Mr. Brett just called me to ask me if I was interested in the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival. Government Mule with Gregg Allman? Hot damn, of course I’m interested.

So instead of driving sedately back to Iowa that weekend like responsible adults wishing to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed come a-Monday, we’ll be camping in Telluride and groovin’ through an outdoor music festival. Oh, and the beer too.

I haven’t been to a multi-day outdoor show in… since… well, in a long time. Damn! Possibly since the Grateful Dead in Eugene fifteen + years ago? Egad.

I’ve been to Iowa blues and jazz fests, of course, but that’s not really the same thing as a crunchy pseudo-hippy camping-vibe kinda thang. I hope I have fun, and that I don’t feel all weird or too much the shy, rural Iowan. I lost my crowd legs years ago and no longer love crowds for their own sake the way I once did. (Of course, at that point – the loving crowds point – I was twenty something and hot, so crowds loved me. But now I’m just your basic boring, married. not-so-hot-any-longer type person. Probably I no longer love crowds because they no longer love me for being scantily clad and twenty. Eek! What a horrible thought to have about oneself! Am I that shallow? Snort!)

Blues, though. Will I never escape the damn blues? I mean, “the blues” – despite the genre’s deep history, which I totally respect, and the vast number of people who really relate to it yada yada yada – are still not much more than a severely limited set of changes and a finite number of variations. The blues, unless played by absolute geniuses, are fairly boring. And because the blues are easy, very very few blues players are anywhere near being geniuses. There are only so many solos you can play over a twelve-bar progression in G major even if you are a genius.

People like the blues because they know what’s going to happen next. It’s predictable in a comforting way, it makes you feel like you’re already familiar with the song even if you’ve never heard it before. The comfort of familiarity in itself is not a particularly bad thing, but there’s so much other stuff in the world to listen to, too… and some of it’s even got interesting, fresh changes. Seriously!

Anyway, I don’t hate the blues. I only bring it up because I feel like I can’t escape them. I live in the Midwest. My husband loves the blues. I find many of Brett’s CD collection hopelessly predictable, but I do know that live music are better*. I’ve seen B.B. live before and he definitely rocks. And in spite of my lukewarm feelings for our Johnny Lang and Shemekia Copeland CDs, I’m sure those artists will rock hard in person, too.

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Avoiding live music is really easy in my staid Iowa life. I almost do it on purpose. Exposure to live music makes me want to do music, and that unfortunate feeling makes me think of the musical resources available to me (few) and how lazy I am (very) and how much of a primadonna I am (I’m actually not, but people think I am because I expect absurd things like for them to know how to count to four all by themselves for fuck’s sake), and all that together makes me have stop thinking about doing music because it’s such a clusterfuck for me: I want to do music, but only under circumstances I don’t have and can’t make without more energy output than I’m willing to put out.

So I don’t want to do music. But I do. Except I don’t. See the problem? I pretty much avoid live music because it’s easy to. How lame is that?

Listen, when I say I’m a snob what I really mean is that I am – er, was – a trained musician with chops who didn’t want to waste time her time playing with people who were still struggling with the absolute basic basics like tone, timbre, time, etc. And this isn’t even the age old “intellect vs. heart in music” argument! It’s simply that if you have a band comprised of players so weak they haven’t yet mastered the ability to play in tempo, you’ll never be able to get all the way through a song. Period.

If you want to communicate in Spanish, you have to learn the rudiments of Spanish. If you want to communicate in C++, you have to learn the rudiments of C++. If you want to communicate in music, you have to learn the rudiments of music. (If you don’t people stand around supplying words for you, as if you were a stutterer or an ESL student or something.) In a real band, you don’t have to stop for most of an hour to pound out a simple rhythm guitar part over and over and over again, because in a real band the rhythm guitar player can already play it, and is working instead on refinements like nuance and style – the part of music where self-expression and art finally come in – more than the mechanics of actually playing the riff.

Basic music skills are so necessary one should be able to assume they’re there… but around here, they’re just not. [Of course there are some great players around here. It’s just really hard to get them all in the same room and on the same page. It’s life, you know: it happens to everyone.] Which means that instead of making music, you end up teaching the guitarist how to count to four and the drummer how to find the first beat of each measure on purpose… and that’s if you’re lucky. I’m not even going to get into the mechanics of dealing with a garage band ego who makes wanting to teach the basics they need (and should want), for the betterment of player and band and music as a whole, just as insulting as calling his momma a dirty name. Any player who thinks he doesn’t need to get better is a moron – it’s just like anything else. If you think you have nothing left to learn, you’re wrong and wrong.

Personally, I don’t like practicing someone else’s part on my time, so I expect they won’t want me to practice on their time and I show up and do my level best. I don’t like head games or being anywhere near power trips. I don’t like sitting around talking about “making it” for hours on end. I don’t like rehearsals that degenerate into arguments, practice of rudimentary skills that should have been mastered in private, starry-eyed conversations about the stupid shit we’ll require in our dressing rooms when we’re famous, or bong sessions. In fact, I don’t like rehearsing at all: I do it because it’s necessary but I don’t want to be all night about it. And if all that makes me a snob, then so be it. People have been calling me a snob for years.

I like to play. I like to play in front of an audience. I don’t even care about recording or studio work. For me, music is about communicating, and to communicate you need a communicatee: an audience. I’m actually more of a performer than a musician, really. But I’m enough of a musician that I can – er, could – sing in tune and in time fer chrissake.

Anyway, to get back to the point: to add to my quite horrible flaws of laziness and what is around here known as total stuck up snobbery, there’s the unpalateable fact that my own chops are shot, gone, utterly rusty – so rusty I wouldn’t play with myself, let alone be able to play with musicians of any respectable calibre! And there you’ve got the conundrum that is me, my voice, and my problem with live music: I don’t really like being a spectator. I’d rather be adored than do the adoring, and I can – er, could – hold my own against lot of the so-called professionals I’ve seen (particularly blues vocalists!) (don’t even get me started!).

The fact is that seeing live music – good live music – sends me off on the “What am I doing with my life? I could sing fucking circles around her!” trip so hard I practically half miss the performance. I want to be up there, but I’m not because I’m so lazy my chops have atrophied to the point where I couldn’t be up there really but I still remember when I could! And the half of the performance I don’t totally space out on I analyze for flaws (if the band’s even vaguely lame) or makes me feel lame (if the band’s really smokin’!).

Since not much live music shows up in my living room, I’ve managed to ignore the whole problem for quite a while. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

It’s a never-ending degenerating spiral of idiocy. I’m a snob, but I’m no longer good enough to play with the only players I’d be willing to play with. So I don’t play. Which means now I actually suck as bad as the people I won’t play with!

Yes, perhaps I do think too much but whatEVer!

Snort!

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* “Live music are better bumper stickers should be issued” is a very very old private joke I have with someone who doesn’t even read this blog. So don’t worry about it. I’d give you the setup but I can’t even remember it any more. It’s just one of those dorky phrases that pops into my head in certain circumstances. Hah!