Playing the Local 506

I've fallen a bit behind again after a late night, but what a night!  My friend and I played a short set (about five songs) for a benefit concert at the venerable Local 506 in Chapel Hill.  We were one of seven or eight acts, and we performed next to last, when the audience was both smaller and more liquored up.  But they were perfectly well behaved, and it went quite well as far as I could tell.  It was really hard to know how we sounded to the audience because the monitors on the stage were kinda funky and we are not experienced with microphones and all.  But all that aside, it was a dream come true to play for an audience at a club I had grown up hearing about and in which I'd seen bands I love perform.  I don't think I'm cut out to be a professional musician who makes his living by performing, but it's something  I greatly enjoy and want to do more of.  And this was an excellent beginning.

Singing Really Loudly in the Car

Usually I take the bus to work in the morning, but this morning we were doing an off-site strategic planning discussion, so I drove.  On the way, I pumped a band I just saw last week and loved, The Rural Alberta Advantage.  They're from Toronto.  I love listening to music in the car, and especially love it when I'm feeling tired or frustrated or really happy, and I can just blast it and sing along at the top of my lungs and get lost in the wash of sound.  It was a very wakeful way to start the day.  I also love pulling up at stoplights when somebody in the car next to me is singing emphatically, not realizing others are watching.  Sometimes that somebody is me.  I like to think this duck is singing along to some Meatloaf, or maybe Journey or Queen.  His day just got a whole lot better.

8-Bit Video Games

Because the colors are so bright and pure.  Because the sprites and landscapes are endearingly blocky and indistinct.  Because the sound effects evoke the future and the past at the same time.  Because nothing about the goals and interactions really makes sense when you think about it.  Because prizes are hidden inside boxes and catchy theme music follows your hero everywhere she/he/it goes.  Because you get points for doing just about everything.  Because they remind me of some beautiful afternoons in my youth.  Because I should really go outside, but they're so much fun!  For these reasons and more, I salute 8-bit video games, which accomplished so much within such strict limitations, which gave us whole worlds of shared cultural reference points, which boosted our hand-eye coordination to the point where we can now use iPhones without hardly thinking about it, and which made us think that jumping on the heads of our enemies was an effective tactical maneuver.  Thank you, 8-bit games.  And thank you, 8-bit game programmers, whose Snickers Bars-and Jolt Cola-fueled coding binges brought us brave new worlds of adventure.  And Mom, who I know is reading this, I want you to know that I am not sitting in my basement playing video games tonight, but in fact at a coffee shop writing this post.  I feel so mature!

Records

Tangibility has been on its way out for a while now.  Rotary dial telephones were supplanted by touch-tones, which over time gave less and less tactile feedback to users.  Some car steering systems moved toward drive-by-wire, introducing electrons and silicon chips between your hands and the rack and pinion gears that turn the wheels.  Doctors starting using robots to move the scalpel and suture the incision.  Dials and gauges were replaced by digital readouts on LCD screens.  Cameras no longer expose physical film, movies are no longer shown by projectors whirring their way through reel after reel of celluloid.  Heck, even the future of one of humankind's greatest inventions, the book, is in question.  Not all of these changes are for the worse.  Doctors can achieve greater stability and precision with a robot arm than with their own hands alone.  Drive-by-wire steering systems have great feedback so they feel just like normal.  Modern phones and computers allow people to connect in ways they couldn't have imagined even twenty years ago.  But there's certainly something being lost as something is gained here. And one area in which I feel the pang is music.  There is a fundamental and qualitatively different experience inherent in plugging headphones into an iPod versus setting the needle into the groove on a vinyl record.  For one thing, you can see the energy that is turning the record grooves into sound.  You can turn the power off and spin the record by hand and hear, very faintly, all the sounds you would hear if the amplifier were turned on.  You can't plug into an iPod and try--what even, shaking it?  Letting it sit there?--and hear a thing.  You can't witness bits of information transforming into musical reproduction before your very eyes.  For another thing, it's become very natural to pick and choose single songs to play on your computer or MP3 player, and to start and stop them in the middle, or to skip ahead to that rousing chorus.  On vinyl records, it feels natural to just let the record play, to hear the entire album as a unified artistic creation, to lose yourself in the musicians' imagination.  I could go on at somewhat greater length, but this is already absurdly longer than any of my prior posts.  I am by no means a vinyl purist.  I listen to most of my music digitally, as MP3s pumped through my car speakers or through tiny headphones.  And I still enjoy it and it still makes me feel a tremendous range of emotions, and it still inspires me.  But I also have a few records and an old turntable.  The counterweight is made of pennies duct-taped together and one of the feet is missing.  And when I get those pennies taped back together and set a record down, I feel a special kind of joy.  In the music and the tactility, the tangibility.

Jam Sessions

On Friday I had a chance to jam with two friends in my basement.  There are only two ducks in this picture because it was getting late, so you'll have to imagine the third.  We'd been looking forward for a while to rocking out with electric guitars and making some positive noise.  It was a pleasure to engage in joint musical inspiration.  One of us would start playing a few chords or fingerpick a pattern, and the other two would figure out what we could add without overpowering the original idea or changing the mood drastically.  Probably the coolest feeling was how we would all without saying anything know when an idea had run its course, and slowly, spontaneously move together into different territory.  Of course to someone on the outside it might have sounded like just so much noodling around, but to be playing that way was satisfying and challenging.  I enjoy playing with people who are better than me, and I felt like that was the case here.  I could keep up, but I was pushing myself, which felt great.  Can't wait to do it again.