for those about to rock

thoughts

i remember seeing some stand-up comic a few years back doing a post-routine interview on the tonight show or something. he talked about how when guys drive around with the windows down and music blaring, they oftentimes try their best to emulate every instrument they're hearing, sometimes all at once -- tapping out the drumbeats on the steering wheel, hands darting out with air guitar moves whenever the driving actually permits, shout-singing lyrics as though one's lungs were expelling the very same air that carried the voice blaring through the radio speakers.

a year or two later, smoking butts in my room in noho and trudging through a restaurant review of amanouz cafe with the tube on and tuned into the hotly-anticipated michael jackson interview special, in which some brit was to dig intrepidly into those molestation allegations, and watching jaco dancing to billie jean in a tame segment early in the program, well before they were to get about the business of talking about his sleeping with children and all, and explaining to the host that such movement involves letting go and becoming the guitar, becoming the bass and becoming the drums.

memory's a funny thing sometimes, an amorphous, ever-changing, animated thing that pokes its fingers through the static to assist you in making sense of the present, even when you weren't so sure you needed the help in the first place.

as i sit thinking about how we auditioned our first bass player the other night, i feel like these unbidden memories have lended greater focus to my perspective on my music's direction. it's an arguably dubious undertaking to glean serious lessons from jaco, let alone some stand-up whose name i can't even remember, but i honestly think they both jostle the same essential truth, and when i apply this truth to our practice the other night, it makes me realize that the right fit for bass, when he or she does come along, is going to FEEL like the right fit.

like, in a very literal sense, the reason the guy we played with the other night isn't going to work is that he played hyper-busy lines over passages where jamie and i lay back on the groove. i mean, on paper, that screams pretty clearly that we're not on the same page, but the point is actually FEELING that inconsistency in its musical translation. with the exception of a couple of the tunes, there was an unspoken understanding hovering like a cloud in our practice space that we simply weren't clicking.

that's ok, of course; it doesn't make him a bad bass player, and it doesn't make our songs bad. it just reiterates that a band is greater than the sum of its parts, each player/voice a finger on the same fist, and that when you DO click with everyone, you are sort of becoming the drums and the bass, even it's the guitar that you are actually playing, by virtue of relinquishing your ego to the bigger, greater thing that the group represents as a whole.

am i flaking out on you guys?

posted by jomilkman @ 12:32 PM