The Musical Schizo

So, I’m a pretty atypical musician, I think.

I didn’t get into it for approval from women or anyone, I am not too precious to basically do anything related to music, and I’ve never done drugs.

Yes – you read that correctly. I’VE NEVER DONE DRUGS. Not even weed. (Sorry, 4:20 crowd…)

Now, you might think that it’s because I have some sort of puritanical attitude about them, but that’s definitely not it. I’m super cool with people doing drugs. Whatever gets you through. Just don’t let it screw up your life or your performance. Don’t kill yourself, don’t hurt anyone else, and don’t fuck up my show. Outside of that, have fun.

I’ve had my share of alcohol over the years, but since I kind of hate wine and hard alcohol and my body doesn’t metabolize it correctly anyway, it’s like I have a built-in regulator to prevent me from being a regular drunk.

As far as all the other drugs go, though, for years I’d say “I’m weird enough without them – no need to add to my craziness.” Then I had kids, and it was “I’m a dad – it’s not about me anymore, so I shouldn’t.” The truth was, I was afraid of the drugs not being exactly what they were supposed to be (being cut with something else in some way), and afraid of being caught with them and having that mark on my record. So I had cute excuses, but the truth was, I was just scared.

When my big kids were old enough, I started to warm to the idea of at least trying marijuana, but many years ago I made a promise to my brother Rob that if I was going to get high, the first time had to be with him. So I didn’t and haven’t yet.

I guess time will tell if I ever do get high, but at my age it kind of seems a little pathetic to take the risk, what with my just-barely-three-year-old running around.

So me and drugs might have to wait until I need them for glaucoma or something…

I still find it hilarious that most people simply can’t believe I’ve never done drugs, looking the way I do, but it’s true. I may present as a bearded Jesusy hippie guy, but that’s just a love and peace thing for me – no chemical modification required.

Sidestepping into current events:
– I hope that fucker rots for the murder and the sentence is stiff. Black Lives Matter.
– Don’t abandon precautions when it comes to coronavirus – we’re not out of the weeds yet. Get a goddamn jab and help protect everyone and prevent nasty variants.
– Be kind to each other, and get the facts before you state an opinion.

Peace be the journey and don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.”

TMS

The stage is set. The gear’s all loaded and set up. Soundcheck is done. Guitars are tuned, mixes tweaked. Now, we wait for downbeat. And here come our fans, streaming in, amped up, happy to see us play. They order drinks and food, get settled at their VIP tables or whatever, and are ready. Sometimes they’ll come say hello. Most of the time they’ll just stare at us, with an expression that says (to my brain), “Well, when are you going to start?” Even though we always advertise our start times. And even though they might not be thinking that at all.

For regulars or long-time fans, I will always tamp down my introversion and pretend to be super friendly and outgoing and greet them warmly when they approach or head over to say hello if they don’t. I try very hard to remember everyone’s name if I talk to them at a show. Having the luxury problem of being in a well-liked band means that usually there are too many people to remember. But I try. (Oh my god, do I try… #onbrand)

My feeling is that part of the reason our silly band works is our dedication to being interesting and putting on a fun show, but it’s also being approachable and very kind. People are not only excited to spend time with you singing along, but they love the fact that you care about THEM as individuals. And we honestly do, because we appreciate them more than they even realize. We know none of the energy or fun happens without them throwing it all back at us. The small kindness of spending time with your fans (or at least the people who are at the show that night that are checking you out – don’t want to jump the gun and call them fans without earning it) is one of the best things a band can do to build relationships and engender loyalty.

I always think about being a fan, and my interactions with artists. There are two things I always remember – people who are dicks or indifferent, and people who are kind and friendly. And it doesn’t take much to fall into the latter category. I will always adore Kelsea Ballerini because when she came to visit our radio station (my day job is as a commercial production director for radio), she made it a point to pop in and introduce herself and talk to me. It was very sweet, very genuine (she wanted to know what I did for the station), and she’s always been awesome when she’s come back, remembering me and having a nice little chat. And basically all she did was acknowledge my existence. Dicky Barrett from Mighty Mighty BossTones was at their merch table at the Warped Tour in 2000 or something and we had a LONG conversation about music and stuff – he was AWESOME to me and my friend. I have many more stories like this, both bad and good. Working in radio means I have met a lot of artists on promo tours and stuff – the new ones are in “full charm offensive” mode and it’s kind of adorable how nice they are…and even funnier when they become international superstars like Katy Perry and Justin Bieber (met both in 2008 – both were very nice, and so I still root for them…). Others have been kind of meh, but most are pretty good, because they have to be – they have a song or show to sell. The sincere ones are my favorites, though – the ones that are nice without there being much of a benefit for them.

So take this to heart – no matter how you feel in those non-music-playing times, remember that every interaction is a chance to make someone love you and thus love your band and support you. So be awesome if you can. Learn their name. Interact with them on social media (to a healthy extent – don’t be a creepy weirdo, overly intrusive/intimate, or salesy). Make the interactions about THEM not about you. They’re important. You seem important because you’re the one on stage. But if 2020 has taught me anything, there’s no show without an audience.

So, spread love. Acknowledge your audience members’ existence as fellow humans who are special and deserving of kindness and love. And remember how good you felt the time that guy or gal from that band was cool to you at the merch table or whatever. Give that love back all you can. Find ways to make them feel special without embarrassing them – so learn to read the situations right and don’t overdo it. (And watch out for psychos. They’re out there…)

I appreciate every awesome person who comes to see the band. And I look forward to seeing them all again soon. Yay vaccination!

Thanks for reading!
TMS

If there’s anything that I sort of expected from this pandemic was that we’d lose a bunch of gigs. I didn’t anticipate we’d lose over a YEAR of shows, but I am happy that people are getting vaccinated and things are slowly getting safer out there, so we’re getting closer to playing some shows (closer – nothing is final yet – and we’re definitely not show-ready, in terms of rust or stamina at this point).

I could go on a forty-page rant about how paranoid, stupid, shitty, and selfish so many people are in this country, but what would be the point? George Carlin said it best, “Think about how stupid the average person is, and realize – half of them are stupider than that!” I did my best to make sure I wasn’t passing around this shit, and thankfully, my precautions and care helped make it so no one I am close to got COVID-19. I’ve heard tales of many friends of friends, and some casual acquaintances suffering through it or losing friends and family to it, but I was fortunate to not know anyone who passed from it (that I know of).

My heart goes out to everyone who suffered loss as a result of this. And my heart goes out to all my fellow musicians and all the wonderful people we rely on (sound and lighting professionals, techs, venue ownership and staff) who suffered HARD as a result of the lockdowns – lockdowns that could have been avoided had we put a system like many other countries had in place, with widespread testing and contact tracing and strict quarantines for the exposed. Things basically every epidemiologist was saying were the way to handle this back in February. Every single one of those countries fared far better than we did through this bullshit. And basically, what it comes down to is that our leadership failed us completely. I’m not saying anything partisan here – Biden might have screwed this up just as bad at first for sure. But let’s get off this for a second and go into happier thoughts.

Like there’s this weird thing that I haven’t experienced for a long time – it’s called “hope”. People are excited about getting their vaccines. People are still wearing masks and practicing social distancing until enough people get the jabs. Everything is going the way it should.

3/4ths of the band (the vulnerable ones) are halfway to being fully vaccinated and we’re already talking to venues about future plans, possibly starting with outdoor shows. This is good. I’m excited to go out and make people happy while I do one of my favorite things – play music with my friends.

We’ve been having rehearsals, planning for the future, refining our show to allow for future expansion of the “show” aspect of it, and honestly, it’s gone GREAT so far. We’re already starting to sound like ourselves again.

It’s going to take some time to build up to our three- or four-hour extravaganzas, but I am very hopeful.

I’m happy about the way attitudes in leadership on the federal level have changed regarding this pandemic.
I’m proud of my efforts to do my small part in helping prevent the spread.
I’m excited for what the future holds, because I think happy times are just around the corner and we can stop losing so many people to this nonsense.
The math with vaccinations looks good. Here’s hoping it stays that way even with all the efforts of the toxic dipshits that hold certain government positions on the state level that keep trying to make it worse.

Stay safe, get a shot if you can, help the elderly and vulnerable get their shots if you can, and don’t lose hope.

Once we’re out there again, I hope to see some smiling faces singing along and dancing to our silliness.

Time to keep putting in my work so that live show experience is the best for everyone present.

Peace and love and good happiness stuff…and peace be the journey!
TMS

I like noodles.

Like, spaghetti, ramen, egg, Kevin from The Offspring, our brains, you know, all the cool noodles.

Of course, since this is a music blog, I’m not talking about food noodles or people noodles. I’m talking about noodles related to playing. Nothing too purposeful, just moving your fingers around and finding new ways to put notes together. Improvising little melodies or things that are completely pattern-based to stretch your fingers.

The Art of Noodling.

There are plenty of musicians who get annoyed at people who noodle during soundcheck, and I completely understand that feeling. It can be very annoying when your bandmates do that when you’re supposed to be getting things set up or getting sounds or whatever.

Annoying as it can be, it is FUN, no matter when you do it. It’s part of the love affair with your instrument. Yeah, you probably shouldn’t do it while people are setting up or waiting for you to play the soundcheck song, or at band practice when there’s a lull. Unfortunately, for most of us, the times are few and far between that we get to noodle at gig volume. Either we’re stuck in some apartment where we can’t be loud, or we have small children or people in our family with sensory issues – there are frequently obstacles to noodling.

I will say, it kind of makes me sad that there are no more Music Lab practice facilities in Austin (the last one just closed last month). I used to go to the one on St. Elmo during my lunch sometimes and crank my amp up to get sounds or just to be loud. It was great. Thankfully, even closer to home there’s Space Rehearsal, and it’s fantastic, but a little more pricey (and now a lot more busy).

Besides being loud, another aspect of noodling that is great fun is queueing up a song and finding the chords and key and noodling over top of it. It’s a great way to stretch out as a soloist and find your voice. It’s kind of how I learned to solo, actually. And to this day, I think I’m a fairly confident lead player because of it – I can almost always find something tuneful and interesting to play over whatever chord progression you throw at me, with a caveat: This is limited to pop, rock, country, and blues as of right now – some jazz stuff is still way over my head. But I still try. I still grab my guitar, throw together an inspiring sound or use one I already created, and noodle.

And you can do it, too, if you’ve never tried. You should, actually. The great part is that you can start super basic. Just find something with a basic chord progression or an easy 12-bar-blues sort of song – old Chuck Berry stuff is great – find the key, and find the notes that fit the chords. Let’s say you have a 12-bar blues in A – you can play pretty much anything with the notes A, C, D, E, G over it and make something approximating music while you learn to noodle. Add some other notes in there, like a D#, B, or F#, and you can add some really interesting texture and “flavor” to what you’re doing. If the chord structure underneath is basic – just A, D, and E – you can really go to town with those 8 notes and find interesting little melodies or harmonies.

The point is, stretch out. Don’t be afraid to sound like hot garbage. Messing around with scales and different notes is an excellent way to learn how different scales sound over different chord progressions. Learning what notes are in the chords you’re playing is also a good way of finding tasty source material for your noodling. Better yet, learn what notes seem “wrong” so you can color the main chords of what you’re playing and use those consonances and dissonances to make your noodles have some emotion and personality.

Or just say”fuck it” and wank whatever you want over it. There are plenty of “metal covers” of pop songs and stuff on YouTube and Instagram that basically feature the metal guy shredding metal licks over very non-metal songs that have been changed to have chunk-chunk metal rhythm guitars and typewriter bass drums. That’s kind of off topic, but that sort of wankery can be super fun, too.

So don’t worry about having a noodle plan, just NOODLE. It’s good for you.

Sadly, unlike most delicious food-type noodles – they’re just carbs, and we really don’t need a whole lot of carbs in our lives. I mean, we need enough, but we don’t need too many. Believe me, I know. I like all kinds of noodles WAY TOO MUCH. I am a chub chub as a result. But I can shred, kinda, so…

Have fun, take care, and peace be the journey!
TMS

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” – Robert Burns

Translated, that basically means the best-laid plans often go awry. And that sums up my week of March 1st.

I had plans to do a little live-stream concert, shoot my first video in what would be a series of me talking about my guitars, maybe shoot a Bathroom Schizo song or two, get all the tempo-mapped songs for Chandler and The Bings edited and distributed to the band, and I couldn’t even manage to write a Museday blog. Life did its very best to intervene in every imaginable way this week.

Seems like my toddler has decided to enter the “terrible twos” three weeks before he turns three. Meltdowns, irrational whining…you know – the good stuff. So that’s left me little energy to do anything. Plus as I’ve said before, I spend all day in front of my computer for my work. Since it’s likely most of the videos I’d shoot would be in the studio, my energy for spending another minute in there after working in there all day is basically zero. It’s a shame, too, because it’s a great space for it, with my guitars hanging on the wall as a good backdrop for everything. It’s super convenient, too, as I already have cameras set up that I use for work Teamsing and Zooming. But not this week. Two days working until 7:00 because of workload. I’d rather be anywhere else. So that knocks out most of those issues except the blogging.

And unfortunately, I’m just going to have to punt on having any sort of interesting topic to muse on, except to say that life really doesn’t give a shit if you have ideas about how you’re going to be living it sometimes. Sometimes it just lives you. (In Mother Russia…life lives you!)

In big-picture news, I’m optimistic about the numbers in the pandemic, and looking forward to this all being over soon. No matter what my dipshit governor says, we all still need to wear our masks and stay safe. Get vaccinated as soon as you can, and we can all get back to life on the planet and give each other hugs.

Walk with kindness, and may peace be the journey!
TMS

Ah, the good ol’ days. Selective memories of a better, vanished time.

Nostalgia. I’ve engaged in quite a bit of it here on this blog. And to be honest, I find it as comforting as it is crippling. If you’re a long-time reader of the blog I’m sure you’ve read something about my “nostalgia spirals” on here – they’ve grown far less frequent as those memories and feelings become more distant and I actively try to focus on being present in my life as it is happening, but in a lot of ways I kind of miss them.

I used to be very good at imagining myself in my past. When you couple that with my just-barely-asleep “dreams” (thank you, long-time sleep disorders) and my ability to influence the things that are happening, almost to the point of lucid dreaming, my brain can almost feel like a time machine. Of course, the bad side of it is when I get into nostalgia spirals and they cause insomnia because I just can’t STOP thinking about how it felt to walk from my dorm to the dining hall at my college on a Sunday afternoon (when it always seemed to be windy for some reason…) Or I can’t stop thinking about jogging down the carpeted hall in my dorm my freshman year and basically jumping down the two flights of stairs to the first floor. Or how it felt to crunch my bare feet into the Berber carpeting in the first house my daughter came home to when she was a baby.

All these sense memories are powerful for me, and they’re like a sensory rolodex that I can flip around and find something to make me feel safe and happy, strolling around in my past.

The beautiful part of this is as the situational memories sort of mush up and fade a bit, the sensory ones seem to be pretty solid so long as I remember the triggers.

Tying this back into nostalgia, the reason nostalgia has always had such a grip on me might be how I grew up. Trying to make sense of a life between the ages of 5 and 18 where we moved every two years (on average), it was hewn into the fabric of my very existence to cling to the familiar, because so much of life was unfamiliar on a regular basis.

I think I rolled with it well, and I had my little brothers and my parents as “fellow travelers” on the journey, but I don’t know that I ever shook nostalgia-as-coping-mechanism. My spirals grow strongest during my darkest depressions, desperately searching through my history for a time when I didn’t feel so detached and sad.

I usually find some memory and then I’ll try and ignore all the questionable parts of how I actually was at that time and focus on the things I did. Ironically, many of the ones I latch onto actually come from times in my life when I was powerfully depressed. There were many times when I wasn’t mentally all that fit when life was actually being rather kind to me – I just couldn’t shake my caustic brain and the terrible way it treated me. So I wander into those periods I think both because there are cool things happening but also because I know I’m in a similar mental state.

Which brings me to that which 2020 hath wrought. I’ve had a couple of pretty solid dips in the past year – sadly I’m going through one right now even though things seem to be looking up – and the times I was depressed I managed to use old fond memories and being present in my life at the same time to mitigate the pain. It’s actually nice having a little one around – the world is so new. If you imagine how they must see the world – all the possibilities and things to learn – it can really be a welcome distraction from that asshole in your head telling you you’re a piece of shit and a horrible husband and father and brother and son and friend, and terrible at your job, a shitty musician, etc. etc.

And so the toddler definitely helps, as does clinging to pleasurable memories, but my biggest issue is that if I linger too long thinking about the past, it gets infected with the bad talk of the present. I beat myself up in three ways, longing for a past that can’t be lived again, sad that it wasn’t appreciated when it was my life, and then guilty for wanting life to be something other than the blessed thing it is now.

And that’s the thing: I am truly thankful for the life I have. It’s pretty great. I don’t know that I’d want to relive other parts of my life knowing what I knew then. It’d be fun to tackle them knowing what I know now…that might be rather exhilarating. Dammit. I need an “Environmental Simulator” like on The Orville – or something like that, where I can revisit those situations completely. Or maybe not. Maybe that’d just be another spiral. Much like this. Or this. Damn if I don’t repeat myself sometimes. Anyway…

Back to the topic. Nostalgia. I love it, it’s helpful. But it’s also a prison. So I have to be careful. I’m interested in reading your takes on nostalgia and how it affects you – hit me with a comment if you like. I’d love to get some more perspectives.

Thanks for reading!
TMS

P.S. I get my first dose of the vaccine on Saturday. (yay obesity!) Next week’s post might be about that experience.

P.P.S. All the usual stuff – Black Lives Matter, wear a mask, physically distance, socialize digitally, wash your hands, care about facts…and a few new things: put country over party, call out bigots of every type, don’t mourn garbage that cancer takes out for us (not all of the dead deserve our respect, especially when they were horrid, cruel bullies who always talked ill of the dead and essentially ruined our discourse, radicalizing a large segment of our country and tearing it apart for their own financial gain), and believe in the common good and take care of people instead of being a selfish pile of shit.

I don’t think of music as a competition.

Even in the earliest days of playing music, I loved the idea of just finding ways to make sounds and play melodies so much that I don’t think I ever even really thought about where I stood in relation to other musicians.

I do remember being very proud to have been named to district band my first year playing an instrument (clarinet) in 4th grade. Coincidentally the same year I was put in the gifted and talented program. (Things were apparently good for Kid Schizo in the 1982-1983 school year.) But I don’t know that I thought of it as me fighting to be better than my peers in the band at school. I think I was just trying really hard to figure out how to read music and apply it to the fingerings I hadn’t quite mastered on the Bb clarinet.

School band wasn’t meant to be for me, though, because the following year I moved to northern California and I never stuck with it because the band director/teacher at my new school was an asshole who made me hate it.

I never stopped trying to make music, though. I had a toy ukulele that my parents got me that I’d always noodle on, and eventually I got a little Casio keyboard so I could create on my own terms. Just me and music. Even when I had a friend who was more advanced than me, I didn’t see it as trying to get better than him, I saw it as a way to learn.

Once I got to high school, and guitar entered the picture, I started to associate more with people my age who were learning how to play, and I became more aware that this sort of competitive attitude was a “thing”. That people in music were essentially doing the same thing we did in sports, “I’m better than you…” That’s not really how I’ve ever thought of music or approached it, but it was there.

The differences in ability level of the musicians I’d meet became something I noticed all the time. I was constantly comparing where I was to where they were. I don’t remember doing it in a competitive way, I think I was just a judgy twat. A Dunning-Kruger-effect-addled judgy twat.

You see, you don’t know what you don’t know. This is VERY powerful when it comes from moving from beginner to intermediate as a musician. When you make that jump, you really think you have a leg up on the beginners and are starting to be something special. But you have no damn idea how lame you actually are, because you can’t know that. You haven’t learned how to perceive it. That ignorance-fueled hubris was definitely a solid part of my development between the ages of 19 and 23. But then I grew…

And almost all of the “I’m better than that guy” shit started to melt away completely. Because I started to be around guys I was most certainly not better than, and I realized that I had a LOT to learn. And that was humbling and awesome and would set me on my path for the rest of my musical life.

Finding a way to make those competitive urges work in a positive way – as fuel and inspiration – is the only thing that makes them valid for music.

I don’t know I’m the best person to make such a generalized statement like that about these urges, because I have an inherent bias against them. Competitive urges are BAD for me. You see, I’m never more of a dick than when I’m playing a game of some kind. I can’t stand losing. In team sports, individual sports, board games, video games, whatever – I want – no, NEED to win. If I had ever applied this to music, I probably would have quit a long time ago, because I hate that aspect of my personality. I like to be a kind and good person, and that’s incompatible with me fueled by competitiveness.

Perhaps that’s just me and you can handle it. Well, good for you.

Either way, using those competitive feelings to yield positive results is the best thing. In my old Jacksonville band Slaphappy, we had our “friend bands”, the most prominent of which was Big Al and The Kaholics. They also were the most similar to us, so it was very easy for us to think about them as a rival as well (even though each band always recommended the other when they couldn’t do a gig). We made each other better by trying and failing various things, and supporting each other so we could both learn what worked and didn’t work with our similar audiences. It was a competition, but a very friendly one. And mutually beneficial.

If you get in a situation where someone blows your doors off, either by being a superior player or a more engaging performer, use it as an example of a path you can take, instead of being envious and trying to drag them down because they’re your competition.

(Speaking of the envy/dragging people thing – that’s a blog for another day. I’m not sure why musicians are so keen on this sort of behavior, but it would be super nice if they’d just fucking stop it.)

I find myself to be competitive in the sense that I always want to beat my last performance and continue to be awesome. It’s now been 355 days since my last show in front of a real, live audience. The bar has never been set lower. I just want to play.

Hopefully the band will figure out a time to practice next week so we can keep some forward momentum, and hopefully these immunity numbers for COVID-19 keep getting more promising as the vaccines get out there so we can get our asses back on stage with our people. I miss live performance more than I ever have missed anything relating to my music.

Y’all take care – Texans keep staying strong because we fucking have to – none of the dipshits in government seem to give a crap about fixing anything long-term. My love and warmth goes to everyone suffering because of the avaricious swine that run our energy grid and energy companies. And a big FUCK YOU to the governor, senators, and representatives who aren’t doing JACK FUCKING SHIT for Texans who are hurting.

Mask up, distance yourself, talk to your loved ones on video chat, give your immunized mom a hug if it’s been more than two weeks since her second dose of the vaccine. Black lives matter.

Peace be the journey!
TMS