For Bud
Bud Buckley recently asked me about "how you deal with that feeling that comes too much later when you wished your performance went another way."
I'm not sure what to think about the question. Does he want to know how I feel when I do a show and bomb? Maybe he's wondering how I feel when, in retrospect, I think of something funnier or "better" than I said on stage at a certain moment.
Perhaps the question has to do with my thoughts about a bad show. That is to say, is a bad show a result of a bad performance or a bad audience?
Maybe he was just wondering what I go through when there's a bad show in general.
There is a possibility that Bud wants to know if I feel like a hack doing a standard act that I've been doing for 20 years when I could be making attempts at being ground-breaking or amazingly original.
Hell, he could be asking if I even give a crap about my shows since I realized so many years ago that I'm too lazy and now too old to ever be rich and/or famous.
Bud, I ask you this...huh?
Let me know what your feelings are like and I'll return in kind.
3 Comments:
Andy, I was referring, not so publicly,I might add, to a fantastic show I did in NY that went perfectly. The thought came to me afterward that everything else would be a let down after that. Including listening to my own CD. I wished at that point I had done a live CD as opposed to a studio mix. But i since have learned to use the image of that show to improve my performance in all these lesser shows I'm doing now. So I answered my own question. My producer, Mark Zampella told me during a recording session that a published CD is like a tattoo. You can look at it years later like a thing you're stuck with, or you can look at it as a momento of where you were at that time.
4:05 AM
Bud,
Sorry for making this so public. I hope this was not a problem. I try to talk about life as a performer often here and with my other writings and while I was trying to make a good post about your question it dawned on me that I'd no real idea what you were asking. LOL!
Reading your comment, I am reminded of something I heard David Byrne say while promoting the Talking Heads film & album, "Stop Making Sense".
He basically said that if life were perfect all musical artists would take a year or two to perform all the songs for a new album before ever recording a thing. That way you'd get a better feel for how the crowd would react to the songs, you'd improve upon your performance, make changes in tempo where applicable, and most importantly, you'd have a great idea as to what songs click with your listeners and what songs SHOULD eb on the recording.
The songs had such a different life an feel to them after touring with them that often artists wish they could just go back and redo the recording to match how much better they are when played LIVE. Most live albums suck ass as there's not much effort to get great sound and some songs become so tattooed in our memories in their studio versions we can't handle hearing them played differently.
Having never had a single good show in my lifetime I can't even begine to asnwer how I would handle such an event. LOL!
OK, maybe I can think of something. I'll blog about it later, if that's OK with you. ;)
8:47 AM
David Byrne has it right. Take it on the road before you take it in the studio. With today's technology, there's no reason why you can't record live and add to it in the studio. I prefer most live albums I hear because that's my orientation. For me the thrill is putting over a performance live that's good enough to make somebody want to buy the CD. So I want the CD to capture the same kind of magic. My next CD will have that goal.
I doubt highly that you never had a good show.
10:34 AM
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