Date: Saturday 13 September 2003
Venue: Leaf & Bean Coffee Company, Chili NY
Duration: two hours (8:00 PM - 10:00 PM)
Proceeds: $28.00
Wore
black jeans
black shoes & belt
long-sleeved ultrasuede shirt, gold
red T-shirt
The Crowd
Excellent. Leaf & Bean seats 20-25 people, and the place is full or nearly so all night—full of folks who are generally knowledgable, engaged, and appreciative. A tremendous lift. Demographic skew to the older side of things (40+), which surprises me, in this town full of colleges.
The Rundown
A good night overall. A good house, a better set list (though far from perfect), and a much more congenial vibe. The second set is especially good—relaxed, confident, and expansive. Not the best show I've ever played musically, but the tops in personal satisfaction; I feel like I dared much, and accomplished much.
Highlights
The whole "sophistication" bit gets shot to hell early on, as I hit a rocky stretch right in the middle of the first set. I've worked out a routine stringing together the three "If I Only Had..." songs from The Wizard Of Oz, using them as a springboard for comic asides. At various times, the bit has included dry recitations of movie trivia, goofy celebrity impersonations (Buddy Ebsen, Groucho Marx, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, and Dr. John among them), speculations on the Cowardly Lion's ethnicity, and winks to the Friends of Dorothy. Tonight, though, I can't seem to find my groove; it's an odd bit, and requires an attentive and sympathetic audience to make it work. This crowd might've done, but I should have slotted it later in the evening. They're still warming up to me, and the time is not yet right for freeform conceptual rambling. And the bit itself needs to be tightened and honed.
Been looking forward to playing "My Favorite Things"—I've worked up arrangement built around fast, intricate fingerpicking and ringing open strings. It's supposed to sound dreamlike—clouds of notes, hushed, constantly shifting, driven by a steady six-beat pulse but still somehow fragile—sharing the John Coltrane version's intensity of feeling, but approaching it with a certain stillness.
Think of it as praying. Trane is in full-on Pentecostal mode, possessed by the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues of flame, shrieking Hosannahs; set against that the simple, winding line of Gregorian chant, echoing in the vast space of a Spanish cloister. That's what I'm shooting for.
Unfortunately, I can never seem to make it fly; it's adequate, and competently played, yes, but never, ever quite as good, quite as spiritual as I think it should be. Angling for Coltrane, and somehow I end up with José Feliciano.
Then another set of songs linked by commentary, this time a treatise on Tin Pan Alley attitudes towards love; "Night And Day" (which I've been playing for years) begs the question, "Does the word torment really belong in a love song?" Segue then into "I Wish I Were In Love Again," which is funny as hell, but naked in its fear of love. Here my problems begin: I'm underrehearsed, and the song falls apart several times on its way to its conclusion. From there it only gets worse; "Masochism Tango," the ne plus ultra of pathological relationship songs, I barely know at all. Adding it was a last-minute idea, and though I've got cheat sheets, ultimately they're just another distraction. I'm flubbing words and chords all over the place. I still think the idea is a good one, but again, it needs extensive rehearsal and structuring.
Trying to shed the stink of flop sweat, I plunge into "Autumn Leaves." It has its moments, but the bridge is a struggle—I'm still shaky. A soft, fingerpicked "Veronica" finds me on auto-pilot; it feels like filler, but lets me find my feet again, anyway.
Then into "When The Spell Is Broken," one of the darkest, dourest songs in Richard Thompson's dark and dour catalog. It's a kick to play, mind you—it's easy to sound good noodling around in drop-D—but it's a pretty dissonant shift in the mood. I've still got a lot to learn about building a set that flows not only musically, but emotionally.
Working the crowd at the set break, doing the meet-and-greet that I've always loathed so much. (This, too, is a part of my efforts to stretch myself.) I'm gratified by their interest, their knowledge, their warmth.
I spend much of the break talking to an older gentleman, himself a guitarist, who compliments me on my playing and expresses a mild amazement at the way I'm sticking to the lower reaches of the neck while playing the jazz tunes. He's right; while many of the weirder jazz chords call for barreing high up the neck, I'm avoiding full barre chords as much as possible and using inversions, muting, partial chords, and cheat fingerings to keep things almost entirely below the seventh fret.
There's something to this, I think. Writing earlier about filtering various musics through my aesthetic and sensibilities, I couldn't precisely define just what that aesthetic might be. I'm a little nearer now; my style is defined by its limitations. I'm working what is in its essence keyboard music (both jazz and, earlier, hymns) and arranging for—not just guitar, but solo guitar. A pianist can carry all registers at once; a jazz guitarist working with bass and drums might well comp all over the neck; but I've got to hold down the bottom, play the changes, keep the beat and keep it simple enough that I've got a few brain cells left over for remembering the words. All else follows from that—whether I'm singing folk songs, hymns, rock'n'roll, or standards, whether I'm working from sheet music or memory.
Anyway. Hand out a few business cards, shake a few hands, down a glass of water, and...
...it's straight into the second set. Technical glitches strike instantly: I break a string on the first song, and simultaneously realize that my volume has been creeping upwards all night. Take a break, restring, turn down, back into the fray with "There She Goes." Such a pretty song—and such a complex exercise, one guitarist doing the work of two, keeping that chiming riff ringing out while the chords chug along behind. I think it was okay; I really can't recall, though I was still rattled by the disaster of the previous song. I took it in the key of F, by the way, transposing to D from the original G (the resulting chord shapes allowed me to play the melodic figure against the chords) and capo'd to 3.
This was a week that saw the deaths of both Johnny Cash and Warren Zevon. I'd had songs by both in my set already, but this week added "Johnny Strikes Up The Band," all fingerpicked and bittersweet, in a kind of a shared tribute to both. I changed some of the words: They'll be rockin' down in Folsom... It's my favorite song from Excitable Boy—but as an utter obscurity, it really couldn't raise the kind of emotional response I'd hoped for. When I played "Werewolves" a few minutes later, though, the joint went nuts.
Dropped my low E to a C for "See The Lights." It's a gorgeous lyric, and I've enjoyed playing the song before, but somehow, in this company of tightly-structured pop songs, it sounded weak—too shapeless to make an impression. Again, it's all about placement and mood.
What I Learned
Sophistication's all well and good: but maybe rockin' out is your great strength, after all.
It's lovely, lovely people that come to your gigs, but you can't take them for granted. What you play and what you attempt constitutes a series of promises to the audience: and, as in all things, you should not make promises that you can't be rock-solid sure of keeping.
Do not trust in the "magic" of live performance to make a song that sounds mediocre in your living room, sound transcendent. "Rising to the occasion" is largely a myth; if anything, the adrenaline oflive performance makes you play worse.
Likewise, you cannot count on audience goodwill to carry a half-baked conceit. You have to earn your laughs and gasps, with hard work and preparation.
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