Wednesday August 2nd, 2000 @ 8:55 PM
They kissed her hand. One by one, a cowboy, two college kids, an old hippie, a New York tourist–and the line was long behind them. In the background people applauded in the rain. No one left. All beheld her in astonished admiration. Two girls genuflected as they caught her eye. The diverse gathering had formed one mind, one focus, one emotion. I looked on in disbelief.
Here was an elderly black lady in a cowboy town on the high lonesome Laramie Valley, during its rodeo days. She stood on a flat bed trailer parked on the street facing the toughest bar in the state: the Buckhorn. She had arrived only hours before after riding all night from Oklahoma with her faithful friend, Doc Metcalf. They had staggered out of his pick-up wearing weightlifting belts for their worn out lumbars.
After a short nap, Dorothy Ellis, known as “Miss Blues,” marched down the street from her motel and took the stage before a wild crowd of revelers, and simply proceeded to stop them cold, mesmerize them, and leave them impaled on her piercing vocal tone. With her might and her charm she became thunder and rainbow, so whom she didn’t dazzle she tantalized.
Those who have seen her do this, know my words are true; those who haven’t need to make a pilgrimage to wherever this lady is performing and behold.
The fascinating Texas shouter hadn’t come a thousand miles just to sing a few songs in the rain, she had come to record her first CD after fifty-four years of singing the blues professionally. As we know, sometimes life is not fair, and sometimes it is ridiculously unfair. With all the twits and nincompoops we hear squeaking and squawking on MTV with their record labels printed so proudly in the corner; this captivating and dynamic woman wandered in recording wilderness fourteen years longer than the ancient Hebrews in Sinai.
Now Laramie, Wyoming, hardly looks like the promised land, but it is the home of Crying Tone Records and the blistering blues band, Blinddog Smokin’. It was the blistering quality that drew Miss Blues to Blinddog as a kindred spirit seeking a home–because this woman likes Tabasco on her blues.
She had shunned invitations to record elsewhere because as she put it: “They was gonna stick me with some tired old men, playin’ tired old blues…” She knew Blinddog Smokin’ would start up like a struck match– but we didn’t.
When she had positioned herself before the recording microphone and explained her first song, the guitarist, Jason “12 fingers” Coomes, plodded into an acoustic progression and the drums sauntered in behind him. “Chicago” Chuck Gullens peered at Miss Blues through his question marked face wondering if he was going too fast.
After a few bars the grand lady stopped suddenly and formed an awful face full of dismay, “What in the world are you guys doing?” She screamed. “You worse than the tired old men. Just because I’m a lady don’t mean I want you to play gentle and slow. This ain’t no funeral. I want the Blinddogs. I want you to play Blinddog style. Get some electric guitars and make ‘em scream. I want some energy. I want it now.”
Well, ladies and gentlemen, this woman weighs two hundred and thirty pounds and is damned near as tall as my six foot one. Her voice sounded like a locomotive coming through a tunnel and we sat up straight and begin’ “yes ma’aming” like orphans in a Charles Dickens novel.
From that galvanic moment on, the basement studio was smokin’. Miss Blues likes it hot. “I want music that will sell CDs…” She announced between songs. I believe her CD is going to do exactly that.
She wrote several original songs. Slow blues that glow like embers at midnight. Songs from her rugged past. Songs where one can feel the pathos in her tone like you feel the chill of a north wind. Songs like “Sinkin’, Sinkin’, Sinkin’, where the despair of a young and abandoned mother torque’s your soul like a spiritual wrench until it draws out the compassion that lies so often dormant in human languor.
We all begin to feel an atmosphere of reverence around this woman. We approached each song as though it were lain upon the altar. Metaphorically we were in a state of worship. She taught us. She told us to listen to the words, listen to her voice, and then let our own vision come out in the instruments. No longer were we playing notes, we were telling a story–her story. The guitarists forgot their practiced licks and begin to mirror her voice, her soul, her words. If she sang of a mountain stream, then so did each instrument, and soon she was painting pictures with song and we were her brushes and paint, and the black electric recording boxes stacked against the wall with their myriad and dancing colored lights were her canvas.
An odd orchestra it was: an old black woman; a young black drummer; a guitarist of eighteen years, dubbed “The Kid;” a young white bassist nick-named “Junior” from the yuppie town of Boulder, Colorado; a stoic and stern master of guitar who also served as technician; and me, the raconteur philosopher. We had nothing in common, except our gathered souls. In that almost eerie atmosphere of concentration, everything, all that one is, all that one can be, lines up into a single purpose and anything outside that purpose disappears. It is not something you can walk into a store and buy. Neither is it something that can be dictated or decreed.
By contrast, time between songs was filled with joviality and outrageous banter. Some of this was captured on tape and will be included on the final CD release. It is this buoyancy and vivacity and merriment that make Miss Blues profoundly lovable, despite how intimidating her stage persona can be. This is a woman who loves to laugh and has every reason to be bitter instead. I think she loves herself and truly gets a kick out of Miss Blues. Because of that everybody else finds it easy to love her too. I am reminded of a quote from William Makepeace Thackeray who wrote: The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
The faces that look back at Miss Blues are happy faces because hers is happy. They are inspired faces as well, and faces that reflect deep feeling. They are faces revealing certain expression perhaps for the first time because they have never looked into a face like that of Miss Blues. I lament that more people can’t participate in her reflection, or that those of us who do, can’t do it more. The world needs that. Too often we look into faces reflecting self-pity and self-loathing, anger and angst.
When I reminisce about those four July days we spent recording with this beautiful old Texas Shouter, and I hear the dozen songs we made together with her fire and our smoke, I think of another beloved quotation I found years ago by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The days come and go and they say nothing, and if you do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Dorothy Ellis has been a gift each day in many peoples lives for over fifty-four years of professional singing, yet she grew old having never made a record of her own. If Blinddog Smokin’ does nothing else with our precious time on this mysterious earth than to make sure she is not carried silently away, I will know we have not lived in vain.
Look for Miss Blues’ first CD on the Crying Tone Record Label sometime around the end of November. Blinddog Smokin’ will be appearing with her at varied times and locals in Oklahoma and Texas this fall and winter.
Posted by Carl
Tuesday April 11th, 2000 @ 8:48 PM
A curious activity dancing is. What is it? Moving one’s body to music would be the obvious definition, but what is our motivation for this peculiar motion? Foreplay perhaps? Ego gratification maybe? Resolving something psychologically like crawling does for a baby?
It does seem to be an innate response to music or a rhythmic beat. I’ve seen a toddler standing on a street corner sucking his thumb, hear the startup of our band and immediately get big-eyed and begin to bounce up and down. This little bounce is the universal first dance. I’ve seen these wee humans do the same dance in Turkey and Spain and Fiji.
For some humans, that is as good as they ever get. At forty they are still doing that same little bounce, only it ceased being cute when they were six, and won’t resume being cute until they are seventy-six–the ages where self-awareness seems to be absent. In-between those ages people seem to need alcohol to dance. In ninety percent of the places we play, no one dances the first set. Whoever drinks the fastest will start off sometime in the second set and that gives a few more couples the courage to display their moves. By the third set the floor is usually full and by the end of the evening these same once timid and conservative humans are writhing around on the floor doing “the worm” and “high fiving” the band.
I’ve often wondered at this social phenomenon. Why do people need drink to dance? I think perhaps, it is tied to sexual attractiveness. Dancing is a sexual icebreaker among other things, and we often judge each other’s sex appeal by how we appear and move on the floor and by the confidence we display. The last thing we want to do is to look stupid when everyone is watching. And they do watch. I can be in the midst of the most inspiring harmonica solo I’ve ever played, and if the two most dorky looking hacks in the bar get up and start dancing, I immediately lose my entire audience. Every eye will settle on the uncoordinated bumbling and shuffling of the dancers.
Of course drinking doesn’t make anyone appear less stupid on the dance floor, but it causes a state of vision warp where the picture of themselves in their heads is dramatically different from what the audience is actually seeing. It is sometimes called the: I am a sex machine syndrome. Ironically, if the dancing partner is in the same vision warp, then indeed you are a sex machine, whether reality agrees or not.
However, this is often a one sided dance. Some poor bastard who is divorced and lonely and horny as a satyr, has left a half an hour early from the machine shop to take a shower and wash the grime from his knuckles; then dons his only pressed shirt and puts on half a bottle of Brute aftershave. Now this guy hasn’t danced since he and his first wife were learning the shoddish from his Swedish grandmother at the VASA lodge when they were in sixth grade.
He spies a lady across the room who had to lay down on the bed to get her jeans buttoned, and is wearing enough makeup to spackle a Quonset hut. She is wiggling her torso to the music with a look on her face that announces: “To get anywhere with me boys, you have to ask me to dance.” He sees several other guys with freshly washed knuckles looking at her and reading the same message. He knows he has to act fast. He has left the security of his blue shirt that says “Ed” over the pocket and the comforting sounds of his drill press. His big feet don’t have their roomy steel-toed boots about them and are instead wedged into fake ostrich cowboy boots he bought at a truck stop for thirty-nine bucks.
He frantically runs through his memory for some encouragement and remembers a half-time speech by his high school football coach: “you’ll never be a real man if you can’t get the ball over the goal.” He puffs out his chest and it starts across the floor without his feet, which suddenly seem to have big wet suction cups attached to them. But he does it because he has been laid only once since his divorce. That was to his ex-wife during reconciliation, where, in the heat of passion she confessed to all the men she’d slept with in the last two months, including his poker buddy, Cletis, who wears a prosthesis from the Viet Nam war.
Immediately upon accepting his offer to dance, the woman, an exhibitionist who believes she is an “old soul” re-incarnated seven times starting with Cleopatra, bops unto the floor and begins to dance with herself while making faces of sexual ecstasy exaggerated in glossy lipstick.
The poor bastard awkwardly follows her around trying to place himself somewhere in her line of vision. He feels his neck burning and his face flushing and he decides he ought to start smoking again. He becomes aware of his big hands hanging there wondering what to do. They seem to grow larger and ungainly like Gooney bird wings. The suction cups are getting bigger and he feels worse than he did when his parents had him circumcised at age thirteen. He knows that the other guys with the washed knuckles are laughing at him. The song seems to go on forever as the world shifts into slow motion. He hates the band. “They’re doing this on purpose,” he accuses in the muddle that was once his mind. Meantime, Cleopatra is beaming and thrashing about like a porpoise doing a tail dance over the water at Sea World. The conglomerate gaze of eyes from the crowd caresses her fanny like a warm breeze and she glows with her moment in the sun.
He’ll get his revenge if eventually he wins the prize and weds the bonny lass, because she’ll never get to dance again once he has a ring on her finger. But for now, the poor bastard is in hell, and she is Satan, and the band is a gang of demons and the smirking audience members are the flames licking at his aching feet.
Some girls don’t wait around for the poor bastard to make his move, they just dance together. They like this because it allows them to look good and feel good without having to worry about the advances of the satyr. They don’t have to exchange astrological signs and listen to the male lie about his interest in whatever it is they like: “Re-incarnation? Really, I love re-incarnation! I had a dog once that I swear was my grandmother Gertrude, same look in its eye, same little fuzzy upper lip…”
The girls seldom get to keep their sorority untarnished from leg-hiking males for long, there is always the guy who upon seeing two or three girls dancing, decides to be their savior and come hopping to the rescue. He gets right in the middle and tries to copy whatever dance it is they are doing. He smiles and winks and shoots his thumb and index finger like a gun at his buddies. He’s the guy with the big sweat circles under the arms of his silk shirt and whose e-mail address is “hip_shakin_daddy.”
Hip Shakin’ Daddy is a wannabe leg humper. If one of the girls so much as looks at him he’ll run right over and hump their leg, and if she doesn’t hit him across the lips with a can of mace, he’ll move right around behind her for some prolonged and serious humping.
I’m amazed at how many people think humping is dancing. I like to think that humans dance and dogs hump. Humans are piss poor humpers compared to dogs. I had a Lab named Tigger who could hump both your legs in alternate strokes while holding one paw in the air like a dandy, or so it seemed. But accomplished or not, people love to hump. I’ve seen bars where an invitation to dance was an invitation to hump. Now think about it–isn’t that a bizaare Western World social oddity? Can you imagine doing this anywhere other than at a bar? Picture yourself at Safeway in the beans and tomatoes aisle, when an otherwise self-respecting and nicely dressed stranger comes over to you and says, “Hi there, would you like me to hump your leg for about five minutes?” Spectators would be aghast at your humping and the store manager would probably try to separate the happy couple with the hose he was using to wash the fresh veggies.
I’ve seen a lot of aberrant and humorous departures from our Judeo-Christian culture on the dance floor from my perch above on the stage. I saw a guy at the Grand Targhee ski area do “the lizard.” He squatted precariously on the edge of a chair, holding his arms tight in to his body making hooked three-finger reptile hands, while flicking his tongue and darting his head. Then he leaped high into the air, came down into a stretched out slide and wriggled rapidly all about the room like a giant iguana, dragging his feet, pulling himself forward with his hands. He never left his lizard persona as he scared woman up onto their chairs and slithered about the room faster than a centipede.
There isn’t a dance a human being can achieve anatomically that I haven’t witnessed in our miles around the globe, but the biggest irony came one time in Lander, Wyoming, in a tiny bar. I saw a voluptuous young female enter the room in wearing yellow flowered pedal pushers. That’s the name we used to call very tight pants that came down to mid calf. Her parts oscillated nicely as she moved in the jiggling flower garden and every eye sought the flowers like the flight paths of so many bees. The males begin to drool and the females looked at the flowers to see why their men had suddenly dropped out of what had been a cogent conversation.
This girl had come to dance and dance she did. She was a hoochie coochie style dancer like Charo of eighties Vegas fame. She had a female partner who was dressed in black and wasn’t quite as uninhibited. These two got the wave started and soon the floor was full of dancers, with the men trying to stare at the bopping butt in the yellow flowers, while their women kept trying to dance between the flower child and their mates.
Suddenly I was overcome with nausea and the urge to gag rose in my throat. A gaseous invasion of my sinuses had left me weak-kneed. It was so bad that I seemed to be viewing the audience through hallucinogenic waves like a mirage on the desert. I looked around at the band members to see if any of them was concealing a look of guilt. All were stoic. Obviously they were either good actors or the odor hadn’t reached them yet. But it did. Jason’s eyes came open like he’d been goosed by a python. Chuck drew his head back and flinched like a Catholic Nun had slapped his hands with a ruler. We looked at each other and begin to make the kind of wrinkled faces human beings can only make when something smells bad.
I begin to look around the dance floor for the culprit who I intended to shoot in the face with a seventeenth century Blunderbuss. I glanced about for the usual suspects, like some 300 lb. truck driver with a ship tattooed on his chest, sporting six inches of plumbers crack, an Elvis hairdo, wolfing down a jalopeno Chimichanga, preparing to blast the vinyl off his bar stool.
This was some bad gas folks. This could fumigate cockroaches hiding behind the quarter rounds. I could picture them there writhing on their backs kicking their greasy little legs. I pictured my socks curling down around my ankles. I refused to take my harmonica solo where air intake is voluminous.
I figured if he knew about it, Saddam Hussein would recruit this bad motherfucker to ride around on a camouflaged trailer like a scud missile. Somebody had turned a food processing tube into a bazooka. A scud missile often misses its target, but this poison gas would have the Kurds waving white flags all along the Iraqi border.
I asked Chuck, “Where is Dr. Kevorkian when you need him?” Some priest should have entered with an iron cross and a whip of rosary beads to force a confession. Not a sissy priest, but a crazed monk with a sour stomach and a tooth ache–a throwback to the inquisition who would administer a forty-five minute ass whipping for penance. I’m not sure God Almighty in all his mercy could forgive such an unmitigated and unconscionable olfactory assault. If this wasn’t sin, then the Pope is a Mormon penguin visiting door to door on the south pole.
Whoever it was would not give up the attack. Finally the dance floor began to clear and to my horror only the two girls were left. I called a break. They came to talk to me. Which one was it? Another wave boiled up to the surface from its cauldron and I had had it. I knew one of the girls was guilty and the other one thought it was me. Now I’m as gracious as the next guy, but I would be damned if I was going to be a martyr for this broad’s cause. I spoke up, and in one precious breath said, “You girls are going to have to step outside and one of you needs to confess to the other because if you cut loose one more time you’re going to kill me.”
There it was. The flowered pedal-pusher girl frantically called the other one outside in embarrassment. “Oh no, not the flower of humanity,” I thought. “Whatever happened to sugar and spice and everything nice?” I was dismayed and disillusioned. Why couldn’t it have been the Elvis trucker? The world was not running in its greased tracks, something was out of kilter. Whatever cook fed that poor girl needed to be put in the town stocks where every male who ever fantasized about the purity and loveliness and inviolable nature of ladyhood could walk by each day for a week and slap this nasty dude’s face.
Oh, the dance floor! What extremes of human nature are displayed there! For myself, I like the symbolism of a smooth transfer from normal person to dancing person. It is symbolic of the changing faces of mankind in our many roles. To just jump out of character violates the chameleon in us–the multi-faceted wonder that is a human being. I both hate yet enjoy when a person stands pensively on the sidelines watching the band, then upon entering the dance floor, walks stiffly to the center and suddenly turns into a flopping Albatross from bizarro world. It never ceases to make me smile or break out into laughter.
I like approaches, cool approaches. So cool that imperceptibly the human transforms into dancer and back again to human so that we the onlooker can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. This is a practiced art. A subtle snapping of the fingers, a slight facial gesture, a bounce emerging in the step and then–there they are, dancing, and nobody knew how they got that way.
I once saw a couple who never left the dance floor. They seemed to have always been there. The man was an old gray cowboy wearing an even older grayer hat with a curled up brim. His pants were several inches too short and his worn socks had fallen. He had no expression on his face. Neither did she, an Indian lady near his age, who was probably half African-American. She had on a dress that went out of style with Dixie cups that had pictures on the lids. She sported a hat with a black net veil pulled up over her forehead. They gently held each others finger tips and swayed back and forth to the music. Next to them a lady lay on the floor wiggling, wriggling, and giggling, looking up at her partner who just stood there dumbfounded.
The old couple never changed their dance. If the beat sped up they moved in half-time. Between songs they just stood there holding finger tips. A strange ritual to be sure, but I leaned forward and studied them, and found meaning in their dance. Past experiences had scarred these two human beings and left them afraid and confused and lonely–very lonely. I thought about us all, riding this tiny planet in the gargantuan dark and quiet universe. We the people, so short-lived and fragile, so easily vain, yet so quickly desperate. Facing old age and regret, frailty and illness, and the mysteries after death, all by oneself, is enough to make you insane. And, indeed these two pitiable creatures were crazy.
The dance was in Evanston, Wyoming, at the State Mental Hospital–for the residents there. For these two forgotten people, life had slowly eliminated those who had loved them and touched them. Alone and bewildered in a foreign place they had never intended to be, they reached out to each other when they heard the music and begin to dance their tiny step. Somewhere in the strange confusion, or dormancy, or damaged cognizance of their minds, a comfort crept. A minute transference of love that said to the other, “I understand…”
I sat on a folding chair in the shadows of the old gymnasium and stared at this couple and pondered, lump in throat, about the strength that neither dancer had for himself, yet could somehow give the other. The lines etched into their faces spoke to me of tragedy, sorrow, defeat, and fear, but the countenance that glowed so delicately through, unveiled the joy that warmed their hearts and mine like so many fading embers in a hearth long abandoned. They were still dancing when I left. It was the sanest activity I’d seen on the dance floor in many months and left me heartened that perhaps there is hope for us yet.
Posted by Carl
Monday April 10th, 2000 @ 8:46 PM
“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