kenoir said:
the invisible and unspoken communication, drived me into watching them and stand by doing a lot of roadies work every time.
I tell ya, that's half the fun I get out of doing live sound ad/or roadie work with the bands that I do. It's not the lousy pay scale, or getting to listen to yet another cover of The Staple's "I'll Take You There" for the millionth time
.
It's in watching the band members do their thing. This includes everything from getting to watch my favorite guitar player's left-hand fingers do their magic up close to watching the interaction between the players and the real teamwork and "feel" that passes between them.
When you notice the drummer thow a unexpecued but purposeful slight lag or break into the beat and the bass player suddenly whips his head around to the drummer, gets a shit-eating grin on his face, and adjusts his style just slightly to match it - all within the space of a half a beat - and all of a sudden the band hits a subtly different groove that takes the performance to another level (one that unfortunately half the drunks in the audience will never even notice happened, but will notice enough to increase the applause at the end and wonder what happened), it's as beautiful to watch as a well-turned double play. Even a deaf person that could not hear the music would enjoy the visual performance and the professionalism.
Or when, as happened beautifully just last week with one of my bands, the guitar player breathes new life into a tired old cover. In this case it was Tom Petty's "American Girl". I never cared all that much for that song myself, and frankly, neither has the guitar player. Especially after hearing and playing it for the 3,742,998th time
. But when it cam time for the extended riffing towards the end of that song, Jimbo (the git player) was in the zone at that moment and gave a high-energy, extra-extended riff that left his '71 Strat smoking and the audience picking their jaws up off the floor at the end. It was a sight and sound to behold; absolutely beautiful.
But what was just as interesting in it's own way was watching and hearing the way the rest of the band reacted to it themselves as he was doing his thang. The drummer got that wicked grin on his face (well, actually they all did), and his energy level followed right along. He didn't play harder or louder or faster, he played with precision and control; but the "feel" of his playing picked up an energy and the style adjusted slightly to counterpoint the new riffing style properly. Meanwhile the bass player just slowly drifed stage left, over by the keyboardist, giving Jimbo plenty of room to work. The keyboard player looked like a kid at Christmas and the bass player, who is no slouch on the strings himself, just bore down on his bass and went into this private zone where it was just him and Jimbo in his mind, matching each other bar for bar, beat for beat like someone jumping in on a swing dance on the dance floor.
The great unwashed in the audience probably never even noticed any of this going on and never realized that the band had - despite having run that song into the ground - never played it like that before. They probably went home figuring they practiced it that way a million times. But the fact is that it was a performance of a lifetime for that band on that song - they possibly may never play it quite that good and almost certainly will never play it exactly that way again; it was an on-the-fly, seat of the pants, pedal to the metal, unpracticed performance.
For an improv performance to sound like it was practiced a million times is, I think, a pretty good indication of the importance of that teamwork and subliminal stage communication. And for those of us who catch and appreciate that "performance behind the performance", it's a glorious thing to watch. A feast for the eyes to go with the more obvious feast for the ears.
I suddenly find myself disappointed that I don't have a gig to work tonight...
G.