Once In A While, You’ll Play A Sour Note.
It was at a club in Tennessee: BB Kings in Nashville, and the jam was scheduled from noon to 4 PM on a Saturday. I signed up, introduced myself and waited. Nashville is different. Like Austin, they realize that some of the best musicians in the country are around them. In Austin that means you’ll likely play with some great musicians. In Nashville it’s a badge of honor to get up to play and this is one jam town where you might not get up to play for a long time. When you do get invited up, you better play well.
I didn’t. In fact, I played the wrong key on the first bar and never played another note and was invited off the stage after the first song. I paid my bar tab, fielded a “Hey dude happens all the time…” comment from the bar tender. Hell, I just picked up the wrong harp. It’s not like I couldn’t get it up. But those sorts of things feed the Nashvillian notion of the inherent superiority of Nashville and surrounds.
But that’s a whole other column.
I have spent twenty years sitting in on blues jams and with bands and in picking circles. You people who have been around the block? I AM the block. So I have seen and done everything, including bomb, like the US over North Vietnam, from time to time I have bombed. Now, how can you bomb playing a simple instrument like a harmonica…..you might be asking. Well, let me tell you.
Easy.
The thing about the harmonica is that it is so easy to play, there is level of immediate competent playing available to literally everyone with lips and the ability to breathe in and out. I could take a perfect stranger, and after a song has started, give her the right harp, tell her where to exhale and where to draw, and she would sound OK.
The harmonica is an instrument just like any other. But you can’t play the first time you hold a saxophone or a trumpet. The tenth time you play a harmonica you can sound fairly competent. That’s why horn players hate harp players. A sax player can take a year before they can rip out a gorgeous riff. A harp player can own the room in half the time. The harp is so powerful, it can amplify your presence in a band. It can amplify your mistakes as well.
But even if you play something else, something really complicated like a saxophone or a clarinet or a guitar, then you are going to make a few mistakes. And when you do, depending on the level of the mistake, everyone will hear it. You can sometime see the mistake in the band leader’s face, when they wince. It’s a hard thing to live through. Then again it’s only for a moment, until the next note is played.
One of the things I used to do was box. I learned that whenever you you get into the ring, you might get knocked out.
When you go on stage at a jam, you might blow a bad note.
It’s life.
One of the things that is cool about our country: It’s huge. And everywhere there are Americans and everywhere there are Americans, there are Blues Jams. So you can rest assured that you will not have to play at that club again and there are plenty of other places to play if it is in your DNA to put it behind you.
Once at a SPAH convention ( Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica) I was in a jam circle with Rob Paparozzi, a famous virtuoso harmonica player. I played the wrong key when I got my 12 bars.
“That’s OK, Catfish. You played perfectly in 16th position.”
Whatever you did, just learn from it. I guarantee you one night, decades ago, a young guy named Bob Dylan was on stage at a dive somewhere and played a bad note. He got over it.
