Last Tuesday I played what is, I guess, the first Natural Light show. Or live action. It's the name I have been using for a whole bunch of stuff. Mainly this blog, art stuff, and some music I've made / played during the last 9 month or so. After last Tuesday, I have derived the following statistic:
Number of good first shows: zero.
I played two cover songs. The first was WHY?'s "The Fall of Mr. Fifths" done as a capella rap sort of thing. Second was a cover of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's "Killers".
Mr. Fifths went fine. Killers did not.
The biggest difference is probably my own outlook on what I wanted to achieve vs. what I did. Both songs were things I wanted to do, and with the first I did what I wanted to do. I don't really care whether or not anyone watching/listening liked what they were hearing. It's not about that. It is about feeling like I was accomplishing what I set out to do: performing my arrangements of music that means a tremendous amount to me.
I really do get that there might be a disconnect playing such a heavy song when the show started with a Rebecca Black parody. But it's what I wanted to do. Whoever laughed, as if "I know your mom was your age when she had your brother" was a punchline, you are not my intended audience. For this performance, or for anything I will ever create or do in my life. You are not what bothers me. That I played so poorly does.
A lot of it comes down to rehearsing in conditions that were a lot different from the performance itself. Not even now being in front of lights and crowd that probably doesn't care about your music specifically. Things like standing at a keyboard instead of sitting at a piano, basically turning into a totally different instrument under my fingers. Having a drum machine on my right instead of on the left. Things I should have foreseen, thought about, and planned for and didn't.
There were problems with my ability to play a keyboard, sequence, and sing at the same time. And there were technical problems, like something with the drums sounding pretty shitty running through the amp I had to use last minute. And problems with the event itself, where coordinator was insanely rude and asked me, act 18 of 21, to only play one song for the sake of time roughly 50 seconds before I went on.
I was kind of mortified and devastated immediately after, and thanks extensively to my girlfriend, and thanks a small, surprising bit to some guy who came up to me in the parking lot afterward, felt a little better the next day.
Still, I think the experience is something important to come to terms with and talk about while it's still vaguely permeating my thoughts. I won't really get a chance to talk about a first show ever again, anyway.
I don't know when I'll ever do this again (or have the chance to), but I'm not writing it off as completely as I was when I walked off the stage. I have been writing a lot of new stuff (terribly, terribly fragmented new stuff). A semi relevant one:
to never fall into that trap
of a disappointing live act
songs becoming old and played lived less
wearing out not unlike i did sometime after the 12th grade
the run-on of ritualistic mass transit
the reason for this, the reason to consider language in...finite
and it felt infinite
as for what i did to deserve this
went to college, got nervous
I still think about this all a lot.
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