Re: [Harp-L] Train wreck recovery

["Cara Cooke" <cyberharp@xxxxxxxxx>]

I cannot say that I know "Whammer Jammer" all that well since I generally
play acoustic, bluegrass, folk, etc.  However, it sounds to me like you
handled it fine.  You just plug on -- everyone in the band working like a
team (with the needed give and take) to move the piece back to where it is
supposed to be, never letting on that you are somehow out of sync or in
"uncharted waters".  You never know what the audience will think.  They may
be so used to the piece being played a certain way that the unexpected
deviation might be welcome and warmly received.  Sometimes these things are
"happy accidents" that lead onto creative arrangements.  If the entire thing
was so obviously a trainwreck that you can see it on the faces of the
audience, then you may want to make a joke out of the event.

Example 1:  During the taping of an Austin City Limits show, four masters of
bluegrass music  had one of these trainwrecks.  The banjo player announced
the upcoming tune, then started on a different tune with different chord
changes.  He played and played and held the lead for an extremely long time
it seemed while the background chords never seemed to quite match and the
band looked a little puzzled.  Eventually, the fiddler yanked the lead from
him and suddenly the tune and chords matched and the rest of the tune went
wonderfully well.  They ended the piece as if nothing had happened and left
a very experienced audience wondering how much of that was planned or if
this was, indeed, a new arrangement.  The banjo player, realizing the
question which sat with the audience and wanting to share his embarassment
with them and have a good laugh, owned up to the mistake.  'I suppose you
noticed the odd lead in the front of that last piece.', he started.  (The
mandolin player nearly collapsed on the floor in hilarity, no longer able to
contain himself.)  The banjo player explained that somehow he had gotten
started on the wrong tune, and because it was so different from the intended
tune, he could not find a neat way to get out of it and get back to the
correct tune; and, eventually, just got lost.  He thanked the fiddler for
rescuing his drowning bandmate.  The incident never made the TV show, but it
made for a great, memorable moment in a wonderful show -- and made being
there just that much more special.

Example 2:  In one band, our banjo player was an alcoholic.  We tried very
hard to keep him from drinking before shows, but at one show (in his home
area where we was well-known as a player and a drinker) he managed to find
enough alcohol to get smashed right before the show.  Not only was he good
at finding the drink, he was also good at hiding his condition for awhile --
so we discovered he was intoxicated when we were on stage -- too late to do
very much about it as long as he could "hold up his end".  The show started
off well enough, then we did an instrumental where he lead it off.  The
beginning went fine, but something wierd happened in the middle and his lead
wandered into uncharted territory.  The band followed the new chords as well
as it could and another lead player watched for a point where he could
wrestle the lead away from the lost player.  Once someone else had the lead,
the tune returned to normal and received rousing applause.  However, the
incident rattled the main lead singer, who then proceeded to have difficulty
remembering words and songs for a short while.  He did alright with his
harmony singers helping him keep in; but one song, which he lead off, fell
apart.  He kept putting stops where there had never been any before and
confused the words of the verses and the chorus so that, in the end, he had
successfully rewritten the entire song and arrangement.  The band watched
him carefully and adjusted, and his harmony singers, as a team, simply made
the same adjustments to the words as the lead singer did to keep the song
together.  After the show, the banjo player's friends and fans came flying
in with one question on their lips: "Where did you get that marvelous
arrangement?  That was wonderful!".  They knew he drank, but were so
overwhelmed by what they heard that they did not notice the fluid-induced
nature of the musician they were quizzing.  Other fans came up to the rest
of the band glowing about the marvelous new version of an old traditional
tune that we had found.  "Where did we find it?", "How did we come up with
it?", they asked.  We didn't really have a good answer other than the truth
(which we did not reveal), but they did not seem to mind.  We continued to
use the new arrangement of the song that went awry for several years to
come, though we put the correct words back where they belonged.  The
accident came out happily and gave us some new ideas.

In both of these examples, good, experienced musicianship and band members
that knew each other fairly well covered for some serious sins, and the end
results were not all that bad.  Ultimately, the audience is the final
judge.  If they think you are a genius because you got lost and found your
way back, let them.  The event may even give you some more ideas to try out
in the future.

Cara


On 12/4/06, Jim Konish <jim.konish@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> This is really not so much a harp question as it is a band question.  Last
> night my band was hosting the local blues jam, and during our opening set
> we
> played Whammer Jammer.  It went great until the last drum fill before the
> final verse, when the drummer didn't end his fill quickly enough.  This
> threw me off a little, but I tried to just keep going as if it didn't
> happen.  The rest of the band basically dropped out and then quickly tried
> to jump back in before I was fully synchronized with the drummer, but they
> were starting their progression from the end of the fill instead of just
> keeping it where it should have been, so I had to insert an extra
> half-measure or so before we really got it back together.  The audience
> still went wild (they LOVE that song), but they had to have known that we
> screwed it up at the end.  So my question is, what are some strategies
> that
> you would use for recovering from a train wreck like that?  It seems like
> this is a useful thing for a band to practice because generally everybody
> knows how to recover from their own mistakes; you learn to take your own
> mistakes during a solo and just turn them into something new so the
> audience
> never knew you didn't plan it that way in the first place.  But when one
> person's mistake throws the rest of the band off, it's a lot harder to
> hide.
>
> Harp Content:
> I just got the tools and hardware from McMaster-Carr to convert all my
> Marine Bands to screws, and my initial test run on a harp with a broken
> reed
> turned out well.  The only reed that doesn't work on it now is the one
> that
> was broken before the mod :-)
>
> Jim Konish
> Harp, Trumpet
> Deep Blue Shag
> www.deepblueshag.com
> _______________________________________________
> Harp-L is sponsored by SPAH, http://www.spah.org
> Harp-L@xxxxxxxxxx
> http://harp-l.org/mailman/listinfo/harp-l