Stage Frights
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Kylee Swenson, Remix Editor
Photo: Michelle Springmeyer
Playing live is an interesting experiment. When you produce a track and release it, you're still somewhat hidden behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz-style. But when you perform in front of an audience, you are fully exposed. Sometimes, when it's a small crowd, you feel even more exposed because there's only a select amount of people to focus on and win over. For some reason, playing in front of a few hundred or more people feels easier to me; it's just one big entity to feed off of rather than a handful of individual faces to contend with and attempt to win over.
Some people might disagree about performing being scarier than recording. I get the feeling that Beth Gibbons from Portishead suffers more in the studio than onstage. For the defense: She doesn't grant interviews anymore, she looks pretty pained in press photos, and in this month's cover story, her bandmates reveal a sense of tortured perfectionism and angst with their recording process. But to see Gibbons perform live is another thing. I have yet to see her with Portishead, but while the band was on hiatus, I watched her perform solo (with Paul “Rustin Man” Webb of the band Talk Talk) at The Warfield in San Francisco a few years back. She seemed completely loose and at home, smoking onstage and shaking hands with audience members.
For me, though, playing live has been a work in progress, especially since I don't have four techs touring with my band and taking care of every issue that arises. After a couple weeks on tour recently, I learned a few things. There were the personal discoveries, like that our keyboardist loves pickles and that being in a van with five guys for two weeks will produce a constant, nerve-racking “brodeo” of inside jokes.
But I also learned about what it takes to become a better live band. First, equipment breaks, and cables love to get lost. After several trips to music-gear stores on the road, I started taping and numbering my cables and counting them at the end of each show. Losing stuff gets expensive. Second, I learned to be flexible. Small clubs rarely have enough Dis, and I had a faulty active DI I brought with me that worked some nights and didn't others. I had to rip my vocal effects box out of the chain a couple times and roll with the punches.
But the biggest lesson for me was that, whether you're playing in front of 30 people in Albuquerque or 300 in your hometown, you should never phone it in. Some nights, it's hard when things go wrong and you're missing your own bed, but if you give each performance your all, you can turn 30 into 60 into 120 people the next times out. That may be common knowledge, but it's true: If you convert 10 people into fans, the word spreads. And by the time you come back from tour and play to your home team, your blood, sweat and tears pay off. My band played a show at home on the final night of our tour, and it felt to me like the best show we'd ever played. The reactions confirmed it for me. One person said, “You can tell that you've been playing almost every night for the last two weeks.” It's still a little scary stepping in front of a crowd, but I'll never be as stiff again, and I'll never dwell so much about hitting the right chords or notes when I could just be having a good time. Practice and a positive attitude are everything, and at the end of the day, music should be fun, not frustrating.
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