Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

guitar

don’t fail me now

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The last forty-eight hours of my life.

At six o’clock on Monday I am playing guitar. I have been playing for hours, drilling songs against a metronome. The bridge of “Unengaged” for twenty minutes straight. I’ve worn through a callous for the first time in ages.

Later I rehearse piano and vocals equally as hard. I fall asleep reading Outliers in bed, which just two chapters in already has caused one blowup with E because I said if I had me as a child I’d call me a failure.

I don’t want to be a failure.

Tuesday I have a fun, frantic day at work – the kind where you realize at the end of the day that you never stopped to hang your coat. I start writing the second my ass is on the bus, and emerge almost three hours later with that last post.

I rehearse. Hard. Again. Trying not to fail. Despite my voice sounding brittle and inflexible due to the lack of a warm-up, I venture out to an open mic while E stays at home and works on freelance.

At the restaurant my first song is awesome; the room is quietly transfixed. (I’m not a failure?) Afterward I promptly break a string and become shy and faltering when I’m handed another guitar. I fuck up “Like a Virgin,” of all things, and promptly lose everyone’s attention.

Today I feel slightly beaten up (thank god I don’t drink at those things), on top of beating myself up. Still manage another frantic work day that barely includes a coat-hanging. On the way home I listen to my own voice on my iPod, which a lot of days is the only thing I can manage to do.

I’m listening to “Like a Virgin” from 2006 and thinking, This is awful. Why am i singing like that? (Of course, I wouldn’t make it ten seconds into “Like a Virgin” from 2001.)

Then I listen to a Trio from 2008 and realize, God, I really did get better.

I am not a failure.

I get home and am kissed goodbye as E heads out to front her band at the Khyber. Another hour of writing.

pipes and glass

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A long time ago I had a neighbor, freebasing cocaine at his kitchen table.

That came later, though.

Curled around my first guitar on the front step, maybe? Must’ve been. I don’t remember how else he knew I could play. I remember our porch, and his hammers on Ziggy. That’s exactly what I wanted.

We became a pair in his basement from time to time, him showing me barre chords, my explaining why you might retune.

I didn’t have that in my life at the time. I had Gina, still several months of skepticism about my guitar playing before she’d be of much help. No one else to take an interest. Certainly not an adult example.

(My mother’s boyfriend had played guitar, maybe, in the 70s? Some distantly removed time. He had sliced the tendon on his pointer, and could no longer play barres. Useless to me. He had a clumsy way of making a C chord, remembering it a half-fret at a time.

Inwardly I swore: no forgetting.)

So there I was, in the neighbor’s basement. We had known him forever, anyway. He was fifteen years older? Feels like he was much older than I am now. At least seventeen, if he remembered Bowie like that.

I noodled on his ancient synthesizer and he restrung his Yamaha 12-string. “Like Bowie’s.” And he told his story.

He was heavy into music, writing his own all of the time. He went on a cruise ship or some other inane vacation, to play. And someone said, one night, to him – very serious about his music. They said to him he sounded like something or some other thing. It was probably the 80s, so probably some other awful thing. Richard Marx, let’s say.

And he said, “Peter.” He said my name in this very convivial way, like, we’re just two Italian guys shooting the shit. It was not a way men usually said my name. Still not.

“Peter, I didn’t know if it was a compliment. I hadn’t heard anything new in a year. All I would listen to was myself.”

I was incredulous, still a fan more than a musician. How could he turn off everything else? It seemed likely a lie.

I got too familiar, I guess. The whole family lived there, and I got used to poking my head in if I got home late from rehearsal and the light was on.

I put my head in, and there they were, him and his best friend. Hardware on the table, but not the tool box like usual. Pipes and glass?

Pipes and glass, and he said, “do you want any” or maybe “you don’t want any,” and I, numb, just walked back across the porches to my door.

Figures, the one guy who could say my name like that and mean it and play those little hammers. But I knew what my goal was – I would have to learn my barre chords before there’d be any excess.

I forget him for a year or so, here and there. There are other stories – driving to the music store in South Philly, the time I almost cut my finger off and he came over because my mom was at work. That bass in pieces in my closet.

I’ve still never been that freebaser at the kitchen table. I must not be good enough at barres. But, now I know what it’s like to only listen to myself, to not want or need anything else.

I understand him that much.

Why isn’t there a long tail of sheet music?

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Towards the end of last night’s fantastic drumming rehearsal in my living room we selected the cover artists for our next go, one of whom was The Strokes.

“Great,” I exclaimed,” I finally have an excuse to buy their sheet music books!”

Chaz eyed me with speculation. “Do you really need sheet music for those songs? Can’t you just figure them out?”

I plucked my Amnesiac book off of the music stand and waved it in his direction.

“Look, given enough time I can figure out anything, but then I can’t play whatever song strikes your fancy at a moment’s notice, and I won’t have something physical to put on the stand, and I can’t give you a starting note if you want to sing, and I certainly won’t know the harmony. Without this book there would have been no awesome version of ‘You and Whose Army.'”

That paragraph explains exactly why I believe all albums should have matching sheet music folios, and plainly illustrates my addiction to sheet music – because I want the ability to cover or arrange a song to be at my fingertips.

I have a sizable sheet music collection – over a hundred books. A significant portion of it is comprised of out-of-print books I hunted down two Christmases ago, including sheet music for every Madonna album and imported, out-of-print David Bowie books that contain the full scores to their corresponding albums.

Pop and rock sheet music is an interesting niche of publishing, not only because of its specialized audience of amateur and professional musicians, but because the sales of each book can be predicted by the sales of the corresponding album and the singles therein. Does every Mariah Carey album get a sheet music book? Of course – because they sell big, and the singles are huge – lots of people know the songs or want to hear them covered. Those are the books that are printed the most often. Similarly, any radio-ready rock band merits a book – like Foo Fighters, Radiohead, and even Paramore. Also, young artists with a breakthrough record often merit a first book to test the water – Anna Nalick got one on the strength of one single, and Sara Bareilles had one out when she was just touring behind “Love Song.”

The smaller or less-played the act, the less obvious the case is for a book. Get too obscureand you’re out of luck, unless you happen to be a Dresden Dolls fan – singer Amanda Palmer arranged and published two sheet music books on her own. Not coincidentally, they’re the two best-edited piano books I’ve ever purchased.

That makes me wonder – what’s the magical sales threshold that’s preventing us from seeing books from Guster or Rilo Kiley? Is it a flat number based on economies of scale in the print run … perhaps twenty or thirty thousand? Or, is it a function of album sales – a gold-shipped album might move two percent of its copies in sheet music – ten thousand units. There’s clearly a fixed, single-run print quantity for most books, because sheet music regularly falls out of print, and if the book wasn’t popular enough the first time around it never comes back.

Either way, any kind of threshold puts up a barrier between older and lesser-heard albums and the musicians that are clamoring to play them. Effectively, there can be no “long tail” of sheet music books. Yet, any DIY guitarist might argue that it’s okay, because of the internet. Why wait for a publishing company to spend production dollars arranging and laying out a book of sheet music that will cost you twenty bucks when you can crowd-source the task to guitar players in basements across American, who can tab out an entire album for free?

If the industry supported this solution I’d be all for it, but that relationship is tenuous at best. In the late 90s the Harry Fox Agency sued prominent guitar tab sites – primarily Harmony Central so they would remove all of their guitar tab archives – mostly on the argument that reprint of the lyrics without permission was illegal. It was a selfish, spiteful move on the part of the music publishing business – they shut down a venue for people around the world to play their artists’ songs, which is one of the best forms of word of mouth advertising an artist can have, yet they didn’t offer any commensurate response to the clear demand for a long tail of transcriptions.

I’ve been buying rock sheet music for the intervening decade, and I can tell you that the situation has not improved, except now Transcribed Score books are slightly more common – and they certainly represent increased value over internet tabs. Otherwise, if anything I’d say that in the 90s the threshold to print must have been lower – more niche artists got a short run of their own books. Today I don’t know that I’d be able to find my cherished book of Tracy Bonham’s The Burdens of Being Upright, or the tightly edited edition of Elastica’s self-titled disc.

The clear solution is a variation on Amanda Palmer’s Dresden Dolls model. Amanda, being just about the savviest indie artists I know of, made it a point not only to compile the best-edited sheet music possible, but to also turn her books into collectors items rife with stories and photos not available anywhere else. She sought to expand the audience for her product outside of musicians to more casual fans, which would increase her personal threshold for turning a profit on the endeavor in the long term.

It’s a valid strategy, but it’s a gamble – the extra material drives the price of the book, and relies on non-musicians fans to snap up the book for that half to help subsidize the sheet music portion. It’s probably working just fine for Amanda, because her fans are amazing, and the books were a labor of love to begin with. But, what about all of the other niche and indie artists out there who want to spread their music to the masses?

I think the best model would be for artists to offer a PDF of an album’s sheet music for download – either for free or a small fee – and to also offer a physical book containing that music plus some additional content – more detailed song histories and performance notes. Similarly, publishing companies need to find a way to do the same for out of print sheet music. In either case, if certain books prove to be big-movers on the print-on-demand front then you know to go to an actual print-run. If not, you at least have all of your sheet music compiled and available, which will draw a steady stream of revenue as a long tail shopping solution, and you can easily release a “Greatest Hits” book at any time.

Once Arcati Crisis actually records an album (hopefully next year) I’ll be undertaking that endeavor – I’ve already arranged “Standing” and “Moscow, Idaho” as a test. I’m under no illusion that we have hoards of fans waiting to play our songs, but I want to prove my point. More importantly, I want to insert my idea into the marketplace – maybe the only way I’m going to get my long tail of sheet music is to grow the damn tail myself.

No, Not I

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On the list of Arcati Crisis’s mutually favorite artists I don’t know that there’s a musician that debuted within our lifetimes ranked higher than Tracy Bonham.

Tracy’s was the second concert Gina and I saw together; the first was Presidents of the United States of America. Gina and I were possibly the first people into the TLA that night, because I remember standing almost directly in front of Tracy, pressed up against the barricade, Gina intently watching her fingers on every song.

At the end of that school year, Gina decided to audition for the school talent show, and the song she decided to play and sing was “Sharks Can’t Sleep.”

I had just starred in my first play, but at the time I didn’t play guitar. Or sing, for that matter. Yet, when Gina told me about the talent show, I had an unexpected reaction – I asked if I could sing with her.

Our friends were immediately skeptical about this – not only did I not sing, but I was at some point banned from singing entirely in the basement hallway where we all ate our lunch. Suffice to say, I was not experiencing widespread support for my sudden impetus to vocalize.

However, I did have one supporter: Gina. Gina brought in her guitar so I could practice, and gave me my own verse to sing.

As murky as some of the details of this story are, my memory of auditioning for the talent show committee is crystalline. We were seated in the corner of the band room, Gina and I and our friends Lucy and Joanna, who were singing harmony. When we got to my verse I shook like a leaf, but ever-so-carefully sang “Met a star today…”

Afterwards someone on the committee said, “I didn’t know he could sing.”

I don’t have any memory at all of being on stage at the talent show, although there are photos to prove that it occurred. What I do remember, and will always know, is that afterwards I – completely out of the blue – demanded that my mother buy my a guitar.

I’m sure I demanded a lot of things at the time, being a stubborn only-child teenager, but for some reason this particular demand was taken seriously. Within a week I had my clunky old Ashland guitar in my hands, and a guitar lesson once a week. I kept taking them until I learned the F sharp i needed for “Sharks Can’t Sleep” and never looked back.

Over ten years later it is both completely apropos and batshit crazy that I am playing guitar in a band with Gina, since I wouldn’t be playing or singing at all without that first nod of support.

This fall Tracy blogged about “Sharks Can’t Sleep.” (She also spent some time co-writing with Garrison Starr, which blows my mind, as Garrison is my #2 longest supported indie song-writer right after Tracy. Whatever song they wrote, it is surely the best song in the known universe.)

Last year Tracy stealthily released an acoustic disc, In The City + In The Woods. She also peppers her homepage with downloads of new demos, so I suggest you keep an eye out.

Happy birthday, Gina.

Guitarness

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I’m often at a loss for what to do with myself when we visit Elise’s families in New Jersey. At home, or at any friend’s house, my default position is guitar playing – it gives me something to do with my hands in idle moments so that I don’t feel like I have to carry on a non-stop conversation at all times.

I don’t usually bring my guitar with me to NJ, which means the families haven’t witnessed this particular phenomenon too often, but Elise was planning to leave me marooned while she went on a wedding dress tour, and I needed a way to pass the time. I added a wonderful new “print-version” feature to my lyrics database, so for the trip I printed out sheaf of my fifty most incomplete songs to workshop while Elise was out on her wedding whirlwind.

Isn’t that a little crazy – fifty songs that are unfinished and still relatively new?

I really vacillate about this sort of thing. At this point Gina and I have a solid sixteen song set, and I have ten or twenty of my strongest songs that go in and out of solo rotation. It’s a comfortable point to be at, but then I look at my freaking database and I see all of these unfinished songs – some of which I really adore and like to play, such as they are in their unfinished state. And, since my current setlist is heavily influenced by my 2003-04 stuff, there are incomplete songs hanging around that are about to be four years old.

Four years old! Which is a problem when I have a whole new fleet of unfinished songs to be working through – I only have so much headspace to to to push these things forward. So, I sat down with my sheaf today and had a touch of a workshop. I re-notated a few things in a more complete fashion, and I think finished one from 2001 – “4th of July” – once and for all.

All that rehearsal meant I was plenty limber for my post-dinner conversational gambit. Except, these are people who aren’t used to my schtick – that I like sit and underscore a conversation without needing anyone to pay attention to me, and that if there’s a lull I might sing for a bit before tucking my voice back under the din.

It made for a few awkward moments … I don’t know that Elise’s father has ever heard me play my own songs before? Certainly not songs about his daughter, anyhow. But, they won’t be getting rid of me anytime soon so they might as well get used to the incessant underscoring of my life. Along the way I turned in possibly my best vocal of all time on the bridge of “Love Me Not,” and also a very respectable version of the recently on-hiatus “Little Love.”

All of which is why I need to go home tomorrow and record a Trio. And then I need to record another another one. And then another. And so on.

Right. But, first I need to drink this glass of wine. And maybe another one.

G’nite.