It’s the black print again. The darkness comes. If our words were little ants, then rob’s must be fire ants and I would be … well … regular ants … Camponotus pennsylvanicus. That’s what this font would be called.
Once in California, PA we had to engage in some typical PA behaviour – shooting dogs with guns – but in keeping with our own morality, we had to keep it to the behavioue of the people that we actually liked… so Alex and Crystal introduced us to shooting stuffed animals with air pistols.
But this is going to be an entry about what it is to be a performer, not entomology.
Tuesday night we played at Indiana University in Indiana, PA in the Ohio Room. We arrived amidst a congregation of chairs being preached to by a singularly charismatic podium. I think it was advocating the doom of the ass, because one day, to every chair, comes the ass that it can’t handle. What dark doom is spoken in the Book of the Chair. It makes me fear for the poor things…
When you become a professional musician, there are nights where you do the job and there are nights when you indulge the passion. We’ve done both this weekend: a grueling 4-hour bar gig and an intimate listening room all about us. It’s amazing how different those two shows can be from one another, the different skills they demand. One requires patience, the other finesse. Restraint v. exhibitionism. Stamina v. concentrated energy. Efficiency v. charisma.
Last night we didn’t talk too much, tried to wrangle in the eyes that lingered a couple seconds on us and the bodies turned at least more than halfway around. It wasn’t a conversation as much as a monologue. We provided a service, like the wait staff bringing dishes to the tables.
Tonight we played what we wanted, told our stories and held unbroken the eyes of the familiar and the uninitiated alike. We had fun, and sucked people into our fun with us.
To succeed as a musician, you play a little of both. “I work this job to leave this job/ I work to support the work that does not support me yet,” as Ember Swift would say. The same whether you give up your day job or not. Most people’s passions are financially impractical, and so there will always be a component of the compulsory in any artistic pursuit.
To be a performer, you also have to develop a skill set that goes far beyond music, particularly when you lack roadies, merch people, dedicated personal sound engineers and others who help smooth transitions. You have to be able to read body language, find out what kind of audience you have, what your limits are, what’s working, and then adapt quickly. Maybe tonight’s audience wants to be able to talk softly over their dinners. Maybe the guy four tables back has an infectious laugh and once you find what cracks him up, you can suck in everyone …
You have to have an accessible and appropriate sense of humor and be somewhat knowledgable about pop culture to make references and jokes that people will relate to. It’s similar to journalism; You don’t want to flex your intellectual muscle with 10-cent words and obscure literary quotations as much as you want to appeal to the widest audience, touch on archetypes. The performer needs to keep people interested while tuning, switching instruments, restringing a guitar. It becomes another facet of the entertainment that solves a practical problem and keeps the show moving. So the perfomer is part anthropologist, part comedian, part director.
I’ve never been nearly as graceful as I’d like to be, but I’ve been told that is sort of my schtick. I’m goofy. I’m a dork. A little more the straight man than rob (insert joke here – rob), which is a funny sentence. It was something that bothered me intensely my early days in ilyAIMY – that I would finally be in a band and somehow still not get to be cool – but now I accept it. It’s another skill in a way, something that, when refined, is just another feature to offer. Other people add physical grace to the performance, and the anatomical elegance becomes a visual component. The musican is a little bit of a dancer, an acrobat, a tightrope walker.
I’d still love to be a little cool.
And after clearing out all the chairs, the audience came in.
Basically, you decide to be a musician and then start realizing – like a college student fresh into the job market and crafting a resume – that pretty much everything you’ve ever done is a resource … yes, even that crappy camp counselor job you had when you were twelve. Every experience you’ve had, every joke you’ve ever heard, every interesting fact you learned, celebrity impression you honed, observation you’ve made, date you’ve been on … all implements in the toolbox of holding an audience’s interest.
It’s definitely a lot more than I thought about when I was a little kid and wanted to become “a singer.”
I’m still nowhere near the “performer” I would like to be, but gigs like this weekend’s are all different sorts of training. I forget how far I’ve come sometimes. I used to make jokes that weren’t funny all the time … and so the inherent “not funnyness” of my jokes became a joke in itself. Now I actually get a couple laughs for being clever. I bemoan my limited chord knowledge and guitar skills, but I play a hell of a lot better than I did when I picked up the instrument less than a decade ago.
