music – handkerchief tied to stick

Have you achieved any little dreams lately?

The dream, for me, for a long time now, has been to live loop and then kick acoustic drums to accompany myself. It’s a humble dream, I know, but lord is it hard to play loud music when you live downtown. So when my mother told me she wanted some live entertainment for a gathering at the lake, I said of course. What I did not account for was setting it all up: My god that shit is heavy. The amps, guitars, keyboard, pedalboard, cables, table, extension cords, and the freaking drums themselves, are SO HEAVY. But after grunting and swearing and sweating my way through the morning, I was finally all set up on the dock, overlooking the lake. Then I picked up the guitar, switched on the amps, and started making stuff.

To be clear I was not a particularly engaging entertainer. I never once spoke to the crowd, never explained what I was doing, or why — I just sat there, mostly with my back to them, and listened and played, and listened, and tweaked, and played. This isn’t unusual: the vast majority of the time I sit down to make music it’s improvisation. I have no plan. I know it’s a defense mechanism, a pre-emptive emotional hedge, but my hope is that if I do the work, get seriously stuck in, block out the noise, the pressure of performing live, the expectations from both myself and the audience, something interesting will happen. Failure is absolutely on the table, every time, and the specter of failure is an integral part of the experience for me. I might sit down to play and just produce crap — formulaic, unimaginative, derivative crap. Don’t tell anyone, but it happens.

Despite my not explaining this to anyone there, oldmanboy is a performance about the creative process. It could have gone wrong, and those poor folks, eating their appetizers, sipping their drinks, would have had no indication that sometimes it goes right. They would just think, oh there’s that guy who plays that kind of crappy music. And I wouldn’t really disagree. Anyone who makes things in volume makes crappy things. I just have to believe that when it really matters it will happen. And honestly? This day, there on the shore of Cayuga Lake, in full Ithaca summer, with the dream finally assembled and an audience at the ready, was fucking perfect. It was everything oldmanboy has been building towards from the first moment I clicked a loop pedal. I think it was Leonard Cohen who said that life is like a lit cigarette, and art is just the ash. Well, I have here for you the song from that day. It isn’t the thing itself, of course. The performance was the thing, making it live, in front of everyone — spending an afternoon with failure sitting right there, staring me in the face, was the thing.

But as far as ash goes?

I mean, it’s pretty good ash.