Hi all
Well, I was the very model of suck last night at open mic night. I get conflicting messages when I'm there. People ask me to play but then noone listens. Noone notices when I finish a song. Generally there will be one person listening, that individual will start to tentatively applaud when I finish a song, for fear of interrupting the conversations of the people to whom my playing is of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
I really don't know whether the mature decision is to keep trying to play or to give up.
Maybe you could say that a musician is someone who has something to say and does so musically. I don't really have anything particular to say. I just like various songs. The players who got attention from the audience were guys who don't just play better than me, they sing about navigating the world of social pressures as an emotional being.
The only things I really understand are beauty and how stupid most people are. I sing the City of New Orleans because I find it a beautiful evocative song. I personally have pulled out of Kankakee. But noone at open mic night, myself included, has ever rolled past a freight yard full of old black men, and the song has basically zero relevance to anything in the lives of the people at Sam's Cafe on open mic night. I do not understand anything to sing about that would be of interest to anyone there.
If the only oberavation you are capable of making is "here is something that is beautiful" that can be a good asset for being a photographer, the medium lends itself to making such statements. People always ask if I do weddings, or recommend that I do them, but weddings are about precisely the opposite of the things that I understand or am interested in. A wedding is a ghastly artifact, a massive ceremonial orchestration of what a woman believes to be the relevant dimensions of her social ties. I can take beautiful pictures at a wedding, but I have an embarassing tendency to take too many pictures of the most beautiful woman at a wedding, which is a problem if it isn't the bride. Last wedding I did I got some nice portraits of various persons in attendance. I really liked a portrait I did of the harp player they had, a pensive expression of concentration through her harp strings, but he pic of the harpist the bride put up on her website was a crappy snapshot someone else did, with the harpist way in the background with one of the bride's quilts in the foreground. Weddings are about the display of faces and artifacts from which the bride has built the structure of what she sees the building blocks of her world. And I'm not really wired to understand or communicate about such things.
Maybe I'm sort of cursed in that I can play the guitar just a little bit and sing a few songs halfway well, people think that's enough for the tall chair at open mic night, until I'm actually in it, and it turns out that what you really need to have is an emotional common ground with your audience so as to have something to communicate to them.
Well, I was the very model of suck last night at open mic night. I get conflicting messages when I'm there. People ask me to play but then noone listens. Noone notices when I finish a song. Generally there will be one person listening, that individual will start to tentatively applaud when I finish a song, for fear of interrupting the conversations of the people to whom my playing is of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
I really don't know whether the mature decision is to keep trying to play or to give up.
Maybe you could say that a musician is someone who has something to say and does so musically. I don't really have anything particular to say. I just like various songs. The players who got attention from the audience were guys who don't just play better than me, they sing about navigating the world of social pressures as an emotional being.
The only things I really understand are beauty and how stupid most people are. I sing the City of New Orleans because I find it a beautiful evocative song. I personally have pulled out of Kankakee. But noone at open mic night, myself included, has ever rolled past a freight yard full of old black men, and the song has basically zero relevance to anything in the lives of the people at Sam's Cafe on open mic night. I do not understand anything to sing about that would be of interest to anyone there.
If the only oberavation you are capable of making is "here is something that is beautiful" that can be a good asset for being a photographer, the medium lends itself to making such statements. People always ask if I do weddings, or recommend that I do them, but weddings are about precisely the opposite of the things that I understand or am interested in. A wedding is a ghastly artifact, a massive ceremonial orchestration of what a woman believes to be the relevant dimensions of her social ties. I can take beautiful pictures at a wedding, but I have an embarassing tendency to take too many pictures of the most beautiful woman at a wedding, which is a problem if it isn't the bride. Last wedding I did I got some nice portraits of various persons in attendance. I really liked a portrait I did of the harp player they had, a pensive expression of concentration through her harp strings, but he pic of the harpist the bride put up on her website was a crappy snapshot someone else did, with the harpist way in the background with one of the bride's quilts in the foreground. Weddings are about the display of faces and artifacts from which the bride has built the structure of what she sees the building blocks of her world. And I'm not really wired to understand or communicate about such things.
Maybe I'm sort of cursed in that I can play the guitar just a little bit and sing a few songs halfway well, people think that's enough for the tall chair at open mic night, until I'm actually in it, and it turns out that what you really need to have is an emotional common ground with your audience so as to have something to communicate to them.
Lately I've been semi-obsessed with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're a psychedelic influenced country rock band that was started by Jerry Garcia and a couple of his musical friends. They were popular in the '70s, and they're actually still around, with two of the members from the "classic" lineup. They have one song, called "Whiskey", that's sung by a moonshiner driving a truckload of whiskey to Memphis. Not only have I never driven a truckload of moonshine whiskey to Memphis, but neither did the guy who wrote the song. In fact, I believe he went to prep school in Michigan. But there's something about the song -- the music and lyrics combined -- that's just appealing.