Pennsylvania Reflections

We just performed our second show last night, at Revolutionaries cafe in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.

You never quite know how a show will go. The best time I ever had playing show, when true rock and roll lightening leaped up in me and charged my soul, was many years ago in Cuyahoga Falls. I'll never forget how we all sat around beforehand fidgeting and feeling restless, wanting to go on stage. It was maybe our fourth show or so. Something about that show, the crowd, the stage, the end of any nervousness and really wanting to open up and explode, made it happen. It wasn't something anyone knew would happen. It wasn't even thought of. It was like spending years pushing a car around with the engine off, and then suddenly one day turning the key and the engine starting. It was another level no one could imagine. There we were were playing our first song, and something was seething and swirling in me: I felt hot and crazy and there was a perfect union of really believing in the music and feeling wild spiritual elation and being totally in position, and then just screaming and letting it loose: for an instant everything stopped and then the band, the crowd, the everything responded.

The stage is a sacred place. You only go up there if you are really going to do something. The stage has power and you can feel it even with the lights off and empty. It's a launching point. It's so important. It's where you share yourself. It's where the union begins, and the crowd is everything. That first moment, dead silent in time, of getting on stage under the lights, in slow motion, just a few steps, under the hot house lights, and the first instant of looking out at the crowd and you see those faces and you've seen them all night and you look at the faces and they are impassive and they are wanting and you are looking at each other and you are seeing the vulnerabilities and then you see what is inside you, what you are going to give to them and what they will give back to you. How much do you trust them? Do you love them like your own?

The goodness of the show is really a question. The question is: as a performer, how far are you willing to open up? Everything else is nothing. The sound is never perfect, the monitor mix always skewed, the guitars are always out of tune and either to loud or tooo quiet, the cords suddenly start crackling and popping, the amps go haywire... The only thing you can really count on is the spirit in you and what you intend to give.

At Revolutionaries Cafe we were playing Freefall and I was singing and all of a sudden someone started clapping. The clapping interested me and I wondered what had impelled the man to do that. A word? Some note or chord he liked? The spirit of the piece? I didn't ask. But those folks sat right in front of my amp practically, which must have been slightly hair-raising at times. I was glad they were there and they drank in every note and word. Those upturned faces and the implicit promise.