You know you’re doing okay in your art when the process of setting up to create — be it preparing your materials, rehearsing for the billionth time, or dragging a seventy pound amplifier around when your flu-ridden body would rather use it as a final resting place — is not that much of a hassle.  Fun, at absolute best, or, in my case, something that I don’t even notice anymore.

We finish setting up the amps and the pedals and the mic stands, and Kyle calls me over to the bar. “Minimal volume, yeah?”  My god, we haven’t even played a single note yet, and they’re already asking us to turn it down.  What did we do to deserve this – outside of playing to the deaf people three states over most of the time? I assure him this will be no problem tonight — we’re coming off a hard played gig on Saturday, and I worked a nearly 24 hour day on Friday (leading to my relapse), so minimal is no problem.  Minimal volume, tempo, and effort.

Playing a quiet gig is hard for rock and roll — because often, playing quietly means that you’re gonna lose your energy.  Combine that with playing for a Sunday night crowd at a bar that is known more for it’s beer selection than it’s live music, and you’ve got a challenge — one that I think Eric and Carlos and I more than met last night.

Being a musician is much more than learning how to read dots on a page and play them with correct pitch and tempo.  One of the most overlooked abilities — at least, from what I’ve witnessed over fifteen years over working in audio and bars and playing in bands  — is dynamics — being able to bring the music up or down on the fly.  The term dynamics in music refers most commonly to volume or intensity, but I’m talking here also about tempo, about feeling, about any number of things that the song might call for at a given moment.  Musicians don’t seem to learn this — some of the most talented musicians I know seem incapable of using dynamics on an unprocessed instrument, relying on pedals and Eventides to take things up or down a notch.

Eric and Carlos and I showed why the Exhibit(s) are such a good band — we all have a strong sense of dynamics, and a good chemistry that allows us all to flow on the spur of the moment.  Chance has it too — that’s one of the first things I noticed when I started playing with he and Eric three years ago.  The four of us, all pushing and pulling and pounding away at a song until it just falls into place some nights — it’s like the rock and roll version of Brokeback Mountain.  Only without the cowboys (though Chance sometimes wears that hat).

I think it should be said that any weekend that earns you hundreds of dollars for hanging out in bars is not a bad one, return of the great white flu or no.