King Biscuit Time Magazine - Road Kill Column
Tuesday August 1st, 2006 @ 9:03 PM
Filed under: Everything, Publications
Don’t Be That Guy
He may be sitting next to you acting normal. He may have a business card, pictures of his kids, and a firm handshake. He has learned to adapt to his environment and blends in to a blues audience like a J.C. Penny’s clerk at a banality convention. It takes a seasoned pro to spot him, like in the movie, Ghostbusters.
Now the scariest thing about this guy is that he doesn’t realize he is the monster every band fears. Not a behemoth, Cyclops, type monster with fire-breath and claws, but one of those goofy, little, green, wiggly, types that irritate the hell out of you. They don’t know they are so dreaded because they are immersed to their little green gills in self-deception. They look in the mirror and see one “swell guy.”
Now here comes the part that should send shivers down the backs of some of you reading this column: you may be that guy, or could become him. Not even your wife knows who you really are, in fact she may be a collusionist monster who helps you scare, haunt, and instill heebee jeebees in blues bands. Even worse is that she may be a true believer and not self-deceived like you are. This can lead her to become a zealot for your cause and to be deeply offended by those who lack her vision, namely the poor band she has chosen to haunt.
It begins like this: from the stage I notice a gleam in her eye, slightly brighter than the intensity in the eye of the monster. She is hopeful, he is serious. They are seemingly deep into the music and applaud vigorously at the end of each solo and song. The applause is a faade, needed to ingratiate the monster with the band. In reality the monster cares almost nothing about any band. The monster has a mission.
Alcohol fuels him and gets his sugar high going. He feels brave now. Delusions of grandeur pump through his visionary faculties in a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria. Mr. Hyde is bulging out of his festival T-shirt and we have very little time to trigger our band’s defenses.
Then it happens. The wife makes the initial approach and does a slight genuflection at the stage as though approaching a high priest or a statue of the crucifix. Her next words are slurred slightly from three or four vodka tonics: “yougizergreat.” Of course we know that she wouldn’t know a great band from a band of pigeons shitting on a gargoyle.
Now we already know that the monster plays a musical instrument or sings. We’re about to find out which: “Hey Carl, you play a great harp.”
So it’s the harp her husband plays. I wonder if he plays a “great harp” or just whatever’s on sale like I buy. Here it comes: “My husband plays a great harp too.”
It’s a pet peeve of mine that people can’t think of any compliment more discriminating than “great.” I think of God as being great, and in the mundane, guys like Alexander the, and Muhammad Ali, and the Wizard of Oz, but not her husband for some reason, maybe it’s the pretzel salt stuck on the corners of his mouth, I don’t know.
Now in their world, at this moment I would say to her: “No kidding! Gosh, do you think he’d come up and sit-in with us? I’m sure the fans would love it and maybe I could learn something from him.” But it’s not their world, it’s just sober reality that stares back at her and says nothing. If it was my world, a giant cookoo clock would strike twelve and a six-foot, two-hundred pound cookoo bird would emerge and start banging her and her husband over the head with a wooden hammer the size of a roto-tiller.
After a moment of silence, she continues: “If you’d like, I could get him to come up and sit-in a few songs with you? He’s played with all the greats, like Albert Collins.”
I fell for that once: the old Albert Collins name dropping ploy. If that guy had really sat in with Albert Collins, the band would have shot him and tossed his body in the dumpster that holds the deep fry grease.
Actually, every band has to learn the hard way. At first they try to be nice and let the guy sit-in. It took me years to harden my heart to the block of lead that it is now. They finally started bribing me. One guy in Nebraska offered to let the band have a peek at his wife’s breasts. They were huge-shade-makers. Third world countries should hire her to suckle their starving masses. This gal was Gaea, Mother Earth personified. Later on when one of our band members was seriously injured in a car accident, the guy sent photos of his wife’s breasts to help in the recovery. I hope to be filleted and eaten by cannibals if he didn’t.
Another guy offered us a hundred dollars per song if we let him sit in. We took two hundred dollars worth of his harp playing. It was so bad the audience started taking up a collection so we would give him his money back and get him off the stage.
We could endure one song from some of these guys, but getting them off the stage is often harder than getting your neighbor’s cat to quit making deposits in your kid’s sandbox. We resorted to taking an early break to get one guy off and he stayed onstage during the entire break fussing with his amp knobs.
Not all of these guys are clever enough to appear incognito. One guy in Denver dresses up in Stevie Ray’s guitar-slinger outfit and walks in with his guitar case in one hand and amp in the other. He even changed his last name to “Blue.” There is no doubt what he wants.
A truck driver from Illinois who shows up all over the country, wears an open shirt with a giant harmonica tattooed on his chest. A sax player from Montana wears a long black trench coat and keeps his saxophone under it.
But those are guys without wives or diehard girlfriends. The ladies serve as emissaries using sweet, sexy, charm to disarm the band. But after being turned down two or three different ways by the band, the wife resorts to pleading and begging. She will actually fold her hands like a supplicant and make tears pop out of her eyes: “Please let him sit in. He’s so good. Everybody will love him. He has a fifty-foot cord so he can leave the stage during Mustang Sally and get down with the audience in the chorus. Puuuleeeeeeese?”
Now, I have learned from having seen this hundreds of times, that the next stage after pleading and begging, is cursing and screaming. What started out with genuflection is now going to be genuine flecks of spit flying from her horrid tongue like pigmy darts. “YOUGIZESUCK!” She says from a mouth hissing and snarling like that of a viper with its tail being stepped on. “My husband is ten times the musicians you are. We’re never coming to see you again and we’re telling all our friends.”
The husband, who realizes he has been found out and turned down, stands up in the audience and gives us the finger. The monster’s friends who have been duped into coming to hear him play, are bewildered at the transformation, but they leave with their friends out of neighborly allegiance, embarrassed and crestfallen.
Despite the ugly scene, we in the band are happy with our position. It is much better than having this guy onstage sweating nervously and stomping all over the vocals and guitar solos while his wife is popping flashbulbs and asking us to get out of the way.
From what primordial soup do these personalities ferment into the volatile human cocktails they have become? I had one guy at the King Biscuit Blues festival in 1997, ask to play with us on the main stage. Now we had given up our day jobs, invested our savings, written original songs, recorded CDs, traveled together in most states and many countries, gotten tight over years of gigs, left wives and girlfriends, sacrificed money and security, slept in the van and on the floors of strangers, and overall adapted to a life of paucity, highways, and mechanical breakdowns, just to get an opportunity like the King Biscuit Blues Festival. This guy thinks we should do all that just so he can walk up on stage stand in the spotlight while we support and applaud him. Doesn’t he think the festival director might want a say in this? How about our fans? The torque and twist on these kinds of egos always frightens me a little. That particular guy, after being turned down, chose to stand in front of the stage during our performance, pointing his finger at me and laughing. This is why I call them little, green, wiggly, monsters.
I think this whole mentality might be the result of Karaoke bars. It has bred a mutated form of musician who craves his moment in the sun like a hallucinogenic drug. In Karoke one never learns how to play with a band. He doesn’t understand the dynamics and arrangements and professional courtesies. He only sees a vision of an audience applauding and cheering.
Don’t be that guy.
If you suspect that maybe you are that guy, like if you play a harmonica in the audience while the band is performing, here is a rule of thumb to help save you from embarrassment and mental warp: if you are truly good at your instrument to the degree that the band would be made better by your presence, they will ask you to sit in. It is that simple.
How does the band know if you are that good? Because you have been in other bands or attend jam nights where the whole object is to sit-in. If they don’t ask you it is most likely because they don’t want you. Now if you can just convince your wife.
Posted by Carl