Your Brow Is Sweatin' and Your Mouth Gets Dry

Believe it or not, I once attended banjo camp in Colorado with Pete Wernick, a personal hero.  I was heavy into the banjo then ... but that's another blog entry (aka "story").  Anyway, this 14-year-old kid came in one day and played this banjo instrumental like wildfire without a shred of performance nerves.  I was amazed, and of course jealous.  Pete told me later that if you played a lot in front of other people before you started puberty, you'd never have stage fright.  I thought that was maybe true, but at least a good line.  I've always had a bit of stage fright up there and I've never gotten to the point where I could totally relax on stage.  It's gotten better over the years, but never been totally cured.  Maybe I got puberty young...

But as I digitize these old cassette recordings of mine made between the ages of 14 and 19, I hear an earlier me that was in many musical respects completely unafraid.  There's no perfectionism in it, no need to "get it right."  All I wanted to do was play, and the tape recorder seemed to be easily forgotten as I got into the song.  It makes me aware of how much more brittle one can become in certain respects as one gets older.  Maybe it's that we didn't know anything back then, didn't have anything to compare what we were doing to.  Maybe the joy of making notes come out of the guitar was enough.  That's the beauty of garage bands -- the whole garage band phenomenon.  Of course it mostly sucks!  And it doesn't matter.  It was never about being professional.  That's what punk was trying in its own way to recapture.

Anyway, it's ironic that one of the songs I recorded back then was The Band's "Stage Fright."

My wife is seven years younger than me, and in many ways it doesn't matter.  But in some ways it does.  To be born in 1956 meant you were listening to the transistor radio when The Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" came on.  You were at Jones Beach and listening to "Good Lovin'" or "Tracks of My Tears" or "Strawberry Fields" when they were just out, and so there was a real, concrete connection between the song and your life that people don't have when it's their older sibling's music they've discovered or (worse yet) they hear it on an "oldies" station.  It's weird and very cool to realize that a lot of the songs I was playing had come out within a year or two of my learning them.  I had no idea I was cutting edge!  I was just playing the music I liked.  I was cool and never knew it.