Last night I lived it all on stage, in living color, in the real, with my r&r band. A well-rehearsed, well-oiled 5 man band of brothers. Our last rehearsal was epic. After that session I wrote to one of my bandmates in a text: "Maybe the best we've ever sounded?"
We were playing to a packed room. Most of the folks were there to see other bands, but still, we had a captive audience. The room was electric. On the first note of the first song the low E string on my Telecaster went slack, I thought I had broken a string, but it turns out the tuning machine had broken. I flailed away and noxiously low, rumbly, unmusical noises belched from my amp. It sounded really, really bad. Not a good bad.
It sent everyone else in the band off-kilter. The whole band basically went Tilt. We stumbled thru a few songs, everything was tentative and fractured. I struggled to play tunes with one less string, with strange noises still pouring out of my amp. I was not succeeding at all. Failing & falling badly. Funny. My uncertainty, my indecsion and flailing totally infected the whole band. Everyone started flailing and failing too. I could not get my guitar in tune. It was a complete mess. My in the moment thought: this is a train-wreck and I am the Conductor of Chaos.
The other guitar player in the band offered me his guitar, we traded guitars, and he jumped off-stage and put on a new string and tried to tune up my guitar. We both thought it was just a broken string, but it was not, it was a fatal, unfixable, untunable break of the tuning machine.
He decided to play my guitar with 5 strings, while I played his 6 string. Finally, the set almost complete, the last three songs, we found our footing and played a fiercely-wild, uncontrollable mini-set. It was total mayhem. I flailed away on a guitar I wasn't familiar with, totally uncomfortable, with a wider fretboard, longer strap, it just didn't sit or feel right, but I flailed away with total, crazy abandon. Fuck. Trying to banish the bad vibes and broken chords. We playled like a band of drunken wild horses with newly-discovered instruments.
We finished with a hurricane of sound. We decided to blast thru Neil Young & Crazy Horses' song "Fucking Up." Yes. So damn fitting. It was a messy sonic explosion of fucked-up-ness. It was sort of sastifying in it's total unsastifying-ness.
Shite. That was a show. We will remember it. The uncontolled wreckage. The unholy glory of the fuckup and the breakdown of an old guitar. Yes. My guitar needs to go to the shop. My head could use some fixing too. That was humbling and embarrassing. Nightmare realized. Yikes.
