ESSAY
From Acoustic Guitar, September 1995

LETTER FROM BACKSTAGE

Taj Mahal, Jorma Kaukonen, Peter Rowan, John Lee Hooker--these and many other familiar faces peer down on us from every wall. "Live at the Sweetwater," the posters say. I can picture the room upstairs packed with bodies, sweating and swaying to the music; the line of eager ticket buyers extending down the street; the bouncer collecting crisp bills; the tap filling empty glass after empty glass. What could we possibly be doing here, in this same basement where Ry Cooder has tuned up his guitar? That image both inspires and intimidates me as I sit here, tweaking my B string, listening hopefully for signs of intelligent life upstairs.

It's a Tuesday night in early winter, and my band, Heavy Wood, is getting ready to play some music in this venerable club. A few hours ago, Andy, Jay, Steve, and I were leaving our respective day jobs and joining the flow of rush-hour commuters. Now we've unloaded our gear--acoustic guitars, upright bass, and percussion--and done the sound check. I’ve changed into my black boots and favorite guitar-playing shirt, and I’m trying hard to shed my after-work lethargy and summon the energy that will make our songs come alive. It's always a tough transition, like unscrewing one head and attaching another.

Heavy Wood is not what you'd call a workhorse club band. We've played at a few venues around the Bay Area, but we spend most of our time together working on new songs, polishing arrangements, and recording the tunes that come out the best. A few years ago, we lucked into getting heard by the owner of this club, which has a much larger reputation than seating capacity, and we played a split bill with another local acoustic band. Between the four band members, we rounded up enough relatives, friends, and fans to come hear us that we've been invited back, several times now. It's our best gig by far, which both energizes me and makes me worry like crazy about what's going on upstairs. How many tables are full? Is Denise, the waitress, looking at her watch and preparing herself for a long, dull night, or is she pleasantly surprised by the figures filing in from the street?

I can't suppress a yawn--it's one of my expressions of nervousness. The other is the faint gnawing in my stomach, which usually begins by four o'clock in the afternoon and discourages me from having any sort of real dinner before a gig. It helps to have something to occupy this empty time between sound check and the first set: I still have to write out the set list to take on stage. After I jot down a song title, I listen in my mind to the final chords and imagine how the next song's opening riff will sound a few moments later. When I'm finished, I attach my list with electrical tape to the dark upper bout of my guitar. Although we have set aside one song for a possible encore, it's not our best song and we don't really expect to play it: this is, after all, Tuesday night, and we are not like the seasoned players who look down on us from the walls, clutching their guitars with the ease and assurance that come from many years of albums, stages, and encores.

We're not alone in this position, perched between amateur and professional music making. In fact, we comprise a high percentage of the musicians who climb onto stages and stools every night. Our ranks include those who have dreamed of making a living as a musician but settled for a secure day job instead and perform occasionally to keep the flame alive, those who tried to make a living as a musician but got discouraged and went to Plan B, and those who never wanted to make a living as a musician but still get out there because they crave the buzz of live performance. We're the wannabees, the not-ready-for-prime-time players, loiterers on the fringe of the music business. We're not quite pros--we don't have managers, tour buses, press clips, our band names stenciled on the amps--but we're no less serious and passionate about what we do. Our demo tapes clog the mailboxes of people in "the business," and our hands and vocal cords fill clubs, restaurants, and coffeehouses around the world with music.

Considering how many musicians like me are out there both comforts me and makes me feel vaguely anxious. From the amateur point of view, a fellow musician is an ally, a kindred spirit, a jam partner; from the professional angle, that same musician is another person nagging the same record companies and club owners--maybe sending a slicker demo and glossier photo and getting the gig rather than you. Even for those of us whose typical income from a gig is approximately enough to cover a burrito and a set of strings, this competitive aspect is insidious. It's not the money that matters, it's the pride. It's the judgment of your music implied in every unreturned phone call and rejected tape, the preference expressed for someone else's creations. When you're searching for gigs or that holy grail of the record deal, for every success there might be 50 rejections, and each one stings. What does that slimy booking guy with the tattoos know about good music anyway?

In my case, it's the songs I write that keep me going at this racket, year after year. If I don't play these songs of mine, who will? Although there’s an enduring satisfaction in the act of crafting a melody, honing the words, and finding the right instrumentation, eventually the best songs beg to be heard by an audience beyond your spouse, your dog, and a few friends at a party. Until I've put those certain songs out there for an audience, it's as if they aren't quite finished. Even if the chance to perform comes only once in a while and under less-than-ideal conditions, I need to feel those songs emerge from my chest and guitar and go in search of sympathetic ears. And there's nothing more gratifying than a sign that a song has connected with someone--an appreciative nod glimpsed in the back row, a more-than-polite round of applause, a genuine compliment between sets.

Of course, these high-minded intentions don't mean a lot when the guy back by the pool table wants to hear "Sweet Melissa" and reminisce about his high school girlfriend, rather than puzzle over some weird tune he's never heard before and will probably never hear again. Playing original songs for people who don't own your CD is an uphill battle and can definitely limit your gig opportunities. Playing a repertoire of sometimes folky, sometimes jazzy, sometimes rocking tunes with a band, rather than the tinkly background music people expect from acoustic musicians, adds another barrier to the success of Heavy Wood, Inc. Not loud enough to compete with electric blues bands but too loud for the pensive poets at the Cafe Milano, we often wind up stuck, as it were, between rock and a soft place.

But this is no time to grouse about the frustrations of finding good gigs. Here we are, about to take a stage where some esteemed musicians have held court. This is our night--that's our name by the door. Steve plucks a harmonic on his bass, eyeing the digital tuner. I run my fingers up and down the fretboard to limber them up, while Jay tells Andy about the show by the Band that he caught a while back.

"Five minutes," Sue calls out from the stairwell. "Alright?"

"Alright," I say. We were hoping she'd be here tonight. Almost every time we've played here, Sue has been running the mixing board, and she's gotten better and better at putting across our quirky ensemble sound. She knows that Andy strums and sings much louder than I do, that I use my guitar mike for percussion on a few tunes, that the congas and cowbell need to be boosted in the mix. We're spoiled, having a house sound person who's familiar with our music. At just about every other venue where we're not using our own PA, a sound check--if we get one at all--consists of someone plugging in cords, hitting the power switch on the board, and, if each instrument and microphone emits a noise of some sort, heading for the bar. One of the cruel ironies of being an acoustic musician is how your beautiful and subtle playing, chiseled to perfection over many years, usually sounds like a car in need of brake fluid by the time it comes out of the speakers, while the Neanderthal rockers who come on afterward sound like they're on tour promoting their latest platinum CD.

"OK, guys," Sue says. We grab our instruments; I take a deep breath. At the top of the stairs, I spot a respectable number of bodies at the front tables--even a few faces I don't recognize. It's not a huge crowd, but not bad at all for a Tuesday night, and definitely enough to justify the phone calls, the postcard mailing, the purchase of that new guitar cord. As we plug in and settle into our places, Sue turns up the stage lights and speaks into her microphone back at the board.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she says, "welcome to the Sweetwater. Tonight we have a special show by four guys who I've known since they were just little kids." She's lying. Andy and I laugh; the crowd is now turned toward the stage, sipping drinks, giving us a once-over. Sue wraps up her introduction, "Please welcome Heavy Wood."

There's a small wave of applause. Andy strums an F#--the opening chord of "Come On Home." I count out four, and we nail the downbeat. The groove is solid--the interlocking strums, the bass octaves, and the snare rim shots sound good and set my head bobbing with the beat. Once the music begins, my nervousness vanishes, as it always does. Day job? What day job? I close my eyes and the song carries me away, inviting the audience to come along for the ride.

--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers