There aren’t many musicians who’ve missed out on the phenomenon of playing to a place so empty they get acquainted with the lint beneath the chairs. As a longtime player in bands, I’ve gotten up close and personal with such lint more than once.
Early on in my musical adventuring, such occasions felt like failure. We hadn’t put up enough flyers, we didn’t have enough fanatical friends, or maybe we’d chosen a poor venue. I’ve played a cafe where no one would turn off the jukebox, a place where bands set up in an annex to the main bar that archaeologists probably still haven’t discovered, even a gymnasium where someone turned off the lights to save on electricity. In our own fair Valley, I was once sent home on a blizzardy night so the bar wouldn’t have to pay anyone to run the soundboard.
These are the times that try men’s souls. To step with leaden tread upon a creaking stage to play to, say, a cross-eyed drunk, a bartender and one embarrassed friend can be a daunting task. The introspective often turn neurotic, the talented to fumbling messes. Yet a curious thing sometimes happens instead.
When I recently showed up to play swing tunes at a usually high-traffic Valley venue along with two musical friends with whom I hadn’t played out in a long time, I felt that mysterious vacuum force in the air, the one that suddenly draws people to every place except right there, right then. It’s an ineffable force that’s almost enough to make the supernatural seem plausible. This time that malevolent void manifested in other ways: my guitar amp quit producing sound, even though the power switch glowed (bad luck, I thought—yet the amp sprang to life afterward and still works fine).
I remembered empty gigs long past, and that produced an undeniable twitchiness. But this time, things were different. When you’re a greenhorn in the gigging world, empty gigs feel like calamity. That’s usually because dreams of stadiums full of fans and legions of album buyers seem to recede yet farther away. “Making it” is, after all, why most people drag 85 pounds of vacuum tube amp and several instruments out of the basement over and over.
A few hundred gigs after my first, it’s safe to say that things feel different. Gigging isn’t a means to an end; it is its own sublime convergence of sorts. That particular day saw the reconvening of players who hadn’t sat down together for a few tunes in several years. Only two of us had rehearsed, since the setting was laid back, the songs familiar. The stakes weren’t low, they were nonexistent. We didn’t have dreams of stadiums, just a notion that playing together in front of an audience again would be fun.
Maybe it’s a side effect of playing for years, but most every gig feels like some sort of participatory entertainment instead of a search for glory. The adulation of crowds, I’ve realized, is optional.
Maybe I was the only one feeling that way as we plugged in to play (on a borrowed amp, in my case), but I don’t think so. No one of the three of us seemed anything but eager to make some noise, to hear it echo off walls unimpeded by crowds.
What followed was remarkable: probably the best sound the three of us had ever made together. Everything felt freed from its usual constraints. Things were far from perfect, but every so often we found a handy lock-step in which experimentation created surprising textures and grins were passed around as readily as choruses.
It’s for moments like those that I seek out playing shows anymore, moments that only arrive when you’ve put on your Sunday best, stretched out a new set of strings and hauled the gear. It’s somehow different than basement rehearsing, even if no one shows up to listen.
Playing gigs creates unique moments of improvisation, moments of musical alignment and creation that can only be hoped for, never planned for. The instant of cruising along a wave of stand-up bass and swinging guitar and responding in kind is a door open to possibility. That’s true no matter who’s listening, or even if no one is listening.
That day, we kept looking for those possibilities, playing to a handful of people well past our planned ending time, into a second hour and a third. We had a great time, and it turned out that was what really mattered.
Maybe we’ll do it again soon, but truth be told, I’m not sure I want to tell anyone when and where.
