Crash and Burn, Baby

Reality divides itself up into a million different pieces, and our brain takes those pieces and puts reality back together… we try to rebuild a broken world into something that might mean the same to someone else. We want to know the world inside someone else’s head… and we want others to know our world. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes not. And we ask ourselves constantly:

“Who are we?”

Entertainers? We are whatever we want to be really, if we try, if we put some work into it. We could put the work into anything we wanted, and it ain’t easy, none of it. And… if we study enough and push ourselves through the years of crap… if we get ourself to the point where we can play in front of other people then we are still probably going to be pushing our music and selves through tough crowds of people in bars. Chatting, chanting, fearing and loving the crowd, telling jokes while the guy on guitar tunes up. Pushing till the day we die, so we may as well enjoy it.

I listen to our recordings… and sometimes – for any one song – the sound is wonderful and sometimes the sound is just terrible. For any one piece I have no idea what someone else hears. Everybody has their own ears and they have their own reasons for listening… just like they have their own eyes. “Sunlight on my shoulder makes me happy. Sunlight in my eyes can make me cry.” I have no idea about other people’s angles of vision. And all I can think when I hear my own music is: This is powerful. This is emotional. This is over the top. This is strained. This needs work…

And, in the not knowing what others are thinking, I am seized by dread. And if it works and if it don’t I want it to be in my control. It’s a sad sad state of affairs. What I want to do now is simplify. Take control over my amp and my vocals, the same control I have with my harmonica. When we practice I have it because it all comes through the same amp. When we play live it gets taken away from me with the separate mic. If the crowd is or is not listening and what they are listening to… Well, when I crash I want to burn on my own terms. I want to be responsible for my own failures and my own successes.

If we think we’re or we’re going to be multimillionaires from our music we are going to be sad sad people for the rest of our lives. Better to make the music for the guy in the back who shouts “Shut up and play!” Better to make music and be happy, not worry about the technical crap like money and incompetent sound technicians so much. Keep things simple. Feed it all through your own personal amp first.

Because I got some really good advice from some guy last week who had been doing gigs for 20 plus years. I’m 40 plus and I have been playing and doing gigs for only five years. Oh, I do have a background. Music, theatre, radio, film in a dozen different countries. A hobo going everywhere and going nowhere. And then I end up here singing and playing harmonica. Wander the world looking for something and in the searching find I have lost what I was looking for. Just hope I can last another 20 plus years. That would be nice. Yeah, I do the blues because the blues have done me in.

There was a movie recently called “It’s a Wonderful World”. Matthew Broderick was a wonderful guitar player. He played for kids. He tried to put out an album and the producers didn’t distribute it and no-one bought it. He was disillusioned, became a hateful cynical bastard, divorces his wife, loses his friends and sticks himself in a job he hates and eventually loses. That can happen, I guess, if you lose your shot at greatness. I have nothing to worry about. I already am a hateful bastard. I have no shot at greatness. The one thing I have got going for me is: I love it when they yell “Shut up and play!” because my harmonica playing takes me away, and when they yell at me I know my harp playing can take them away, too.

The world divides itself into different parts for me. I am me, when I am playing in a bar, and I am also me when I am listening to a recording of myself playing in a bar. And it all carries me to different places.

That’s who I am.

And from a totally selfish point of view, to drive yet another nail into the band The Blue Monsters - the only thing which has sustained my sanity for the past five years - I just got the gig tracks from our last gig!

Click to listen to The Blue Monsters playing Deathletter Blues.

Crash and Burn, Baby.