preparation vs. impulse

By Robbie on September 14, 2011

Now in the second year of weekly shows with constantly shifting casts and repertoires, I've been getting more into this idea of quality performance arising from less fervent preparation. The idea has been impressing me simply because some of my best group performances, I couldn't help noticing, were some of the most minimally rehearsed, and vice-versa. For last Monday's show there were 18 Everly Brothers songs to learn. Sounds like a good deal of work, and it was, as far as learning lyrics to tunes I didn't know well, which was about half of them. But when we got to the club a couple hours ahead to run through the set, I was determined in my mind not to go over every single song, and not to run all the ones we did go through from top to bottom. This is fatiguing overkill on a day-of rehearsal; if you take a couple hours to run down every moment of the show, then soundcheck, and take a break to change clothes and write a set list, by the time you come back downstairs to start the show you're already a little bored with the music, compared to your attitude when you got there. Probably your ears are slightly burned out too, and often as not you're hungry. Better to let some mystery in, and meet it on the spot with fresh feeling.

I figured I could take the approach of minimal preparation only so far with the Everlys' highly organized music. Most of their flagship songs, as you'll notice, fade out, and what's more, fade out on non-resolving chord progressions. "Bird Dog," for example, has verses that begin and end with a I-IV-bVII-V acoustic guitar signature; on "Poor Jenny" it's I-IV (x3) I-V; and so forth. How to end these songs in a live group performance, at least if you want everyone to end at the same time, isn't something that will work itself out naturally and cleanly. So, at the runthrough, Steve Frisbie and I had endings worked out that we practiced and everyone duly charted or made a mental note. I had also noted which songs I thought would work best with solos extending the recorded arrangements and which would be best sung straight through. (Again, you'll notice on the records, especially, the Cadence records, that there's very little soloing or improvising going on.) So in the event, we ended up running almost everything, maybe half the songs from top to bottom and sections of most of the others, leaving only a couple virgins.

The show went well, but I don't think it went well because of the indispensability and extent of the planning. A couple of songs for which we had cute little worked-out endings ended differently than planned, which was fine. One or two places I had meant to stick a solo I blanked on and sang straight into the second bridge, and that was fine. As we played I was thinking, "What kind of bossy nerd makes a list of songs which will feature a solo and then practices them, for that reason, with the band? As opposed to stepping back from the mike and nodding at someone?" Crazy. For one thing, picturing it in your mind and on paper in advance is never quite as accurate as responding in real time to the information in your ears. For another, why detract from everyone's fun? The fun is the first time. There has been nothing, then there is something; and if all the players are in the same aesthetic frame and listening to each other, there's an exquisite balance that comes when the relaxation of manifest skill meets the high-wire giddiness of the unknown.

If instinct trumps preparation, it still can't provide the positive benefits of a musical runthrough; it's the inadequacy of the mental picture that of course makes rehearsing necessary to begin with. Sitting alone in a room with your imagination, you can be pretty sure what just won't work. Once the band starts playing, there's no question. Sometimes half the band will have one take on a tune and the other half another, or one guy has a weak grasp of the feel, or the tune just isn't suited to the cast...these song-ruining shortcomings are pretty inscrutable, impossible to predict in full, and invisible right up to the moment when the song starts. So you run the songs to know where the coiled serpents lie. You trade overall perfect freshness for disaster aversion, I guess.

A friend of mine did a show one time with a big-name drummer, who had just three rules for any gig he accepted: no advance listening to the material, no rehearsing, and no count-offs. The situations in which this extreme approach would work for me are pretty few. I like, as a listener, to hear solid evidence of orderliness, to feel the impact of a group hitting accents together, to revel in the pleasure of symmetry and purposeful design, in music as in nature only more so. So the design and the designer are wanted, but it looks to me like one of the designer's most important functions is to know when to step back and let nature take its course, throwing the blueprint to the wind if need be. Cast it correctly, prepare it according to your wont and its needs, rehearse it somewhat. A good musician who's less than fully prepared tends to play better than a good musician who is scrupulously prepared and hungry. Also, a band that is somewhat unfamiliar with the material it's about to play is more on the same footing as its audience: a nice equality.