CLIFF DIVING WITH CARL SPACKLER

It’s early Tuesday morning and, as is my wont lately, I’m sitting in my beloved local coffeehouse, staring down the yawning white maw of Google Docs on my laptop screen. Wait. Can yawning maws be white? I feel like yawning maws historically tend to be darker and more shadow-filled. Let me try again. I’m staring into the implacable Easter Island visage of an empty Google Doc. Many writers better than I will ever be have waxed poetic about the intimidation and possibility of an empty page, so I’ll let them handle that. All I know is that I do this every Tuesday morning, aiming to keep my streak intact. I set out to write a blog post every week and, eleven weeks in, I’ll be damned if I haven’t managed to keep my promise to myself. And you have graciously decided it was worth your time read it. In the words of Carl Spackler in Caddyshack, “So, I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.”

At least half the time, I sit down having no idea what I’ll be writing about here. Last week, I started typing about how much I disliked Smooth Jazz (update: I still do) and somehow ended up writing about the death of my dad (it should be stressed that, whatever my feelings are for Smooth Jazz, I am in no way implying that it was responsible for killing my father). I kind of found a way to tie the two things together. It wasn’t necessarily elegant, but that’s kind of beside the point, really. I just try to move words around until they sound OK together and, if they ring in a coherent fashion, so much the better. Which is nice.

This devil-may-care approach is a fairly low-stakes example of the nascent, developing thrill I’m cultivating of jumping off cliffs. I speak metaphorically here- I’m not going to be hurling myself off the rocks in Acapulco any time soon. I touched on this a few blogs back, when I wrote about my spontaneous decision to take a job in this very coffeehouse as a roaster. Sometimes it’s good to say “yes” to things, and work out the details as you go. 

I’ve become addicted to playing music that way, especially; I love the rush of sitting in with someone with zero rehearsal and just seeing where it goes. I’ve been at it long enough to have developed a decent, workable musical vocabulary. I know how to listen. What’s the worst that could happen? Even if it’s a total trainwreck, nobody gets hurt, and the musicians and the audience are left with the adrenaline afterglow of at least an attempt at magic. The longer I do this, the less precious I get about not embarrassing myself. Some time ago I read a quote by David Bowie that really resonated with me:

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area.

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in.

Go a little bit out of your depth.

And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom,

you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Bowie knew what’s up. Once you get a taste for not being sure if you’re going to stick the landing, it’s really hard to go back to the tried and true.

The coffee’s starting to kick in. Good thing, too, because I walked in here excessively groggy and bleary, the direct result of saying “yes” to something. A couple months back, I was approached by a buddy of mine, a very talented singer/songwriter/guitar slinger with a kick-ass Country Rock power trio. He and the band have some festival dates this summer, and they were considering expanding the lineup to fill out the sound. Was I interested in being the second guitarist? He and his rhythm section are good, kind humans with a strong work ethic. The music, while not 100% in my wheelhouse, is quality stuff- well written, with lots of cool little touches and filigrees. I was flattered and honored to be asked, figured it would be a cool, fun experience and good for my chops so, after about one and a quarter seconds of careful consideration, I told him I was in. They had a big show coming up in June and he sent the charts for the songs. I got to woodshedding on them. Last night was our first rehearsal and, while I can’t say it was perfect (the live arrangements are slightly different from the recorded versions and it was, believe it or not, my first experience using in-ear monitors, so there was bit of a distracting learning curve with that), it went well enough that I was asked if I would play with them at another festival this Friday night. 

So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. 

I need to make some adjustments to my pedalboard. I had it dialed in more for traditional Country, and these guys are a quite a bit harder rocking than that onstage- less Dwight Yoakam, more Lynyrd Skynyrd/Allman Brothers. It was a five-hour rehearsal, so I’m stiff and sore, as I often am after long gigs. My wife always credits it to my “jumping around” (delivered in a way that I would consider condescending if it were coming from anyone else; since it’s her, it just makes me laugh), but I think it has more to do with my stance. I’m tall, so I’ve developed a kind of bent-leg crouch to a) look cool (the goal, at least) and b) avoid towering over my bandmates onstage. It’s murder on the knees, but that’s the price we pay for Rock & Roll. 

Most importantly, though, my time frame for being off-book on these songs has now been shortened significantly, and I need to walk the razor-thin line of learning the new cues and quirks of the live versions of these songs by the end of the week, but not so much so that I lose the looseness and spontaneity that this band and I both enjoy so much. We might stick the landing, we might not. I’m certainly gonna do my best, but I’m sure it’ll all work out fine, one way or another. 

What a glorious house of cards it is, and how lucky I am to get to do it. 

Geronimo.