Category Archives: View from the Bandstand

How to gig inside

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It’s fairly straightforward, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have commentary. As my kids tell me, I am nothing if not overly explanatory. 

Create a stage. You’re probably not going to have a raised platform or any kind of physical distinction between the “stage,” the place you’re supposed to set up and play, and the rest of the restaurant, bar, whatever. I mean, there might be. But prepare for there not to be. Prepare to show up and for everything to go wrong; this is not bad advice for life in general, if I may be a little coldly clear-eyed this new January. I’ve found it helps if I try to establish a general perimeter, a defensible space, between the band and the audience. Usually this is done with the monitors and the mic stands. I also use a power cord as a kind of invisible fence. Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually shock any perpetrators, but hope springs eternal. This is all mostly theater, albeit theater of a practical sort. But it’s still a show, and anything that even gestures toward a proscenium interruption in the fern bar is an advantage. Perhaps I’m being too whimsical here. Plus the monitor wedges act like a small guardrail against falling drunks. 

Don’t drink. But do eat. Not too much. Mostly salads. Try to stay under your comped limit. You think you can just eat after, but everyone will be a lot less annoying along the way if you have half a meal beforehand. Please, learn from my mistakes. 

Do bring a water bottle. Borrow one from your wife or teen. You know they have them, with the overly complex lid-top-straw situation. To me the metal water bottle trend is less a trend and more an example of mass hysteria, or maybe I just resent how my house has turned into a junk drawer for hydration. But nevertheless, you can turn this vicious foolishness into some easy mid-gig refreshment. Bonus: it has a close-able lid, which is handy if you, like me, are a person who spills every drink he ever touches, every drink he thinks of touching. I am particularly adept at spilling drinks on everyone’s amplification equipment. You’re welcome.

75 minutes on the front, 45 on the back. You need to give yourself enough time set up, but not too much time. It all depends on what you are responsible for. I admit to struggling with the time question. In one band, where I only assist with unloading the PA, they want me to get there 90 minutes early, even 120 minutes early. When I acquiesce, we all sit around staring at each other for the last half hour before downbeat. Yes, I enjoy the hang. But the hang here is clouded by time wasted. For a different band, the one where I bring, set up, and run the PA, I tried to stick to 60 minutes before the gig max, in which I’d set up the PA, the guitar rig, the mics, etc. This turned out to be too tight. It’s like leaving for the airport with just enough time; you can make it if you catch all the lights, etc. I am trying to change this habit and now I’m shooting for 75 minutes before showtime. This allows me to hit some traffic during set up and prevents me from lapsing into a panic. Also, I am able to have friendly side conversations with bandmates while setting up rather than the tight-lipped, avoidant sprint I was doing. I still dream of the 60 minute set up though, something about the evenness of that hour. 

Afterward, I try to bag it up in 45 minutes. Here you really suffer the consequences of all the stuff you brought. At the beginning of the gig, you set up your stuff. At the end of the gig, you tear down your shit. 45 is the goal. Yes, sometimes I want to hang afterward. But sometimes I want to go home. And the staff in the restaurant want you to go home, so they can go home. But that can’t happen until they clear the tables and mop the floor where you’re standing, so get moving. 

To do this it’s important to invoke the Spaceballs rule: take only what you need to survive. Of course, survival here becomes highly variable. And really the rule is more like: take whatever you are willing to carry. If you have help, then everything changes. But I have no help, and I am increasingly willing to carry less and less. Sometimes, to frighten myself, I go on keyboard forums (don’t go on forums) and look at everyone’s keyboard rigs. With the caveat that forums are typically made up of self-selecting nerds dorking out for clout, these rigs are terrifying, like the engine room on the Death Star. Remember: every cord is a failure waiting to happen.1

Other arbitrary but useful limitations: drummers should have only two cymbals max in addition to their hi-hats and at most a four-piece kit. But to be honest, they can get by with one tom and one cymbal. Guitar players should play through a Blues Junior and no pedals for a year straight. Practice skill acquisition through device deprivation. Keyboard players don’t need 88 keys on their board and rarely need more than one board, and they should leave the laptop at home. It’s a job but it’s not an office. Singers should show up on time and be responsible for the PA or at least get really good at rolling cords. What usually creates stage volume problems are electric guitar, crash cymbals, and the snare drum. You don’t need to solve this problem by using in-ear monitors. You solve it by turning down. Bass players: no one wants to hear your slapping or your popping. If you sound like Seinfeld, you don’t get called again. Second guitar players: do not exist in this band. Horn players: no pay until all the gear’s away. 

Of course the problem with horn players is that they know they’re precious unicorns and can gallop away at my Grumpelstiltskin suggestions. 

Don’t go IMAX. Last night the gig was an acoustic duo in a restaurant, two guitars, two singers. In the back room, there was a corporate holiday party with a DJ. We could feel the thump through the closed doors. Let me see that tootsie roll! We couldn’t compete. We just played our Neil Young tunes to our 12 patrons and had a nice little time. There wasn’t any use getting offended by the juxtaposition. This is just the way of the world. But you can see how some bands want to go IMAX, want to surround the world. This is a false god. You’re never going to sound like the record. It’s more fun for you to sound like human beings playing instruments with their hands and feet. I think the primary charm of the NPR Tiny Desk Concert is that it’s the anti-Sphere. There’s no light show, no choreo, no subwoofers. It’s extremely limited. It’s not “authentic” (the other false god). All performances are acts. It’s just a less cliched performance. We’ve all seen the version with the dancing girls already. Over the holiday I saw a live clip of Shania Twain. She was surrounded by young men dancing shirtless in tuxedo tails. Whatever twinkcake allure this might have provided seemed undercut by the sheer predictability of it all. (Dancing: almost always overrated.) When in doubt, underdo it. It’s easier. It’s more interesting. And if you’re quieter, people have to pay attention. 

On break, find somewhere to go. It gives you a break. It gives the audience a break. It structures the show. In one band I play in, the leader likes to go all out the entire time, just one relentless marathon of music. This challenges the human bladder and human patience. There should be peaks and valleys. Always leave them wanting more. Also, if you’re going to eat on break, do it off stage and out of sight. You’re part of the help. 

Minimize patter, murder dead air. Every time I have tried to be amusing with my in-between song chatter, I come across like an idiot, like someone walking down the street without pants, selling blowtorches. The patrons are not expecting my feeble, impromptu attempts at humor. I’m just making them self-conscious and uncomfortable. It’s better to stick to “this song is by . . .” or “on bass tonight we have . . .” type of commentary. Remember, they are primarily drinking, not listening. Don’t mess up the flow of energy. 

To help, either have a song list or know the available tunes well enough so that you can keep things moving when you’re not on break. It’s annoying to watch a group of musicians sit around playing the what do you wanna play game in between each song. And it’s enervating to be on the bandstand with same, at least for those of us who are uptight and care too much. It’s a show. Get on with it. 

1. Lately guitar players have been imitating keyboard players, turning their instruments into synths with all those knobs on the floor. I know it’s fun to make your guitar sound like a vacuum cleaner, but that’s too much to carry. It’s too much to set up. Plus, you don’t need that many sounds. I think aside from vanity one of the reasons people bring all this stuff is the idea of getting their most pristine sound and also the (contradictory) idea of getting the various “sounds” you need to cover the material. I can understand wanting to get a pristine sound in an environment like the recording studio or your home, where you can reasonably control all the variables. But you can’t do that on a gig. Playing music live is like trying to self-checkout your groceries while someone shoots tennis balls at your face. It’s highly contingent on innumerable unknowns. 

And as far as getting the appropriate sounds, I don’t think you can do it and I don’t think you should try. A guitar player needs 2-3 sounds a night tops, a regular sound, a lead sound for solos, maybe an overdriven sound. And really, these are all just different gain levels of the same sound. We don’t ask trumpet players to have different sounds other than what they can produce on the instrument with their technique. Plus the guitar pedals start to work on a player like prescription drugs on the body. You always need to add another one to mitigate the side effects of a previous one. Obviously if you’re playing something like metal, I have no idea what to tell you. That music frightens me and I avoid it. I’m talking about normal music, music that people want to hear in public, while they try to politely signal to their fellow patrons that they’re down-to-clown after closing. 

Redundancy Logistics

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Well, it happened. After a number of years playing live music in a semi-professional setting, my amp died mid-gig. This was a statistical inevitability, like hail damage on a roof. I had skated by blameless for so long, dancing through the raindrops and not bringing any kind of backup, thinking I was different. Depending on who you ask, this was akin to blasphemy or professional malpractice. If you read the music-related internet forums (please don’t; let my squandered time be your warning), showing up to a gig without adequate backup is hubris. It invites the wrath of the gods. 

My impromptu solution was to plug the electric guitar directly into the mixing console. Please do not think this was something fancy or complicated. This was not a show. This was not a concert. This was a standard Sunday evening restaurant/bar gig. This means there was no “front of house” soundman. There was just the small mixing board next to me, because on this gig I was running sound from the stage, in between playing guitar and (humbly, intermittently) singing. It worked, but it sounded terrible. It functioned. And this only happened after I sat there helpless for a song while the other players stared at me like roadkill. 

If you ask the online mind if you should bring a backup — amp, guitar, anything — the answer will be an overwhelming yes. And I see their point. Stuff breaks at the worst time, and you can’t show up unable to complete the job. But then you start thinking through what this actually means in logistical terms. A backup for everything? Does that mean an entire second amp? An entire second guitar? Pedals? The whole P.A.? This turns into a lot of tonnage to sit waiting in the wings. And remember there are no wings to this stage. There are the walls of the corner of the bar that you are wedged between. There’s hardly enough room for you to stand, much less a place to put your gear, much less a place to store your cases, much less a place for other gear that you will hopefully not even need. This past weekend, playing drums, I had to set up in some bushes, and my high-hat stood Bambi-tipsy atop a decorative strip of river rocks. It’s a good thing that sound itself doesn’t take up too much space. 

And this predicament quickly morphs into a larger societal problem that I refer to as Dudes with Gear. I am now going to generalize about cisgender, hetero, male people, so, you know, brace yourself. All dudes like toys; and furthermore, they like accouterments for their toys, stuff that kits out the toys to make them more “useful,” which is the male catch-word for beauty. When they were children, boys liked toys, and now that they are men, these toys are called “tools.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and these observations are so cliched as to be unremarkable. And yet the utility/beauty can quickly become obscured by the amount of stuff, or the rhetoric/belief system underneath the stuff becomes overwhelming, so that rather than making your life easier, more attractive, more convenient, you’re now carting around a bunch of crap so that you can take a picture of it and show it to your online buddies. See, e.g., any musician dude on Instagram. I am also thinking now of the Everyday Carry crowd. I remember years ago, eons in online time, when there was the “What’s in My Bag” trend on Flickr. Remember Flickr? People would disgorge the contents of their bag, and dudes especially tended toward a proto-MacGyver collection of objects. (The amount of camera gear that people purported to carry was insane.) This has devolved into the Everyday Carry meme, which is what some people purport to carry on their person every day, wherever they go. At the smallest level, it’s interesting to see what people need to have handy over the course of a day. (Does one really need that many knives?) But on a larger scale, some people are obviously prepping for some kind of confrontation, by which I mean the unlikely scenario that the Black Hawk helicopters land in the Kroger parking lot, and you’re suddenly participating in a real life Fortnite. Thus this meme trend combines several elements: the dude need for stuff and ever expanding sub-stuff for the stuff; video games as overarching structural metaphor; and prepper ideology, which entails the paranoia that something systemically bad is certainly going to happen and you’ve got to be ready. You have the moral obligation to be ready. Extreme examples of this are off-site locations where you can hoard canned goods and weaponry in case of a Red Dawn–like invasion. That reference dates me terribly and shows just how little I know about or understand the prepper aesthetic or motivations. I’m not sure what or whom these people are afraid of specifically, but the entire project off-gasses notes of conspiracy theory and apocalyptic thinking. And as the writer Freddie DeBoer has pointed out in a somewhat different context, one way of ensuring that you are special is the constant fear/hope that you live in End Times. A devotion to the coming apocalypse is a grand form of narcissism. Perhaps being a prepper is the fruitful offspring of video game thought and gear, a kind of apotheosis, or literalization of game life. Here we prepareth for the ultimate leveling up. 

What this means for the bandstand is a Boy Scout on amphetamines, or a middle-aged man on gin, buying too much stuff under the justification of being prepared. It becomes a morally fortified excuse to buy stuff, which feels good. Hey, I like buying stuff, too. Well, that’s not actually true. Spending money makes me ill, but I still do it, and I am not totally immune to the endorphin high of clicking that Buy Now button. All of this is exacerbated by living in a car city, which makes it much easier to bring more stuff than you need. 

Interestingly, if you observe a professional local musician, you will notice they bring very little stuff to the gig. They bring only what is absolutely necessary. I define such a creature as a person who plays professionally full time and yet who does not have a roadie for the majority of their local gigs. They are the performer and the schlepper all in one. And they don’t treat their gear like a yuppie going camping. One person’s device of convenience is another’s extra weight to hump across a parking lot. One of the best guitar players I know doesn’t even bring a guitar stand. He just leans the thing up in the corner on set break. Asked why and he’ll say because it’s another thing to tote. He is not there for the pics; he’s there to do a job. There are so many obligations in life that are actually optional, but we don’t realize they are optional. They are the default settings of the mind. I hardly ever change my default settings, but this guy did. I haven’t asked him about his amp backup situation.

I’m not trying to be irresponsible, but I loathe taking stuff I don’t sufficiently use on the gig, which is why I mostly don’t take toms anymore on drum gigs. They just sit there, their chrome rims smiling placidly at me, which probably says more about my skill level than it does about any rigorous commitment to stuff maintenance. For backups, there is the equivalent replacement and then there is the good-enough replacement. How can I get by in the simplest way possible? These solutions are much less attractive and don’t sound as good and usually can be accomplished with the crap you already own. We have to remember that MacGyver made do with what he had on hand. That’s what made him cool. He didn’t use every predicament as an occasion to go shopping. The ultimate practicality is to be more resourceful and less precious.

To placate the gods (i.e., the forum in my head), I bought one of those small pedal-sized amps. No, not one that’s a computer that mimics the sound of Clapton at Wembley or whatever. There are no Impulse Responses. Get out of here with that mess. I don’t want to program anything. I don’t want anything that has options that you select through a menu. I don’t really want any choices. I want toggle switches, pointy knobs. I’ve plugged it up. I’ve tried it out. It weighs less than three pounds and sounds fine. It’s so small that I’ll probably forget it’s even in my bag. It should be more than adequate. I pray I never use it, but at least now I am protected from the normal distribution of myself.  

How to gig outside

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First, get a fan. I like this Lasko fan. It pivots. It comes with outlets built in and it has one bitchingly thick power cord. This fan don’t play. You can angle the breeze so that it blows directly up your keister, should you wish. Or you can do what I do and position it in front of you, so that the hair I still have blows like I’m singing in an 80s music video. Don’t fool around with a box fan. Please use my years of box fan failure as your guide. Those things are top heavy, and they take up too much room. Yes, these Lasko fans are pricey, but that’s a realization that comes with middle age. Sometimes the nicer things cost more money. I don’t care if it’s conspicuous consumption. I’m about to have a heat stroke out here.

Second, forgo alcohol. Forgo anything that’s not straight water. Stop drinking Gatorade! You’re not a child. You don’t need Death Water, or whatever the rebranded water is called. Are electrolytes even real? Just get a bunch of regular water. You don’t need a cocktail. You don’t need that IPA. You’re not celebrating. You’re working. Is the event staff drinking? No. Are they doing illicit drugs in the van? Well, maybe. But that’s their choice. You’re a responsible adult, and you’re not going to do any of that foolishness while you’re working outside in the elements.

Relatedly, don’t eat too much. Eat a third of what you want to eat. Don’t go hungry during the gig, because then you will eat too much when they save you a plate of barbecue. Again, let my mistakes guide you. Instead, a banana is your friend. It’s too hot for much more. You can eat a decent meal later at home under calmer conditions. If the idea of finishing that plate and then running around the block seems like a bad idea, then step away from the plate. Because when you’re gigging outside, you’re running on the inside, if that makes sense.

Fourth, compromise is a part of adult life. Remember you can’t spell travel without disappointment. And you can’t gig outside without being uncomfortable. It’s like camping. I mean, I don’t camp so this analogy might not track. I’ve got friends who go camping with the inflated air mattress and fan systems and a battery pack for their CPAP machine. I don’t get it. I don’t choose hardship. But sometimes gigs happen outside. People love to put the band outside. I think they’re afraid of the sound. People want live music. It’s like a vestigial desire to see actual fire. It feels primordial. But then, as soon as the band sets up, you can see the mother of the bride’s eyes go wide at the size of the PA. And I get it. We’ve all been at events where the volume was just excruciating. But the answer is to tell the band to turn down and then not hire that band next time, rather than hire live music and then put them out back, behind where the staff parks the golf carts. The solution isn’t just to hire DJs. God knows they can be too loud, and no one needs that much bass.

Five: remember that everything sounds different outside. Do your drums sound deep and pleasing, thickly warm and exuberant to the touch inside your house? Well, they’re going to sound like wet grocery bags outside. An unamplified acoustic guitar just disappears outside. Amplified it sounds like chopsticks chewing on pine straw. The electric guitar player is going to turn up even more. The only thing that still sounds semi-okay is an electric bass. Everything else sounds like hell. It’s okay. You’re not a DJ! You’re a bunch of human beings creating music on the spot. You’re not robots. You shouldn’t sound like them, especially when perched in a gazebo that’s held together by spiders.

Remember the fundamental riddle of live music performance: what you hear is never what the audience hears. We try to affect but ultimately don’t control what happens in the outer dark.

Hats are your friend. As is sunscreen. Don’t be a child. Put on sunblock. Your mother was right about all that stuff. You’re not less of a man by copping to all this quality knowledge. It’s a cliché for a reason. Screw getting a good tan. What you want to avoid is a difficult conversation with your dermatologist, the one that ends with you getting cancer boogers cut off your face. Do you really have time for that? Getting tan is for teenagers and professional models. Everyone else should know better. An adult with a tan line is an adult who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.

An extra shirt is your friend. If, again like me, you’re going to sweat like a halfback while unloading the trailer, and you are then supposed to play for a wedding, sometimes it’s prudent to bring a change of clothes. In Mississippi, it’s too hot to wear pants nine months out of the year, and that’s if you’re just sitting there. Throw in some speaker cabinets and it gets grim. But also, you’re not in the Pips. Let’s not be too precious. What’s the gig? Are you being paid enough to bring a change of clothes? If not, just wipe your face and truck on.

Screens disappear in the sunlight. You’re not at work in your cubicle. You’re not at home on the couch. I know that contemporary middle class society has rather rapidly disappeared almost entirely into a touch screen interface. Look, I can control my monitor levels with my iPad! While also reading my Tweets! Sure, that’s great, but first, as soon as you get that backlit screen anywhere near direct sunlight it becomes essentially invisible. (This goes for those little clip-on tuners, too.) Second, you know how annoying all that technology is to use in the comfort of your own home? That place is perfectly climate controlled with very little chaos energy, the exact opposite of an outdoor gigging situation. Remember all the precious crap that you haul to the gig is going to get rained on. Not if, but when.

If there’s a 10 percent chance you will be cold, bring a jacket and a hat and don’t leave them in the car. Put them right next to you, perhaps underneath the floor tom so they can be donned at a moment’s notice. Again, I know whereof I speak. Last April we played outside, and everyone in the crowd was fine. They were under those propane heat contraptions, vibing. Mingling generates warmth. Meanwhile I was behind the drumset, arms folded in a pretzel knot of rage between each song. It was awful. And I had a jacket. I just left it in the car like a moron.

And remember cold and heat are relative outside. I maintain that ideal conditions to gig outside are somewhere between 74 and 77 degrees. Everything else is just a version of intolerable and necessitates the aforementioned fans and water and layers. If it hits 77, you have to start thinking about the dew point. If it gets below 74, any kind of wind at all can be brutal.

Also, if there is a piece of gear that the wind knocks over, that means you don’t need that cymbal, or whatever it is. That’s the hand of God saying you brought too much crap. Listen to Him/Her.

If the conditions are extreme, treat it like an out of town gig: ask for double. Sometimes you have to vote with your wet frozen feet.

Discomfort is a part of life. There’s no real comfort in the world. Sorry to be a downer. There are momentary pockets, but something will interrupt the comfort before long. The dog will vomit on the rug. The roof will begin to leak. Something. Why should gigging outside be any different? Why should it be less troublesome than sitting at home watching yet another series on Netflix? Once you embrace the inherent discomfort and disappointment of life, then everything becomes a little more tolerable. Is this depressing? It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be comforting. I just think that everyone would be happier if we lowered our expectations about, well, pretty much everything. I don’t want everything to be crappy all the time, but I don’t want to cruise through life with the illusion that everything is going to be like a commercial with beers and footballs and hot pockets being thrown at my face all the time. Sometimes life is just waiting in line. Sometimes life is trading yet another email with the insurance agent. And rather than these disappointments and logistical aggravations being assaults against my existence, I am instead trying to recognize the ineluctably harsh grain of life. Every day is a winding road, all that.

So: Playing music outside is like eating outside, inherently ridiculous. And there’s a reason bagpipes sound best outside. They’re designed to frighten the enemy.

iPhone Applause

View from the Bandstand

Wherever you go, the phone is there. I was playing a gig at a pool on Memorial Day and someone had their phone in the pool, protected in a specially designed plastic envelope. Even when you’re on the bandstand, the phone is there. Often it’s not yours, but it’s staring back at you, held in the rigid awkward sincere manner of a bar patron attempting to record the live musical performance presently unfolding. This move offends some band members. You’re made to feel even more like a trained animal than usual, which is considerable even under the loosest of performance situations. It happens all the time now, the people formerly known as audience members transformed into cinéma vérité auteurs, a still rock catching the shot on the dancefloor. I can’t imagine the video ever gets shared afterward or even watched again. I think the band is good musically, but rather Warholian in our unfilmability. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps someone more attuned would be able to find solace in the various 17-second clips of the band playing over the years, but my life is too short, and besides, I know I’m just standing there. Cirque du Soleil it is not. 

In an attempt to make the best of the unavoidable awkwardness, I’ve come to think of mid-performance phone videoing as a form of applause, an almost helpless gesture of appreciation. There is still conventional applause, to be sure. But there are rituals around when it is deployed. The phone seems to represent a new kind of applause, a spontaneous overflowing of emotion, a way to memorialize in deed if not in fact, a way of saying, “This is worthy of being videoed.” It’s worth being thrown into the algorithmic seas, preserved and shared, forgotten once caught. This non-phone experience is interesting enough that I want to make it a phone experience, too. I want to shine it through my ever-present prism of meaning. It’s with a type of astounded annoyance that we encounter something already outside the phone anyway. We must put it back in.

After the gig, breaking down the gear, a teenager walked up and said, “Good job playing.” Then he walked off. It’s almost always nice to be complimented, even if it doesn’t make any sense. I am the youngest person in that band by thirty years and I am still old enough to be that teenager’s father. I’m hardly accustomed to anyone telling me “good job” about anything, much less a teenager. I mean, we did fine. We played “Under the Boardwalk.” There was talk of playing “Sea Cruise” but it was never called, just one of those set-break notions that drifts by like a cloud. It sounds more like a phrase I would tell my own children after the completion of some chore. “Good job”? I almost expected someone to then walk up and present me with a congratulatory sticker. It’s so hard to keep living and not become a less funny version of Andy Rooney. 

My middle-aged confusion aside, I still appreciated the compliment. However, it should be noted that said teenager never once recorded us with his phone.