Category Archives: Practice

Gig Preview Plus One

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Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have two upcoming shows! My persistence has paid off, and I hope it continues to. Combined with the recording I’m doing with Larry and Aselin this Wednesday, I now have three reasons to rehearse. So I am, and all of the fun and challenge and fingertip-pain attendant on that is flooding forth. Again, I don’t really know why I stop, ever.

The Raleigh show will be about one year after my last visit to my former hometown. I’ll be playing dueling solo sets with my brother Scott (who performs under the name The Monologue Bombs). We’ll be part of Raleigh’s “First Friday” (10/2) celebration — sort of an open-house for all the art galleries around town, with music and maybe food. Scott tells me that where we’ll be playing (Rebus Works Gallery) is an especially isolated space, singer-wise. I mean, there’s good separation between folks who want to check out paintings and folks who want to hear music. You get the idea.

The Chicago show will be at the newest bar in Logan Square, Cole’s. I tip my hat to my buddy Jet, who texted me in the middle of a barrage of gig-emailing I was already doing to point out the near-glowing writeup of Cole’s in Gaper’s Block, wherein it was mentioned that, hey, they’re looking for bands. Cole himself responded to my email that same day, offering .e September 15, a Tuesday (I’d suggested something low-key like that). What’s more, he asked if I knew other musicians to round out the evening, and so thanks to some more rapid-fire emailing, my compatriots-in-song Denise Hradecky and Eric Ziegenhagen are on the bill. Should be a good night!

Semi-relatedly, yesterday was a great day. We went to Chinatown to watch The Xylenes open up a festival at noon. Amber from the Xylenes is the wife of a former co-worker/friend, David. A few years ago, when I thought I wanted to get a trio going to play out, I invited her and Larry over on a Sunday. My neighborhood being what it is, Amber got lost trying to find the place, and I had stupidly left my cell phone off. We jammed anyway, and it was actually pretty fun, but I always feel bad for having her go through that, only to not have a band materialize anyway. Not that being “in” Zapruder Point is necessarily a total treat. But I digress.

The Xylenes rocked a brisk set of covers, including “Roam” and a very faithful “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” They have way more women in the band than the last time I saw them. They form a wall out front, trading off and harmonizing lines. It was the perfect accompaniment to a perfect day.

THEN after a couple other errands, Amy said she wanted to check out this fabric shop in Bucktown she’d heard of. As we pulled up to it, I saw the bar across the street and was astonished to find that it was Charleston — the only venue on my gig-grubbing short list that I’d never set foot in. I remedied that, asking Heather at the bar if there’s more that I can do to get in with the booker there (aside from email). “Definitely,” she said, sliding me a notepad to leave Wendy, the booker, a personal note. The place looks great — the kind of bar with books in it, and a stage at the back that looks to be about six feet square. Cozy. Sweet. Keep your fingers crossed.

Speaking of fingers, when we got home I practiced again. I’ve been trying to go for a full hour each time, but my fingers were pretty stinging by about 50 minutes. It had been worse the day before. It’ll probably be better now, as I head down to the basement…

In Front of Part Two

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I see now that my original sweep of gig-grubbing emails was sent the first week of MAY. Time flies, yes? I received a sort of form rejection from one place, a kind word unaccompanied by a firm offer from another, and no reply at all from the other three places. I know that I’m supposed to follow up, but I’ve been stalling. Or is 100 days too soon? (Joke.) (I hope.)

I had this idea that if I could write a second part to my earlier post about performance anxiety, I’d answer some internal questions, get some things settled, and once again feel good about “getting out there.” But after weeks of poking at it, just this morning I looked at what I’d written and realized that I’d been winding myself up over two truths that aren’t revelatory, and that I wouldn’t be brave for pointing out. Namely, that 1) The moment you take a creative endeavor out of your basement, parties with profit as their chief concern WILL have to be dealt with, and 2) It’s okay to admit that some part of you wants to be recognized for your hard work and/or inherent talent (because everyone has that part).

Though these truths aren’t earth-shattering, they do bug the hell out of me. The first one’s a bummer, and the second is something I’d rather not admit to. The tempting thing is that if I don’t play out, 1) I never have to answer the dreaded question of draw (which equals beer which equals money), and 2) I can pretend I don’t care what people think. Truths avoided, problem solved! (In a totally cowardly and unsatisfying way.)

Thing is, I get to a point with writing and practicing and polishing where I think, you know, damn. I’m actually GOOD at this. I might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I gotta be the Earl Grey for some percentage of Chicago’s music fans. It’s at this point that I send out the emails, and my vision is lofty, but incomplete: I see only the point A that is me and the point B that is “my audience,” with a black box obscuring all the sub-connections between.

Of course eventually, with the venue-silence that requires of me more self-promotion (sticky truth #1) and assertiveness (sticky truth #2), the black box is lifted, and the complicated jungle of circuitry is revealed. I can hear the booker asking how many people I can get out. I can anticipate the strained reaction of a crowd uncertain what to do with a somewhat-husky, somewhat-mopey, sometimes-twitchy guy in his mid-to-late thirties. Okay, fine: late thirties.

But while these fears are real — while the anxieties of the inbox and the less-than-perfect gig hum like window units in my noggin — I know that what’s scarier still is making music that no-one will hear. At the risk of sounding corny, as much as I despair the myriad x-factors that seem to conspire against it ever happening, I know that the pure A-to-B connection, when it DOES happen, is pure magic. In the end, it’s totally worth carving through the jungle for.

To that end, I’ve sent out a few more follow-up emails since starting this dumb essay. I’ll be live…soon.

Fingertips 1 and 2

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The other piece of calamitous news that had me on pause for a while there was our basement flooding.  There was a freak storm on June 24th, lasted about 90 minutes and only affected a very narrow band of the west side of town. Having no backup power supply for the sump pump, when the storm knocked the power out, we were defenseless. I got home at about 4:00, and the water was all over the basement, with depths between two and four inches. I lost one guitar — it might have been salvageable, but I never liked it that much anyway, and it already had severe neck problems. It wasn’t too painful to let it go. The bass and the electric got a tad wet at the bottom, but they came out undamaged.

We got power back that night, and we wet-vac’d and squeegee’d and sump-pumped it basically dry. But then the next couple days I worked light days, spending most of my time mopping the basement and putting it all back together. In case this kind of thing ever happens again, I have the guitars up on cinder blocks, and I’ve tried to elevate just about everything down there at least a few inches. To be honest, it was kind of cleansing.

But wait! It gets worse! All the junk we dumped into the utility sink from the wet vac caused it to back up. I had to take some pipes apart to get at the problem, and when I went to put it all back together, the shit was so old and corroded that it didn’t fit any more. This was Saturday morning. My way-home-improvement-savvy father-in-law steered me through the process of replacing all that rusty crap with PVC. This pretty much took all weekend, with five — count ‘em, FIVE — trips to the local Ace. It was just like “Dennehy” — back in the damn Buick, etc. Only it’s a VW, natch. But anyway…

My practice space and my practice time were all compromised, but I’m back in the swing of things now. For the last three or four days, I’ve been getting back into the electric guitar after two or three months of re-discovering the acoustic. If I’m going to play any proper gigs, I prefer the novelty — and the volume control — of plugging in, so I’d best get “tight” on that. The problem is I always forget how hard it is to go from acoustic to electric. You’d think the opposite is true — like playing acoustic guitar is like swinging a bat with metal donuts on it, right? The electric would seem easier after that, yes?

In terms of sheer finger toughness, this is true. But the electric guitar…is a gentle mistress. (!!!) What I mean is that a few days ago I picked up the electric and started wailing away, and it sounded terrible. I tried to soften my attack, but honestly, all that acoustic strumming had conditioned me. I couldn’t get out of it. I soldiered on, but for the next couple of days I was convinced I was out of tune, and it just sounded bad to me. Only today did I think I might finally have the delicate touch back. And I love it.

Of course, if I do exactly NO acoustic work for a few weeks, I’ll probably find it tough going when I pick THAT thing up. Got to do both all the time, then. Woe is me. But then the better I get, the more often my self-mandated practice balloons from a gloomy half hour to a joyous hour or more. In my newly dry and cozy basement. Yep!