Gig Diary: Smell The Horse

Here's the deal: I've been playing music semi-professionally on and off for twenty years, but I have never, until recently, kept a gig diary. I think that's because I never felt primarily responsible for my "career" in music, such as it was. Part of that was due to the context through which I experienced the job—as a member (but never the leader) of a band, or as the junior half of a duo. Since the move, I've started keeping a black-and-white composition book where I note the set-lists; the take; what I wore; how I felt; what worked, what didn't; what I learned. It's been pretty interesting to analyze the process, and I wanted to expand it here, to the blog.

Gearing up now for my first pop gig in a long time, my first solo show in even longer; I spent the last half-decade deeply involved in directing a church choir, which left me without a lot of time to devote to a pop career even as casual as mine had been. With the move to the Heart of Empire, the opportunity arose for me to keep my hand in, and make a little pin-money, with fewer compromises than before.

So I've invested a few hundred bucks in a decent sound system, done up some business cards and brochures (featuring the lovely blue-toned image above, shot by D in our bedroom and tweaked to hell and back), and gone looking for gigs.

They're not hard to come by. Rochester and environs are lousy with coffee-shops, and this particular place is within walking distance of my house—although, in deference to the lateness of the hour and all that expensive equipment, I suppose I'll go by car on Saturday.

So it's been this odd week of hanging out in the sunny backyard, sitting on folding chairs with the neighborhood moms (almost wrote "the other neighborhood moms"), one eye on the kids at play and the other on the yellow legal pad in my lap, writing pages and pages of song titles, scratching them off, paring them down. Late at night, in a corner of the basement laundry room, I'm running sets—every song, every note, every quip, every intro—with a clock running and the microphones set up—though not plugged in; they're there just to re-hone my kinesthetic sense, my awareness of my surroundings, so that in the heat of performance I don't knock my forehead against the vocal mic or smash the face of my guitar into the instrument mic.

You may recognize the voice of experience in all this caution.

How nervous am I? An easy measure: in the margins of my set list, I have written brief notes for every joke and story I will tell between songs. Only space constrictions have prevented me from writing out Good evening and welcome and Thank you, goodnight.

So. It's a blues room, I'm told: the set list, therefore, is heavy on Da Blooze—against my natural proclivities. Because I am professional, goddammit.

I've played a metric fuckload of the twelve-bar I-IV-V, mind you, but the blues was always Dan's bag more than mine; that was one of the compromises. I hate the blues.

Well, strictly speaking that's not true—what turns me off is The Blues As A White Guy's Party Music. Robert Cray, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Buddy Guy—that junk shits me to tears. What I dig is deep blues, the shivery stuff lurking at the violent, scary edge of the music.

Here I'm defining "blues" not by its bar-structure or chord progressions, but as a feeling—the spiny tingle, the sense of fear-for-the-soul, that shows up in the oddest places. Blind Willies McTell and Johnson just about owned it; Howlin' Wolf, Muddy, Willie Dixon, and more recently Ry Cooder and Cassandra Wilson have worked the terrain—artists who would consciously define themselves as working in the blues tradition.

But I hear that same dread in Cash's best work; and it surfaces in Bruce Cockburn's voice now and then, and in Tracy Chapman's "Crossroads," in Nick Cave's grotesque drawl, in Will Oldham's bleak and beautiful "I See A Darkness," even in the clenched-teeth MPD vox of Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Soul." That's the blues, the real thing. It's not juke-joint stuff—rather it's the stuff that'll get you thrown out of the juke joint, maybe run out of town on a rail, because it makes people nervous.

Want the difference, in a nutshell? Bono's original solo recording of "Silver And Gold" is deep blues, the sound of a man jumping out of his skin, of a genuine dark night of the soul: U2's re-recording of same is all jive and bluster. (Am Ah boogin yew? Ah doon't mean tae boog yeh... Skip James wept.)

Onward to the gig.