Tecumseh Valley is moving!

No post this week as I move my place of residence from New York City to Tucson, AZ. Wish me luck!

How to be an asshole at an open mic night

There are a variety of reasons to play an open mic night. They’re a quick and easy way to play in front of a large (if largely unresponsive) audience, so if you’re a newbie it’s some easy experience. I play out regularly as a solo artist and I enjoy the occasional open mic for practice in front of a tough crowd. Typically the viewers are nothing but other performers who have no desire to listen to anyone but themselves. If you can catch their attention, well you get the idea.

The basic format of an open mic goes something like this - a local bar has a eureka moment when they realize all musicians are alcoholics and cheap attention whores. So on a Tuesday or Wednesday when weekly business is slowest they host one of these starting sometime in the evening after happy hour. You come, you sign up, you shuffle through 2 or 3 songs, thank everyone, and go. This is the format for EVERY OPEN MIC NIGHT in the history of open mic nights. It’s a universally effective system that allows for any number of possibilities for one performer while maximizing everyone’s chance at some stage time.

You would be AMAZED at how many people can’t grasp this. An open mic is obviously nothing close to an actual show. Still people bring their egos along with their instruments and put on displays based partly on selected single experiences by some assholes they read about in a rock bio, partly on bullshit. Here’s a list of some of the ways you can not only make yourself look like a moron, but also ruin the night for everyone in the room.

• Show up without an instrument and bug every other musician into letting you borrow theirs. If successful, take it and leave the room without telling anyone. When found say you tune by ear and it was much too loud inside to get a good sense of pitch.
• Two words - vocal improv. It might be just you and a guitar on stage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stretch your plunking 3-chord hoohah into the 7 minute range.
• Get a bunch of your asshole friends to come watch you play. When your time is up, get them to whoop and holler for an encore (note: please be sure to be particularly terrible if you do this).
• Play covers.
• Don’t tune your guitar. Get up on stage, launch into the first chord of your song, let out a loud “WHOOPS! Sorry, I’ll be just a moment…” and spend minutes making awkward tuning noises on stage. If possible, be tone deaf and insist you can do it by ear.
• Engage in extended stage banter. Try to see if you can spend more time making bad jokes and awkward conversation than you spend actually playing.
• Play original songs.
• Bring a backing band with you. Spend 20 minutes setting up and 20 more tearing down.
• If you have an upcoming show, announce it between every song. Don’t be afraid to give everyone a hard time about how awesome it would be if they came and how much different you sound with a full band. Hand out flyers when other people are playing.
• Medley several songs together and insist it counts as only one number.
• Start playing a song and a few seconds into it, stop in anguish. Go off into a long-winded rant about how you “just can’t do that one anymore” because you broke up/are fighting with/are being cheated on by your significant other. If you have time, try to play it again later in your set and repeat the process.
• Occasionally open mic nights will have themes (e.g. hip-hop, poetry, country, folk, etc.). It is absolutely important that you disregard this theme even if it factors prominently into the name of the event. Show up with an acoustic guitar at a hip-hop night and insist on playing anyway.
• Get really drunk. The best judgement is always pint-sized.

and of course

• If you can’t play a song, you can always stop cold at your mistake and insist you’ve been “practicing” and you “know you can do better than that”. Start over. Make another mistake. Repeat.

I should note that none of these are imagined. I have seen each of these occur pretty much to the letter at various nights over the years. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about here. I committed more than a few of these myself.

A favorite of mine lately…

…is a record from a couple of years ago that I didn’t get to hear the first time around.

After playing a significant role in all-girl punk rock with Autoclave and after aiding in the development of contemporary freak folk with Helium, Mary Timony came out with an unbelievable collection of proggish folk-punk with Ex Hex. This record was a bit of a WTF?? moment for me because I’ve never heard anything quite like it before. Timony’s spiral staircase songwriting meets some truly excellent guitar work in a band you swear to god couldn’t just be a duo. Her pleasant voice and surrealistic songwriting is a wonderful counterpart to kaleidoscopic song progressions that don’t hint at their epic nature until a song is well underway. The listens are rewarding, particularly for any fans of the best of 90s indie rock. Imagine that period of time after Don Caballero 2 and before Emergency & I combined with all those old arena prog records you’ll never admit you still love. That still only scrapes the surface of what a unique sounding record this is. The songwriting is dense and the lyricism is wildly imaginative. The sound is a mental workout that chameleons its way through permutation after permutation and takes your breath away with its sheer originality. And have you ever seen a picture of Mary Timony?

Yeah needless to say I’m a little in love. Check out a free legal stream of the album in question here and see if you don’t agree with me.

In Memoriam Bo Diddley

The first time that I heard the term “Bo Diddley Rhythm” I was 16 and really into the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was at my guitar lesson and we were going through Blood Sugar Sex Magik song by song when my guitar teacher casually remarked that it all goes back to Bo. He then demonstrated the basic rhythm and all of its derivatives through rock history. I was fascinated. It took away some of the gee-whiz impressiveness of the funk metal I was listening to, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I could have grown up a RHCP fan.

Bo Diddley and his playing style was a eureka moment in rock history. I guess you can credit him with being the first musician to really focus on developing dancy grooves. Some of his songs predate the dub idea of getting a rhythm going and improvising vocalizations on top. Personally I love his eccentricities. He was great at combining the truly clever with the truly absurd, which could have been the genesis of some of his more radical ideas. I mean, rock at that point had always been fairly minimal but reducing it to one chord and a rhythm was pretty ballsy. To make it work was brilliant.

Bo pointed us towards the future of R&B and gave us the launching pad for funk. He gave us Who Do You Love? and Love Is Strange. Bo Diddley was a gun slinger, a twister, and a lover. He walked 47 miles of barbed wire, he wore a cobra snake for a necktie, and he invented the elephant. He was active for fifty years and had five decades’ worth of musicians look up to him and continue to find inspiration in his example. Hey, Bo Diddley! I think you did alright.

December 30, 1928 – June 2, 2008