chicago circle rehearsal

Post 65 of 90.

Within 20 minutes of being on the road, it began snowing. I wanted to kick myself for not checking the weather forecasts.

Shortly after that, I got a call from Don on the cell phone. He had also run into snow on I70 heading into Indianapolis, and he had just recovered from disaster when his SUV slid completely off the road into the median. He was able to guide the vehicle back on the road and was unscathed, but it was a freaky moment for him. Luckily, nobody else was close enough to be drawn in, nobody was sitting in the median, and he was nowhere near a railing, wall, or bridge abutment.

I465 around Indy was a mess, and the cops were cleaning up numerous wrecks, including one on the ramp where it looked like the cars had collided and then somehow stuck together and spun around so they were facing back down the ramp. It must have just happened, since there were only four or five other cars backed up on the ramp with me.

Once I was on I465 itself, I saw cars here and there crumpled against the walls to the side of the highway. Traffic was slow, but some people were still making risky maneuvers. At one point, I drove faster than was probably safe just to put some distance between myself and rest of this mass of cars.

We met at the the T&A north of Indy around 8:30, about half an hour later than we had planned on. We loaded up Don's SUV and headed out. North of Indianapolis, the weather cleared up and we finally saw some salt trucks on the road (we speculated the storm had caught the highway department by surprise in other parts of the state). There were a few slippery spots here and there, but it wasn't too bad.

Even with the delays, we made it to Adrian's studio right on time at 11 o'clock.

We worked on Loren's "Road Trip" piece, and the work in rehearsal cleared up a lot of things for me. Then we moved to practicing standing up and plugged in in the arc formation we'll be adopting at the gig. Everybody had their feedback busters installed by this point and had found the trick of loosening the low C string slightly to get it into the soundhole.

It was very hard to hear. We were monitoring through the PA mains, and so you were either having your brains blown out by the sonic death ray emanating from the speaker cones, or, if you were off-access to the speaker, you were struggling to hear and discern which plinky, weedy note in the overall mass was yours. During circulations, I found myself falling back on the strategy of watching hands to know for sure when to play. I could hear all the notes being played, but I often couldn't tell without looking who had played it. During ensemble pieces, I could feel my pick against the strings and could feel the notes resonating through the body of the guitar, but I couldn't tell which note coming out of the speakers was mine. Or I just couldn't find my sound at all. Very weird. I twiddled on the preamp, but couldn't get anything dialed in.

The overall sound was often very good. I just couldn't tell which sound within that was mine a lot of the time.

Big free-associative digression...

There's something I've noticed about groups of people, although it's incredibly pronounced in rock bands, where ego and fantasy generally rule the day: very often, issues will remain intractable unless a credible "outside authority" is brought in--usually a producer, sound engineer or some other person with credentials who doesn't give a sh*t at the end of the day whether he's losing status at the high school or not. Once a balance of power or a pecking order is established in a group--and some sort of balance or pecking order will invariably arise in a group of human beings--it is often very difficult for even necessary changes to be implemented. Established politics and alliances constrain action, and few people are selfless or objective enough to get past it.

"Hey, I'm the drummer! Without me, you don't have a band! If you irritate me enough with your stupid suggestions, I will leave and you can waste as much time as you like fruitlessly searching for a replacement..."

"Hey, I'm the singer! Why should I care what the lowly keyboard player thinks? Who cares if he has a degree in music? Heck, I'll ignore his suggestions to the group because he has a degree in music! Besides, my girlfriend has told me I'm the most important one in the group..."

"I'm not going to listen to the guitarist! He stepped on my foot three years ago, the creep! Besides, the guy is clueless about picking up chicks. Would you listen to anything some chump like that had to say?"

Back to our regularly scheduled program...

During our work in the Cloud of Unknowing section of Trapiche, some interesting stuff happened. JN called some chords on the harmonic minor circulation, and we wound up with a lot of notes a half-step apart. It actually created this amazing, clustery avante-garde classical sort of sound, like Varese or something. This continued during a very jagged Cloud of Unknowing improvisation where the dynamics were jumping up and down in the coolest way (I thought). At one point, Don played a tremeloed gliss at the very tip-top of his fretboard, and everybody stopped cold for an instant in unison, as if we had been conducted into it.

As always, the drive back was long.

I ran into the snow again when I got south and east of Indy. I guess this band of bad weather had been hanging there all day between Indianapolis and Shelbyville. It snowed so hard at one point that I was having trouble seeing the road, both because it was buried and because of the wall of snowflakes in front of the headlights cut visibility down to about 15 feet. I don't think I got above 30 mph during the small eternity it took to get through this area.