these things were the least bit likely to happen, but once I started to think about them they seemed entirely possible, even probable.

For some reason it seemed like a good idea to drink a whole pot of strong coffee in the middle of the afternoon. I sat in my little home studio with an acoustic guitar, downing mug after mug, arranging and rearranging the set lists. You have to pace each set. Open with an attention-getter, up tempo but not frenetic. Maybe keep it up for one more song, drop into some mid-tempo country-ish stuff, kick it up one time before everybody dozes off, then for song number six, a sweet, sweet ballad. Come out of that with something bright but not too heavy, then close with three rockers in a row, increasing the intensity to a big finish at song number ten. Set one.

Set two. Lather, rinse, repeat. Only two sets tonight.

I get withdrawn as showtime gets near. I remember that now. I don’t feel like talking to anybody who is not directly connected with the gig, about anything except the gig. I don’t do this consciously. It’s just the way I feel.

For a couple of hours I work on my guitar parts, completely revamping the solo on one song. I realize that every time I’ve played it in rehearsal, I didn’t know exactly where I was going with it. Now I do. I start to feel better. I’m prepared, as much as I’m going to get, anyway. You can only prepare so much, I tell myself. Then you have to just do it.

Two o’clock. I load the car. Amplifier, guitar cases, duffel bags full of cables, tuners, foot pedals, microphones, mic stands, guitar stands, amp stands. Stolen milk crate full of more of the same. The familiarity of this — and the physical exertion — temporarily relieve my nerves.

I’ve done this ten thousand times, so why am I nervous?

At the venue four hours before the first set. Due to the vagaries of booking, I don’t know any of the club personnel. A woman I’ve never met unlocks the door, lets me in, turns on the lights. Later she switches on the sound system. More employees arrive, but they are all strangers. We’ve been told that the house sound guy won’t be with us tonight. We’re on our own with a strange board and a huge PA system. The board is easy enough to figure out, but nothing works as expected. There’s no easy way to tell where everything is plugged in to it. The hard way would take more time than we have. There is a rack of digital effects, equalizers and compressors. What’s connected to what? I can’t tell.

I plug the mics into the snake up on the stage and go back to the board. In a few minutes I have the drums up, but the drummer keeps stopping. I can’t find a talkback mic, so I go back up to the stage to tell him to just keep hitting the kick until I tell him to stop. I arrive at the same time as the bass player, who is immediately followed by an extremely irate woman whom I have never seen before. She is angry and yelling that she’s in charge of the sound man and the sound man is in charge of the sound, not us, and she would never allow him to turn things up so loud, there’s only one band who is allowed to play that loud, the Zeppelin tribute band and she refuses to be there on the nights they play, because they are too fucking loud, so we just need to turn down, and right now.

I give her my best smile and tell her that we don’t play loud, we’re a vocal band, the instruments are just accompaniment, but we’re not familiar with the sound system, and things will be better in a minute, as soon as we figure out the equipment. She is not mollified. She wants to be the boss of us, but she goes away, for the time being.

I decide to set up my own stuff on stage. The bass player did sound reinforcement in a past life. I’ll let him deal with it. But when the stage is set and we start again to work on the PA, the first woman approaches and tells us, nicely, that it’s too late for this, customers will soon be here, and anyway why don’t we let Kevin the sound guy handle it at seven when he gets here?

Kevin the sound guy. We thought he wasn’t coming. But he is, after all. This is good news, but still I have to shift gears. The band is pissed off at being yelled at and given the runaround. The bass player is talking loud enough for the bitch crabby lady to hear. No sound check, and he took time off work to be here early.

I don’t want a feud with the help. I get everybody together out of earshot and tell them that, for tonight, we are partners with all these people, these strangers. If we do well, they do well. We have to entertain, and they have to help us. Together, our job is to create a big room full of happy customers, enjoying the music and spending money. If that happens — and I know it will — the crabby lady and Kevin the sound guy and all the rest of them will be our best friends, and we’ll all be happy.

Sweating like a bride and nervous as a pig, I dash home to shower and change. I get back to the club at seven. Kevin is not there.

I tune a guitar and put it on a stand on stage, then tune another one just in case. I decide to work the room.

I’m surprised at how many people have showed up. It’s a big room. There won’t be a full house, but jeez, do this many people actually want to hear us? I go from table to table in the big, darkened bar, schmoozing, smiling, thanking. I meet everybody’s friends and spouses, and the names go in one ear and out the other. I never used to do this. I think I thought it was somehow beneath me. I know now that these people are the bosses. They can’t tell me what to play or how to play it, but they can go away and never come back, and I’m determined not to let that happen. I’ll play my ass off for those that care, and put so much butter on the rest of them they won’t even be able to get up and leave.

Kevin shows up twenty minutes before we start. I tell him our setup, what we play, which mics are for lead vocals and background vocals, where I plugged them in, and what I did with the board when I was trying to work it myself. I explain the kind of echo I want to use (sorry, trade secret). He is receptive. He’s worked sound here long enough to know the equipment and the room, not so long as to be bored. Anyway there’s no time left. I have to trust him.

More tomorrow.

I guess I’ve always been a dreamer.

I think of myself as a serious guy, but looking back, maybe I haven’t taken my life seriously. I haven’t made practical choices. I clung too long to the things of a child, and I still resent being grown up. The fact that I have life insurance weirds me out when I think of it, which luckily is almost never.

Things haven’t turned out the way I imagined they would. It’s not so bad, this life I have, but the dreams — well, the dreams haven’t come true. They are now only dreams, having lost that component of hope that they had when I first dreamed them.

Tomorrow night I fire up one of the old dreams — the main one, now that I think of it — and take my rock’n’roll band before a live, paying audience for the first time in, well decades. The time I’ve wasted! I’ve written a few songs, and found some covers that I can sing with a straight face. Think of me on Wednesday at eight o’clock California time. I don’t have any illusions, and very little hope, but I will rock the house.

Because dreams die hard.