Editor's Note: Preparing for the Unexpected

Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Kylee Swenson Remix Editor

I can say with confidence that I am a mentally stable person, but as I've said in the past, pursuing music is a rollercoaster. Sometimes as soon as you go up the hill, you go flying back down it.

As a musician, I recently had a day like that. I learned that my band was confirmed to play a popular music festival, and I ran around the room pumping my fists in the air like an idiot. If you work really hard to get what you want, when you get it, it's an amazing high.

I rode that high for hours. That night, my band prepared to play a sold-out show at a club in San Francisco. I hung out with friends before the show and felt great. I watched the first two bands play (really good), and I wasn't feeling nervous. We were well rehearsed. We'd practiced three times that week, including the night before. Every potential problem was addressed, and I practiced the hell out of the parts I was having trouble with.

Our keyboardist has a complex rig that is starting to look like a science lab inside of a spaceship. There are keyboards, a sound module, mixer, laptop, pedals and millions of audio and MIDI cables. And there had been some glitches in getting it all to run smoothly in practice, but we'd worked through all of that stuff. We were ready.

Then the moment arrived, we got onstage and our keyboardist's spaceship wasn't ready after all. He kept saying, “Just a second.” Meanwhile, I'm thinking, “There are 300 people staring at us. I don't have a second.” The air started to let out of the balloon. Seconds drifted by, and someone in the audience yelled out, “Play a song!” That is not what you want to hear when you get onstage — that the audience is getting restless before you play the first note.

At this point, I realize, “Okay, I'm not a standup comedian, but I have to talk to the crowd to save this.” So I did. It was a freakishly hot night in San Francisco, and I traded a little banter with the crowd about the heat while our keyboardist rebooted the spaceship. But we were still waiting, and I could have done more to distract the audience from the waiting game. At this point, the balloon is half-deflated and the energy would be tough to recover. A good minute after getting onstage, we finally played the first song. But we never fully bounced back from that first misstep. It wasn't a bad show, but we didn't hit the ball out of the park.

It was a couple of lessons learned: First, when you're waiting for a band member to get his act together or you hear someone in the band flub a note, don't stare him or her down. It's just going to make it more obvious to the audience that there was a screwup. Most people won't notice little mistakes, so don't set off flares announcing that you biffed it.

Second, it's not enough just to have a backup plan — you have to be ready to pull the trigger on it at the drop of a hat. While our keyboardist works on a foolproof revision of his spaceship for the next show, we have to institute some baseball-style hand signals or a code word so that our drummer can take the ball and run with it. No matter how much you've prepared and perfected things in practice, you have to be ready to deviate from the plan when necessary.

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