And Then There Were Three!… Icebergs. (Open Mic Stuff)
OK. Up front I admit I bagged the title of this post from the 1979 Genesis album of the same name.
But this post has nothing whatsoever to do with Genesis, except that all the guys in that band did solo projects… And so am I!
Yes, the U. S. S. Titanic has sailed once again!
Last night I played my third open mic solo with just me and my guitar. Before I say anything else, I have to say the level of talent in this town is tremendously pleasing. Serge, my new friend and favorite local artists, sings his songs in Russian! It’s WAY COOL!!!! Will post some video of that tomorrow.
On this occasion, I did markedly better than the last solo attempt. I have definitely come a ways since the last two outings. But this one was a bit different too. I normally don’t get nervous at gigs. Never really have. Even for the first first two times playing solo, I was not nervous much at all. This one was different.
Why?
A number of reasons.
First – Consider this Iceberg #1
The first two times I ventured out into the mean cruel world of open mic performing, I hadn’t been playing guitar for very long for very long, thus my expectations were , I shouldn’t say low, but lets just say I knew there were going to be rough spots, chord malfunctions, maybe even a few stops and starts. [launch of the Titanic documented here] Now that I’ve been playing for over a year, I’m starting to expect a bit more from myself. That said, it is still really weird being on stage without other musicians to lean on musically, to share the process of performing with. It’s just me, myself, and I. It’s lonely, and that is going to take a while to get used that.
Iceberg # 2
Those higher expectations coaxed me to make the fool hardy decision to not bring a mic stand and sing from memory. If someone at my current guitaring skill level had asked my opinion on whether or not do do this naked, without cheat sheets, I would not have recommended it. I would have told them to continue to set up the music stand just in case. Which of course means I did indeed forget a couple of lyrics. Here is the skinny.
The first song I played was Stings “Fragile”. I previously played that at my second solo voyage. With the exception of maybe one or two iffy chord changes, I pretty much remembered and performed that well enough. The second song is where my memory failed. It was Neil Finns “Driving Me Mad”, another repeat from my second outing. I got halfway through the song just fine, but when I was getting close to coming out of the bridge and back into the last verse, I realized I couldn’t remember that last set of lyrics at all. So I just faded out as if the song ended there…. Hey, It’s an obscure song! Who’s going to tell!
The third song brings me to
Iceberg # 3!
This was almost certainly the root of my nervous condition. For the first time as a solo act, I performed one of my original songs. It’s a song I’ve written about on my blog a few times called “Just One Tear“. It’s a very personal song, written about the death of a dear friend some 18 years ago. I really didn’t want to screw this one up. Starting the song I was going smoothly. I did skip one verse of the song, but I had planned to do that before I got on stage. I never did like that bit of lyric anyway, and the song doesn’t lose much without it. During the last chorus, an extended chorus, right before I went into the middle 8 ending of the song, I stumble on a bit of lyrics. I managed to ad-lib something and recover, and was kind of proud of myself for it.
“See, I can do this!” I thought.
The next thing that happened really chaps my hide! As I got into the end of the song, the crescendo of the whole thing…. My fingers stumbled, my abilities to play faltered and I hit these horrible notes and made anti-chords! Grrrr! I was sooo pissed at myself!
The saving grace was that I remembered the lyrics, and was by design singing them at the top of my lungs! So it may not have been too glaring a screw-up. But because of its personal nature, I really wanted to get that song right.
If I would have done all covers, I’m not sure if I would have been so nervous. As a take-away lesson from last night, I vow that I will bring my lyric stand with me the next time the U. S. S. Titanic sets sail… Unless foolish pride gets in the way and I try it naked again!
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