ALCHEMICAL TRIUMPH AGAINST THE PROBABILITIES

You can rehearse and rehearse and mostly that helps, if not slowly saps the fire away, but until you get up there that nite you do not know how it’ll go. That’s the beauty, the thrill. The danger of it. It’s a gamble. A tightrope.

We don’t play to clicks and backing tracks. It’s wrangling at worst, alchemy at best, of 5 individuals/clowns leaping off and hoping to land on the same bullseye at the same time.

Someone might be having a bad nite. Someone might not be handling their booze as well. Someone might have a sneaky line in the little side room downstairs and attain tempos of their own making. Someone might be struck with the dreaded Monitor Curse (on stage sound all fine and audible during soundcheck, now a mess). Until you get up there you do not know. Anything that can go wrong eventually will, the probabilities come for you.

This is why I don’t like rehearsing too much. The on stage situation does not call for machine like responses. Sure when something goes wrong you have to be quick and have your wits about you. But you have to flow, you have to feel. You have to surrender yourself to the energy of the unit, maintain tempo, composure. Give everything of yourself to the performance, the execution, and you will be rewarded.

Not financially, nothing like that. There is not enough of that to go around. And in this court, jesters ain’t paid in gold. The reward is in making the alchemy. And it comes from endless shows. Not rehearsals. It comes from days, weeks, whole chunks of year spent on the road in glorious grind. As your sanity, intellect corrodes, withers, so do the physical, the muscles, the instincts, strengthen. If you surrender, your brain retreats, quiets. You step out of your own way. 

The stage is like life. You can practice, you can plan. But all that matters is the moment, and how you live it. 

So lighten the fuck up.