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Re: Re: Liking/Disliking your own music
On 7/22/64 11:59 AM, bill bigrig wrote:
This one may be way out there but,,, Joe Meek always forced his
musicians/singers to smile while recording.
Even without a window to the studio, he could tell when someone was
not smiling during a take. I've had to chide a few frontmen during
nights when they were giving other players bad looks. It always
improved the performance almost instantly.
We had such a bad time with the "flashing 'dirty looks' at someone
who'd made a musical mistake"
phenomena in that aforementioned New Wave band I was in.
What would happen is that , sitting at the back of the band on the drum
riser, I could see that
people would get angry, the people they were angry with would feel
ashamed and the whole vibe of the band
would go downhill and sometimes it would affect the entire performance
for several songs.
Our dynamic was clearly hurting our performances at times. This was a
really good, professional and
very tight band.......the tightest I've ever had the pleasure to play in
and we were headlining ever city we played in
at our peak.
An idea I came up with to sort this is what I call the 'Monkey Grin'.
You know that when monkeys appear to grin that it's a sign that they are
angry and very likely to throw
shit at you.
Humans , however, interpret that kind of a facial expression as approval.
You can't necessarily stop the fact that you are irritated with a fellow
musician who fucks up
after a tremendous amount of rehearsal, but you can suddenly turn to
them from across the stage
and give them a Monkey Grin if you are angry.
The fact is that from across the stage you can't really tell if someone
is actually grinning at you, positively
("Hey you fucked up, I can soooo relate <big grin>" or giving you the
angry Monkey grin.
It's really, really effective and there's no good reason to show someone
you are upset with them
in the middle of a performance so why hurt your band by showing your
emotions in that instance.
Then you add the agreement to not talk about the gig until the next day
and this allows
you to sort out the problem in a clear and non-reactive way at the next
rehearsal.
We are human and imperfect so we'll blow it occasionally, but it's
became an effective policy.