Ear’s Lookin’ at You Kid
Monday April 10th, 2000 @ 8:46 PM
Filed under: Everything, Tales Told Well
“People hear with their eyes…” I overheard Jason telling an aspiring young guitarist. “Being good isn’t good enough, you have to sell your performance visually.”
That is why Jason will play behind his head and with his teeth, and why he sometimes throws his guitar and walks it on the floor with the whammy bar, and flips it upside down. He finally smashed his guitar in two during a gig at the University of Wyoming and the students went crazy. They don’t remember one song we performed that night, or one note, lick, or run that Jason actually played on his guitar, but they still come up to me and say, “Jason is awesome, dude, I saw him smash his guitar in pieces and there were strings flying out every which way. He is the shit!”
I stood watching Tab Benoit play in Des Moines, Iowa, one night, and the lady next to me was getting hot flashes. She kept telling her girlfriend what a fabulous guitarist Tab was. I finally asked her exactly what it was about his playing that she thought was great. I could tell by her reaction that she had never given the question any serious thought. After a pause and a frown, she replied, “He is so damned good looking.”
I used to do seminars for Performax International out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and one that I particularly enjoyed was profiling peoples’ listening styles. What I found most interesting was that we can all be listening to exactly the same sounds and we are all hearing different things. Human beings fall into six different listening styles. Some of us only listen in one of those styles. Most of us listen in at least two, sometimes three, and rarely do you find a person who has the natural ability to listen in all six.
Even blind people I profiled seldom were attuned in all six styles, although their auditory habits were vastly superior to sighted people. The amazing discovery that I learned in these seminars was that people hear virtually nothing outside of their listening style. As Bill Cosby once asked, “Do you realize how little nothing is?
Here are the six styles which are backed with the exhaustive research for which Performax profiles are known and respected. They are arranged pneumatically to spell the word L-I-S-T-E-N, to aid in remembering. See if you can figure out which style or combined styles you employ in your personality. All the styles have both good and bad characteristics.
L is for the Leisure Listener. They love to listen to anything that brings them joy and pleasure, but not conflict, stress, or labor. In fact their hearing shuts down during conflict and they hear nothing. Sometimes this habit was formed in their childhood, by parents or other important figures, who screamed injudiciously, or brought punishment with their admonitions.
In the Marine Corps they have a name for these people: “the ten percenters,” the ones who never get the word. The rest of us had to be punished if the ten percenters failed to follow orders correctly, so we learned who they were and always guided them to acceptable obedience. In war, your life may depend on these ten percenters getting the orders straight, so it was no game, even in boot camp.
At our gigs I see these Leisure Listeners relaxed, beaming, smiling, and nodding, most of the time, but when the lyrics get risqu, they begin to tense up, and if I take issue with a heckler in the audience, all listening ceases and often they will take a bathroom break or decide to leave the perfomance completely.
If your mate is a leisure listener maybe now you’ll understand why yelling at them brings a shut down and complete lack of understanding and follow-through.
I-Stands for Inclusive Listening. This person is skilled at catching the introductory remarks, then the salient points or highlights, and finally the conclusion of the matter. They don’t pay much attention to details or color commentary or detours from the subject.
When Blinddog plays a new club, I’ll watch these people come in and make a snap judgement on the whole band and the whole evening based on the first song they hear. It is for the Inclusive Listeners that you’ll hear me announce things we are going to do in the next set or the next ten minutes. I know I must keep them anticipating.
Inclusive Listeners often talk during the show or get up and walk around finding something to do. They perk up if an announcement is made, or a drum roll signals something important is about to happen. They are very confident that they don’t need to stay riveted to the scene to get all they need from the performance. If you accuse them of not listening, they can quickly recite a tidy summary of everything that happened, often convincing their naysayers in impressive fashion.
S-Symbolizes the Stylistic Listener. These people immediately judge the setting, the hyperbole, the dress of the speaker or performer, the reputation, the acclaim, and name recognition. B.B. King could stink up the place with his playing and these people would not hear it because B.B. King is famous. Little Joey Swartz and the Night-time Nerds could play the music of angels and the Stylistic Listener would think they were stinking up the place, and truly believe that is what he was hearing.
Stylistic Listeners think Blinddog Smokin’ is scum on a good blues man’s boot when they encounter us in a seedy dive playing for twelve drunks and the owner’s hound dog moaning in the corner. They are all ears when we show up as headliners at a blues festival. I’ve often watched the stylistic listeners look at us with their noses in the air because they haven’t seen us on the cover of Blues Review or Blues Access. They think any old black guy from Mississippi is automatically good. Anybody who wears a costume, or was in a movie, or is signed to a label has to be better than us. They are incapable of hearing anything we play as being good, because, they reason, if it was, they’d “be somebody.” I’m amazed at how much more acclaim Chicago Chuck has been getting from fans on his drumming since he started wearing his expensive and avant-garde London Opera Trenchcoat.
Unfortunately, most of us have some stylistic listening behavior, with the exception of the hippie-granola-body-odor-is-cool group, who actually practice reverse stylistic listening by not listening to anyone who does possess the appearance of being on a higher echelon.
We recently had a blues band appear in our hometown of Laramie who have quite a massive marketing campaign going for them. They got articles in our local paper and the radio stations were making over them like Stevie Ray Vaughn had been resurrected from the dead. As a result, they played in our largest auditorium and now people are looking at poor Blinddog like we were a soup-bone that got buried in their backyard.
Had they been listening they would have realized that this is a one-dimensional band where the rhythm section is barely professional and the guitarist plays the same licks over and over all night at the same volume and intensity. None of them can sing and they just stand around looking bored. However, once in the stylistic mode of listening, a person is almost incapable of hearing reality, he instead is hearing what he has been told to hear, or what he expects to hear, or what he thinks he should hear.
Of course, if any of us soup-bones were to be critical, it would be passed off as sour grapes and jealousy.
T-Stands for the Technical Listener. This person hears details. If you speak with emotion and humor and storytelling, he will not be listening, but if you start quoting facts or measurements this human being is all ears. Often he misses the whole point, but can tell you that when you said a spark plug clearance was .035 on a 283 Chevy engine, you were wrong, it was .0345 up until 1959 when it went to .0357–don’t be rounding off on this guy.
I am a lousy technical listener and Jason is a good one by contrast. When we listen to music together at a festival, we team up to make a comprehensive analysis. He often misses the emotion and pathos of a player, but knows whether the guy missed one note in the minor scale he was using for his solo. Both of us are trying to improve in the other’s listening category, and it can be done.
E-Is for Empathetic Listening. These are the sympathizers and the romantics and those who cry when moved. Often they don’t have a clue what a guitarist is doing on his frets, but they can feel his passion and see his facial expressions, and sense his aura, and are drawn to the pain of the man.
When I see these people in our audience, I make eye contact, and use them as a means of feedback. God knows I can’t get feedback from the technical squad who are counting how many frets Jason has above his capotasto, or the inclusive listening gang that is back watching the “Want to be a Millionaire” show between guitar solos.
The good thing about Empathetic Listeners is their appreciation when we put our heart into our performance. The bad thing is that they are too forgiving and will excuse a wretched performance by a poor band “because the lead singer’s girlfriend just left him,” or some such horseshit. They can’t hear the bad playing because “they understand.”
N-Stands for the Non-conformist Listener. This person has a strong central point of view and many pre-conceived values and standards. Often he is opinionated and while you are talking he is not listening but rather forming his argument. His preconceptions are very hard to overcome. For example, if he believes that only black guys from Mississippi can play true blues, and that if it isn’t played acoustically and in the Delta style it is inferior, and if you happen to be a white guy from Wyoming playing electrically, then you are dead in the water from the get-go.
Unfortunately, there are many of these Non-conformist listeners in among the movers and shakers of the blues world. They think they have heard it all and know it all and your meager opinion doesn’t count for much.
There is a good side to this style, in that these listeners often are very knowledgeable and astute and not swayed by tricks and gimmicks. Sometimes they are the only listeners in the audience who realize a highly promoted and famous band just simply sucks.
Fortunately most of us are combinations of the above listening styles, and the good news is that we can improve in all categories until we can become excellent listeners. My own profile is strong in the non-conformist and empathetic listening styles, weak in the leisure and technical styles, fair in stylistic and inclusive listening.
Jason is strong in non-conformist and technical styles, weak in empathetic and leisure styles. He is not a stylistic listener, but can be a strong inclusive listener.
Chuck is probably the best listener of us all and as a result does the least talking in our band, but I haven’t met a human being yet who couldn’t use improvement in his listening skills.
Posted by Carl