datamusicata

Talking with my pal, John, the other day, we got on to the subject of opening acts; a position that we’ve filled many times through the years.    Being an opening act is a fine line to walk and the considerations are significant.

We are assuming that it is a compatible billing.  So ask yourself why you are in that slot?

To lengthen the show?   To fill the time until everyone has found their seats?   To change the crowd into a galvanized responding unit, to wit:  to make them a receptive audience for the main act?

Yes.

All theses things are true and there is also the consideration that most, if not all of the audience came to see the other act, so your position with them is weak to start with.

You had best be brief and you had best be the best you’ve ever been.   Go over your material, pick the very best stuff; the material that consistently works with an audience.   And this is a very productive exercise, because it forces you to edit, excise and then go with your very best, because the promoter is going to tell you how long he wants you to play. 

If they say they don’t care, go to the main act or the road manager of the main act and ask how long they would like you to be on.    And respect what they say.   If it’s twenty minutes, the make certain that that’s what you do.   

Many times it is a union house and there are only so many hours the crew will work before they go into golden overtime.  The promoter doesn’t want that to happen because it costs him personally, right out of his profits.

I actually turn my watch around so that the whole time I’m playing, once glance at my guitar neck also gives me the face of the watch.    That way I’m always exactly on time.

Here’s what you don’t do:

Complain that you weren’t given enough time.

Knock the other act.

Pretend your show doesn’t start until you start singing.   When they announce you, your twenty minutes has begun.   If you break a string, that’s part of your twenty minutes—and too bad for you.

Go longer than your allotted slot.

Take an encore.  (What I do is check with the headliner, if they don’t take encores, as was the case with Steven Wright when I was his opening act for three years, then you don’t take encores.   If they do take encores and they’d prefer you didn’t, do that.   You can come back out, say thanks, take a bow and then leave.  

Keep selling your CD’s in the lobby after the main act has taken the stage.

Remember the show isn’t about you, it’s about the other act and you have been fortunate enough to play for their audience.   You want to make the most of that opportunity, by choosing your best material and leaving the audience wanting more from you.

It’s what I do when I’m the opening act and it’s what I expect when someone opens for me.

When you go over long, overstay your welcome, flog the audience to death, you don’t serve anyone or anything.  

The main act is never going to want you to open for them again; the promoter is not going to use you again because you weren’t professional and you cost them money; and lastly the audience that came to see the other guy is going to hate you for keeping them waiting so long to see the act that they actually paid to see.

Today I put a song up on a site called Jango.   They offered to do free promotion for a month.   I’m sure it’s a loss leader type of thing whereby if anything starts to happen (according to their  reports) then they are going to suggest that I upgrade to their paid service to take advantage of my good fortune cyber attention that their service created.

But be that as it may, while I was filling out the various boxes, one asked me for my i-tunes store ID.   It took me ten minutes to find myself on their maze.   I had to wonder how long a prospective fan would endure their  “refine your search” prompt.

I looked under Singer-Songwriter, Contemporary Singer-Songwriter, Folk, Rock, Pop, and finally found it by doing the same thing I did at the beginning.   Type in my name.     It seems that your name only shows up once you are in the proper category.

I know that the whole idea of categorizing your art is repugnant, but if you want to survive economically you have to acknowledge it and work it to your advantage.

This got me to thinking about how I categorize myself; which has been for decades,  as faux jazz.    This is a little bon mot I created from the idea of starting in folk music and falling in love with jazz and that my music  is where the two meet.   Folk /Jazz  or Fo’jazz  finally becoming  faux (or false) jazz.

As cute as that wordplay is, there is no category for that, so I’m always choosing the closest thing I can find from the choices that they offer.

Today I want to suggest that you look very carefully at what you do.   How do you categorize yourself?   But more importantly, how do others categorize your music?    Because they are the ones that are going to search the net for you and if you are not in the category that they believe you to be, you might be missed in their search on the may services that actually do list you.

For a while I thought that I should put myself in a category that didn’t have very many people in it, so that I would be noticed, but that’s a one way street in the wrong direction.  

Do you actually notice the names of the people you aren’t looking for while you search for the name you are trying to find?

Secondly, how many people go to that category?

Take an honest look at yourself.   Who are you competing with musically?   Whose music influences you the most?  What category are they in?   Is your music like theirs?   If it is, then that’s your category.

If not, then who do you go and listen to?   Who do you perform with?  Where do you perform?   These things all help you to define who you are musically.    And while your musical identity will evolve, grow and change, you can always re-categorize yourself to reflect that transmogrification.

The last thing I want to say on this topic is to ascertain that you are consistent.   List yourself in the same category on every site.   What? you say.   I can reach more people with the shotgun approach.  Yes but they will not coalesce.    If all your fans/supporters/patrons are in the same genre, then you have a name.    If your fans are spread across the gamut, then you have no real impact in any of the genre’s.    Trust me, I know this to be true from personal experience.

Think about this.   You sell five thousand CD’s worldwide.   Six billion people on the earth.  You do the math.   Not one person in a million knows who you are.

You sell five thousand CD’s in your hometown, you are on the front page of the paper.   And you draw big crowds when you play because you are an event there. 

Choose your arena and then go for it, dammit.

When is the best time to write?    I think it’s always when the muse strikes you.   You can never tell when that will be so you must be ready for it.   

I know that scheduling a time each day to write is a wonderful way to do it.   The same time and the same place and you sit there; you play things; you read things; you write things down and that way you are right there where the muse can find you.

But what happens if you wake up out of a sleep, or are getting dressed to go to a dinner, or committed to someplace else shortly?

You must follow the muse when she shows up.  

Now I realize that you only have to stand your friends up a few times for you to find yourself without friends, so you need to figure out a way to keep connected to the muse and to keep your commitments.

For melodies, I find that writing down the musical notes is the easiest way to save an idea.   If you don’t write music or don’t have any sheet music, you can use the solfage system (do, re, mi, etc) and give your syllables values if you can (quarter note, half note, etc).   If you can’t do that then use long lines drawn over the syllables to annotate long notes and short lines over the syllables to denote short notes.

Paul McCartney remembered the melody to yesterday by putting it to the lyrics “scrambled eggs, o my god I’m eating scrambled eggs”,   so that is another technique that is obviously successful.   Putting words to a melody, helps to keep the melody fixed in your head.

But you can also still lose the melody if you don’t do something about it soon.     I also keep a cassette recorder (yes, I still have one) with fresh batteries in it so that I can record something at a moments notice.   That way you are sure not to forget it.

A story idea, a song title, a lyric, whatever.    You can just record it into the machine and forget about it.

The bad part is that you actually CAN forget about it, thinking that you’ve gotten it down safely and you can get back to it later.  But later you may not be able to plug into the inspiration that created the idea to begin with, so for me, the best time to work on an idea is as soon as it shows up.

I know that I have scads of tapes with ideas on them that were not followed to their conclusion and some of them are really wonderful.   

My Audi is old enough to have a cassette player in it that works and when I have a long drive I sometimes pile up a bunch of cassettes and take the portable cassette player as well and then listen and either complete the idea or consolidate all the good ideas on to one cassette which becomes the real work cassette.

These techniques work but I think you owe it to yourself and your muse to honor the connection when it shows up.   It doesn’t matter what you are supposed to do (though catching a plane is probably going to trump this idea), put it on hold and follow your muse.

Be late, be remiss, be gone, but be there for the creative spark

Looking over the list of the top 100 CD’s in various categories and lamenting that neither All Wood and Doors nor Backstage at the Resurrection were even mentioned as an also ran, I realized that I knew less than twenty percent of the people on the lists, outside of the long famous.

It then occurred to me that I was remiss in my listening.   You learn and you grow by exposing yourself to as much music as you can.   And I was listening to nothing new.

This is an easy place in which to fall and difficult place to escape, as the music is comforting, soothing, no surprises and reminds us all of some wonderful moment in our lives.

There is another hurdle for the seasoned musician and that is one of the knowledge of the mastery of the instrument and the craft.   

If you’ve never heard really great playing or writing, then it is easier to become excited about some new band, but once you have listened to the greats and tried to emulate them and to grow, hearing a new band that’s been writing and playing for a year or three is not so exciting for that person.

As the producer of hundreds, if not thousands of sessions, I cannot help but begin to think about what is wrong with what I’m hearing and what should be done to make something better (by my lights, that is).

I am truly amazed at the lack of mastery of the guitar, as I hear over and over again, basic guitar playing from “artists”.   Singing that demonstrates no work on the part of the singer to learn their instrument and make the most of their gifts.

Make no mistake, an artist’s work is never done.   An artist is never as accomplished as they want to be; never at the place where they can rest.  

It is our duty and responsibility to continue to learn, practice and grow in every direction of our artistry; performance, composition, and mastery of these crafts.

We live in an age of disposable everythings and that includes music.    Not much from ten years ago is being played right now (though you can still hear the Beatles recordings and compositions on a daily basis no matter where you are).

We throw someone up the pop charts and two years later no one seems to care.   Media is looking to devour, over expose and dispose of the “next big thing” on an incessant basis.   You can’t let them decide your worth or validity.

But you can’t ignore them either.   Try to see and hear as much music as you can.   And try to listen without judgement, no matter how difficult that is for us, we must do it if we are to learn and to grow.

It’s been a wild, crazy and busy year.   And the first one since I started this blog that I did not post regularly.   I started thinking that everything that I had to tell you had been said.  I didn’t want to repeat myself and I didn’t want it to transmogrify from a self help site to a self indulgent site, as there are already quite enough of those in cyberspace.

This year saw the release of my first studio solo CD in four years, Backstage At the Resurrection.   It got a lot of airplay and spent about six months on the radio charts.   I am still doing the songs from that CD as well as songs from the other 22 CD’s in my live shows.  

It gets more and more difficult to put a set together when you have such a catalog to draw from.   And even though some of the songs are decades old, they haven’t become dated or weird (IMHO).    A few have, but most of the time I am writing with an eye on posterity and so there are not references or sounds that would make it too dated.  

Following the traditional instruments route helps maintain their immediacy, though my arrangement style is definitely rooted in the last century, which I believe will be regarded as some kind of remarkable time for popular music.

Cliff Eberhardt and I released All Wood and Doors in July and have received an incredible amount of press, all of it good.   Nothing but five star reviews across the board, with the exception of one doors fanatic who said that I was just wrong to rearrange these songs…as though they came down from the mountain on tablets or something.   I wrote him a nice letter to which he replied with his usual grace.   I leave it to you to discern the gist of his epistle.

I was just listening to Coldplay live and was truly amazed at the limited vocal gifts of the lead singer and the inane lyrics.   The camera would pan the audience and they would all be singing along.   I immediately think back to the early Beatles and the same sort of inane lyrics that made me so happy and I guess this is what the inexperienced listener expects.   Something that they can understand.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a song about losing my parents, which very few of those people will experience for decades.   You begin to wonder why you are writing such things.   Then it comes to me.   I have always written from my own experience and my own heart.   I have never written a “hit” song that I wrote from the get go as a hit song.  I have had some hit songs, but I was always trying to write a great song.   I know that that is subjective and you may find my work lacking in all respects but that is your opinion.  I have mine and it’s just as valid.

And validity comes from sincerity and intelligence, not from having convinced a million sheep that entering the slaughterhouse is good for them.   We often mistake commercial success for validity.    It’s not validity, it’s commercial success.    Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t want to confuse it with what matters to an artist, and at this stage of the game, I’m pretty sure that’s what I have become.   In a perfect world that would be enough.  In this world, it’s still pretty close to enough.

Happy New Year.