Musings
Peter Bolland
10-1-02
Column 27

Broken Hills

ooooRecently I have had the delightful and agonizing task of coming up with a band name. Oh boy.
ooooBand names are easy to come up with. I got a million of them. What’s harder is coming up with the right one, one that really fits.
ooooComing up with stupid band names is a good way to pass the time. You should try it. Simply put any word you like after the word “the”. Or put any two or three words together. Boom. You’ve got a band name. You really can’t go wrong.
ooooLook around where you’re sitting right now. Start putting words together. Stereo Lamp. Paper Door. Wooden Cord. Happy Dog. Empty Cup. Air Vent.
ooooOr try the “The” approach. The Floorboards. The Dust Bunnies. The Tiles. The Shoes. The Outlets. Whatever. In the abstract, there is no such thing as a bad band name. But in the concrete, there are some bad fits.
ooooGetting ready for my official CD release party, I wanted to recruit some other musicians to help flesh out the songs. Normally I do shows with Marcia Staub who plays bass and sings harmony. We’ve been doing that for a while, and it’s simple and nice and good. But I wanted to add drums and keyboards and another guitarist. So we needed a name. The hunt was on.
ooooA band name is like an impossibly tiny poem. It needs to say so much with so little. It needs to be packed with meaning, even if the meaning you wish to convey is that it has no meaning. It has to say even that with conviction and style.
ooooMy first consideration was this: I wanted to have my name in the band name for one simple reason. I didn’t want to start over. I have some brand name recognition in this town, such as it is, and I wanted to trade on that.
oooo“The Peter Bolland Band” certainly works as an identifier, but lacks imagination.
ooooMy friend Tony Horkins, who is a real writer and everything, suggested “Peter Bolland and The Motel Six”. I loved it, and still might use it at some point because it does convey that working-class, outskirts of town, veneer of kitsch on a decaying core sensibility, all with a wry grin. But there was a problem with the fit.
ooooIf you’re going to use your own name in your band name, there’s the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers model or the Neil Young and Crazy Horse model. One has the word “the” in it and one does not. I am leaning toward the one that does not. So it will be “Peter Bolland and something something”. With all this in mind I narrowed down my list.
ooooI ended up with Broken Hills. At first I rejected it as I had all the others. But every band name sounds dumb when you first say it. The Beatles? Come on. But now The Beatles is nothing but great.
I’m tempted to try and explain why Broken Hills is a good choice. But I won’t. I’ll just let it be. I’ll let it suggest what it suggests. I’ll let it sound the way it sounds. The soft resonance of its vowels, the hard click of its central consonant and the infinite fade of its final sibilant is just as important, maybe even more so, than the denotations of the words. But it’s the connotations and allusions that matter most. A band name needs to plow up a field of associations and experiences and memories in which our thoughts can lay seed and bear fruit. A name needs to evoke a feeling, a feeling that comes around the back without knocking and surprises you with its incongruous freshness and familiarity. Like a finger pointing at the moon, a good name should lead you away from itself and toward an encounter with something transcendent. There should be a core of awe beneath the comfortable warmth of its banality. It should tug at your heart a little. But with just the right touch. Like a good haiku, a band name should convey something of the hidden eternal quality behind the apparent surface transformations. Broken hills last. They stay. They bear witness. They bear a great deal. They stand. They feel their connection to the earth, yet stand above it. They are of the world and of the sky. They are not uncommon. We live within them. They bear their scars handsomely. They will be here long after we have gone.
ooooPeter Bolland and Broken Hills. I’ll let it sit for a while and see how it feels down the line.

There are broken hills
That rain and wind eroded
But clouds blow away

Musings
Peter Bolland
9-1-02
Column 26

Into Thy Hands I Commit My Spirit

ooooIt is finished. After four years, or is it five, my record has finally left my weary grasp and is on its way to the manufacturer. I should have a box of CDs in my closet by the end of the month.
ooooThese last few days of the process, listening to it one more one more time, listening to it so many times that you nearly don’t hear it anymore; it just glosses over into one swirling sheen like oil on water. You try to discern the things you need to discern, but your body is telling you it just can’t absorb anymore. The record is done and so are you. You can listen but you can no longer hear. And besides, you’ve fixed everything that needs to be fixed. There’s nothing really wrong with any of it anymore. Leave it alone and let it go.
ooooKnowing when to let go, knowing when to stop, this is the most crucial moment in the process of the production of any work of art. It’s a moment ripe with frustration. Because you’ve pushed through that feeling before and made some changes and it got better. So now you’re wondering, is it really done? What if I…
ooooOne of the things that happens when you make a record is that by the time you’re done, you’ve already moved on to a new batch of songs. Some of the songs on Frame were written six or seven years ago and in those years I’ve performed them hundreds of times. In the last seven years I’ve written over ninety new songs. And ten or twenty of them are pretty damn good. Those are the ones I like to play these days. The ones on Frame are certainly good as well or I wouldn’t have bothered recording them, but the set list is getting pretty crowded and naturally the older ones get pushed out.
ooooI was so fortunate to have a skilled and dedicated collaborator, my co-producer, friend and brother-in-law Michael Krewitsky. Michael handled all the recording, editing, mixing and mastering chores with great patience, expertise and very high standards. This record sounds amazing, and that is all because of him. I’m just a guitar player.
ooooThe drum team of Craig Zarkos and Cliff Almond did a beautiful job recording and playing drums and percussion. The decision was made early on in this project that we weren’t going to cut any corners in the drum department. Anybody with a brain knows that drums are the most important part of a rock and roll record, so we went to the best people we could find. And they did magic for us.
ooooBut in many ways the heart of the record is Marcia Staub, friend and bass player. Her bass is the soft, warm feather bed upon which these songs live their dream lives. And her bass is the vein of gold that runs through the rock. Her voice, at once strong and yielding, blends with mine so that it seems we’ve been singing together a hundred years. Marcia is one of the main reasons this record feels so good.
ooooA project like this comes out of the depths of one’s life, and so truthfully I need to thank everyone who has in any way contributed to the construction of my character. I can’t in good conscience bore you with a list that long, so, you know who you are. Any of you who have touched me in any way will find yourselves in the tracks of these songs.
ooooOne more thing. There is one person without whom this record would have quite simply never happened. My wife Lori does something for me with unfailing consistency. She believes in me. She sees what is good and strong in me and like a master gardener she nurtures and cultivates all of that with her hands and her heart and her eyes and her voice and her unwavering dedication. She sees through the weeds. She is a miracle to me. In her eyes I have no limitations and I am at my best when I believe her.
ooooIn a few weeks I’ll have my box of CDs and the marketing process will begin. In the lull before the storm I realize that a piece of my soul is about to be bared to the world. I will stand before the world, (or whoever I can get to), naked. I trust that it will be well met by some, ignored by others and loathed by some as well. But I have done all I can do. I have reached the end of this project. It finished. Into thy hands I commit my spirit.
ooooAnd on to the next record.

Musings
Peter Bolland
7-1-02
Column 25

Theater

ooooIf you’re at all like me, you sometimes get a little jaded and apathetic about the creative process and its products. The sheer volume of exquisitely produced visual and aural art saturating our culture can’t help but overwhelm our puny little intake valves. So from time to time it pays to strip it back down to the primal level.
ooooIt was my good fortune to attend a small theatrical presentation of Shakespeare’s Othello, staged by the Women’s Repertory Theatre here in San Diego. The WRT is a local group whose mission it is to create, develop and lavish upon women the juicy roles that traditionally go to men. To this end, the group is currently staging Othello with an all-female cast. Not so strange when you consider that in Shakespeare’s time all the roles, men and women, were played by men.
ooooThe sixty-seat theater was mostly full when the house lights went down and the room went black. Footsteps of real shoes on real feet on a real stage broke the silence as the stage lights gradually increased. I sat on the edge of my seat, a position I rarely relinquished during the nearly three hour performance. It was, I know it’s a cliché but I’m going to say it anyway, electrifying. To hear and see such powerful people, right in front of me, living out the compact wit and essential passion of Shakespeare’s remarkable vision of the human condition with all its sad errors and sexual tensions and warm humor, well, I felt as if I was staring down God-like into a cosmos far more compelling than my own. I know of few other experiences that so effectively conjure up the twin contradictory phenomena of omniscience and humility at the same time. And then it hits you: this is our world and it is unspeakably more beautiful than we commonly believed. It takes great art to shake the dust from our eyes, to show us the endless majesty of our own existence, a realization so often hidden from us by the tedium of our routinized lives.
ooooHere in this small theater, no microphones, no digital processing, no mediation, just living, breathing, warm bodied people with blood coursing through their veins crying, plotting, laughing, groping, stabbing, falling and feeling the full weight and breadth of the cosmos. A few simple objects on stage; a bench, a knife, a bed. Little but the power of language and the way our bodies speak a language all their own. It was overwhelming.
ooooI left the theater strong in the conviction that art is the essential language of the human race, it’s the way we communicate to ourselves our fears and the means by which we alleviate those fears. Art encapsulates and re-presents to us all the blood and glory and pageantry of the procession of time. In the myriad ways we have of digitizing and duplicating and portraying the pageant, at the heart of it all there must always be a living, breathing, human being, naked and unashamed, speaking one true thing, then another.

Musings
Peter Bolland
6-1-02
Column 24

The Beauty of Imperfection

ooooMaster Persian rug weavers intentionally include a mistake in every rug they weave to honor the notion that only Allah is perfect. This is both a conscious act of reverent humility and a telling commentary on the nature of beauty. I generally don’t have to try so hard to ensure the presence of imperfection in the things I make. The challenge is rather to roll back the imperfection to a dull roar.
ooooThe practiced humility of the rug weaver is mitigated by the sheer brilliance and virtuosity of their work, another problem I don’t have. But the notion that imperfection is an integral aspect of beauty is an intriguing one. Perfection and that which is aesthetically pleasing are apparently not one and the same. I don’t even know what perfection means, but for our purposes here I suppose it means the attainment of some sort of consentual ideal. Everything in its place. Precision. Excellence. Locked in. Perfect pitch.
ooooI play a lot of slide guitar and lap steel guitar and like any fretless stringed instrument, you can go pretty much any where you want to go, and a lot of those places are places you don’t want to go. And you can’t think about it too much. You simply have to feel your way to the next sweet spot. I find it’s better to stop just flat of a note than to go sharp of it. When you’re flat of a note, there’s always the hope that it’ll eventually resolve, leaving the listener with a vague sense of longing. But when you’re sharp, you’ve gone past it, and there’s no going back, leaving the listener with the high-pitched sadness that can only come from missed opportunity and irreplaceable loss. And forget about hitting the note perfectly. You’re either flat or sharp. Pick one. And act like you own it.
ooooThat’s where vibrato comes in. That way you swirl drunkenly between flat and sharp, safe in the confidence that the true note is in there somewhere. Let the listener find it. You’ve done all you can. They’re on their own now.
ooooMaybe artists just point at beauty. They don’t have to deliver it wrapped with a bow for ready consumption. They merely define the brackets within which it can be found. Great art draws the audience into an experience that transcends the actual artwork. Artists don’t create the experience. They create an opportunity for an experience. You have to have the experience. Whether you have it or not is your business. As Gloria Steinam and the 70s feminists taught us, we are all responsible for our own orgasms. Art can compel, but it cannot coerce. Art can seduce, soften up the opening, but it cannot create an opening where there isn’t one. An artwork is a vehicle, not a destination. You have to get in and hang on. If the ride is good, you’ll forget the map and like a shuttlecock through a loom, you’ll become part of something larger than your self. You might even attain the beauty of imperfection.

Musings
Peter Bolland
5-1-02
Column 23

Art and Life

ooooIt would be nice to make a little money at this art thing. Have some company give us $25,000 or $250,000 to make a record. Then they’d take the single and shop it hard to corporate radio and get it played. Then we’d sell a bunch of records and be rich and famous but most importantly justified, that we hadn’t been wasting our time. Our faith in ourselves was not misplaced. We did have something to say, something people wanted to hear, needed to hear.
ooooBut what if it didn’t work out. We toured relentlessly, we made a few records, we met all the right people, we got our product out there. But we were too quirky for the major labels, too mainstream for the indies. And we were getting older. Thirty turned into forty. The kids getting signed were half our age. The women we met at cocktail parties, as soon as we answered their question, so, what do you do, we saw them scanning the room looking for something better. We felt ourselves becoming invisible, fading. Being a starving artist is very cool when you’re in your twenties. There’s something romantic and courageous and seductive about it. By thirty-five, people begin to look at you funny. When you hit forty, it just gets worse. You say, yeah, I’m a singer songwriter, and you see the sadness and fear in their eyes, as if you just told them you have cancer.
ooooBy forty you are supposed to have given up on your youthful dreams and become practical. Of course you wanted to be an astronaut and a cowboy and a rock star. But it just doesn’t seem to be working out. The subtle and not so subtle pressures of life carry you along to an impending decision. The conflicting voices inside you say what the hell am I doing? Part of you wants to get married, have a family, have a mortgage and two dogs and a bunch of kids and coach your unborn daughter’s soccer team. Part of you wants to be a rock star. Maybe it’s a false dilemma. Maybe there are more than just two choices.
ooooIn the Italian Renaissance the idea of the artist as genius was born. Before that, in the Middle Ages, artists were viewed as capable blue-collar craftsmen, workers who provided a service. Michelangelo belonged to a painter’s guild made up mostly of housepainters. But by the time Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael got done with us, the idea of the artist as superstar celebrity had been born. Wealthy patrons lined up for the privilege to support them. And here, these six hundred years later, we’re still laboring under the delusion that artists are gods. Our celebrity-driven culture and the moneymaking machine it supports blithely perpetuate this notion. We assume that if an artist is brilliant enough, some business entity should simply drop a million dollars in their lap and beg them to sing a song.
ooooPerhaps there’s another model to consider. Around the same time as the Italian Renaissance, in 15th century Ming Dynasty China, a different portrait of the artist emerged. The Chinese began to reject the idolization of the professional artist in favor of the amateur. The scholar-gentleman artist who practiced art as one facet of a fully realized life became the new ideal. In this Chinese aesthetic, the most admired painters were the amateurs who had integrated their art into the larger contexts of their lives as fathers, husbands, professionals, scholars and citizens. They did not sacrifice their life for their art. Quite the contrary, they turned their well-lived life into fuel source for their art. No more paintings and songs about dating angst, broken hearts, that thing that happened at the prom and how deeply satisfying it is to be stoned and drunk. More adult themes emerged. The dialectic between the longing for solitude and the joy of community. The elusive quality of justice. The eternal slow burn of marital love. A sacred sense of place. The contemplative reverie of watching your children grow. The joy of building something, and letting it go. The grandeur of the passage of time.
ooooSo what role should art play in our lives? We still need the young heroes out there on the edge, sacrificing it all in the quest for the prize. But there needs to be an open acceptance of the skilled amateur as well. “Amateur” means of course one who does it “for love”. And true love needs no other reward.
ooooThe purpose of art is relationship, to say something beautiful and funny and sad and true about our lives here together. Good art holds your inner thoughts out at arms length so you can finally get a good look at them. Good art knows your secrets and whispers them back to you. In the dialogue you learn that you are not quite the stranger you thought you were. In the end, in the final assessment, that is what any artist wants. To be seen and heard and in turn to see and hear, to be the lifeline between souls caught crossing the flood of lies that flashes across the arid landscape of our postmodern existence. Art is the eucharist of mystic participation and the salve of salvation. Here is my body, here is my blood. I will stand in for you. You will stand in for me. I will be you. You will be me. That’s what the blues singers call bringing it on home.

Musings
Peter Bolland
4-1-02
Column 22

Tribal Lines

ooooIn a recent public television program called Song of the Earth, Richard Attenborough raised some very interesting and important ideas regarding the origin and purpose of music. In case you missed it, or weren’t taking notes, here’s a second look through my eyes.
ooooMusic is so often ballyhooed as the great cultural unifier, the force that will erase our primeval inter and inner-species rivalries and our seemingly innate impulse to xenophobia. There is much evidence for this position. Music does bring different kinds of people together. Musical genres continue to blend with new mutations emerging every week or so. One could reasonably assume that one day soon there will simply be one world music, where steel guitars and didgeridoos and djembes and bagpipes and cellos and snyth loops all lie down together in the heather like proverbial lions and lambs. And we will all hold hands and sing as one.
ooooBut another assertion is equally true. Music is a social mechanism for delineating tribes. As we peer into the murky past of our species, we discover several undeniable truths about the emergence of music. Music emerged primarily as a means to articulate territorial boundaries and to attract mates. And we also probably just plain liked it. Music was a means by which our developing brains could exercise their increasingly complex and integrated functions. Archaeology reveals physical evidence of a rich musical life 30,000 years ago. A flute with a rather precise and complicated musical scale tells us that its creator, some forgotten Homo sapien, had a rather sophisticated and well-developed sense of music. We see no such evidence in Neanderthal sites. Perhaps music is one of the many things that set us apart from our Neanderthal neighbors. Knowing how we are, these ancient Homo sapiens doubtlessly lorded this ability over their tuneless Neanderthal friends. The Neanderthals died out a few centuries later. We’re still here, making music at a feverish pitch.
ooooWe were playing flutes 30,000 years ago. We didn’t invent written languages until 25,000 years later, a mere five thousand years ago. Practically yesterday. No one knows when we invented spoken languages. 100,000 years ago? 20,000 years ago? There is no way of knowing. But one thing is certain. We made sounds before we made words. We sang before we spoke. The music came before the lyrics. Animals teach us that, among other things.
ooooWhen we study the musical animals, the gibbons and the mockingbirds and the whales, we clearly see that the purpose of music for them is primarily twofold, to establish territorial boundaries and to attract mates (and perhaps for just plain old enjoyment; that part is harder to measure). We see this same phenomenon in the music of primal human culture too. And all these years later nothing’s changed. Our primal war cries, our college fight songs, our national anthems and our pop ditties all exist to set a tribe apart from the whole as if to say to the world, we defy homogenization, we will not be absorbed into the herd. Here we are, we happy few, this band of rebels, united in our practiced differentiation from you, in proud defiance of the collective. We are not like you, we are like us, and we’re pretty much sort of better than you, and we are very very proud of that.
ooooEach wave of youth culture invariably strives to create music that sets it apart from its elders. There’s a reason that new music often seems to openly mock the very source from which it emerges. Because it does. Mocking, taunting and ridiculing all rolled up into an ironic self-awareness, pitched as open defiance, choreographed by the hen house cock. Think Elvis on Ed Sullivan. His message to all those old men in crew cuts was clear: out of the way old man, you’re blocking my view of your daughter. Jim Morrison would say it with an even darker Freudian twist a few years later in his song The End: “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to ball you.” This is the end indeed. That wry, knowing grin, that lurching wriggle, that lecherous sneer, that murderous scream. Those relentless drums. Elvis and Morrison and a legion of others were declaring war on old people. Young people openly weeped in recognition and solidarity, hearing the call to arms, their souls emerging from their confining cocoons, each crack of the snare drum another tear, and they were flushed with the dawning realization of their own power, their own significance as autonomous human beings. They shimmied and shaked and jumped straight up into the knowledge that they were taking over your town, burning down your gazebo and pissing in your hedges. And the old people looked on in impotent horror. Their tribe would lose the war just as surely as they had defeated their elders a few years earlier. And just as surely all those screaming teenagers who saw Elvis in the Ed Sullivan Theater are now driving RVs toward Branson, Missouri, desperately clinging to a musical world that is shrinking, beaten down by the bombastic sounds of their grandchildren’s Korn records.
ooooWhen you hear music blaring out of cars you are hearing a manifesto of tribal solidarity. And it is simultaneously a cry of defiance against all other tribes. Music is not a unifying force. It is instead a mechanism which prevents our absorption into the masses. Just as we need a sense of individual uniqueness within our tribe, we also need a way to herald and champion our tribal affiliation in marked contrast against the overwhelming mass of humanity, a group so large and so varied that within it we would surely be lost and unheard. And we use music to assert our disconnection from the elder generation, a tribe who is in the final analysis simply that much closer to death than we are. And nobody wants to be a part of that. Turn it up.

Musings
Peter Bolland
3-1-02
Column 21

Stage Fright

ooooSo many people are afraid of so many things. Some fear is purposeful and beneficial. Most is not. When we are afraid of something, what is it we are trying to protect?
ooooSinging in public, especially singing songs you have written yourself, is to lay yourself bare. It’s kind of like taking your pants off. And yes I mean your underwear too. In front of a bunch of strangers. In fact, I think taking your pants off would in many ways be easier. When you open your mouth in front of an audience and push large volumes of air out through your throat and across your vocal chords using your cheeks, teeth, tongue, lips and jaws to shape sounds, you are engaging the world in intercourse, body and soul. There is little of you left to the imagination. It’s all out there for everyone to see, hear, feel and touch. You are exposing the deepest recesses of your being, parts of you you hardly understand yourself, parts of you you wouldn’t want your own mother to see, and she’s changed your diapers.
ooooDifferent performers cope with this fear in different ways. That hour before the show is treacherous territory. Some grow sullen and withdrawn, gallows laughter escaping their pursed lips in dry, lifeless bursts. Others become excessively gregarious. Others just disappear and you find them in the alley out back, chain smoking, pacing, staring out from the vacuum of their eyes.
ooooThen on stage comes the transformation. Like a flag unfurling or a time lapsed rose, one by one the wrinkled layers snap open and with each moment another revelation, another beautiful color strikes out across the room and into your heart.
ooooMost people are deathly afraid of singing in public. A man from Tonga told me a simple truth about why people are afraid to sing in front of other people. He said, “They don’t want people to see who they really are.” When you sing, your façade is shattered. The carefully crafted persona you have toiled so long to maintain is in an instant ripped away and there you are, naked and unmediated. Most people prefer to remain hidden, to maintain the illusion that they are the sole creator and the source of their entire image. If you don’t really do anything, it is possible to perpetuate this fraud for quite some time. But as soon as you try to really create something, to sing a song for example, then your control slips away and you realize the humbling truth. You are not in charge of everything.
ooooPerhaps that’s what’s frightening too. The letting go that is required in any good performance. An artist is a channeler. A good artist drops all the stops and lets the power flow through them. It is a curious blend of release and control. And it changes you. You grow to trust yourself more. You grow more accustomed to letting go. You learn that no matter what, not everyone will like you. Half the room will not be impressed. But a few people will be moved. They will be moved by your beauty, your fearlessness. They will carry that with them. It will change them too. It will awaken in them the sense that they had underestimated themselves, and that they stand on the shore of an immense ocean, and they feel the water lapping at their toes. And they will want to learn to swim into the depths of their own unfathomable significance
ooooIn world mythology, in the archetypal hero’s tale, from Gilgamesh to Moses, from Gawain to Frodo, from Luke Skywalker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the hero must face the monster. It is only in that moment when we face and pass through our annihilation that we become who we truly are. It’s as if we are waiting to be born. And the monster, that fear, turns into an energy source, the catalyst of our transformation. At root, stage fright is the fear of moving from one stage of our lives to another, of changing into our truer, more authentic selves. It hurts to have the mask ripped away. But it doesn’t hurt half as much as never taking the mask off at all.

Musings
Peter Bolland
Column 20
2-1-02

Dos and Don’ts for Being in a Band

ooooBeing in a band, collaborating with other performing artists, being a catalyst in the ecstatic communal alchemy that ignites an audience, these are some of greatest experiences life has to offer. Don’t screw it up.
ooooHere are some things you ought to do, or avoid doing, to make your time on earth as a musician all the more satisfying for yourself and others.
ooooWhen you’re loading into a venue or a rehearsal space, put down your stuff and help the drummer. He has more stuff than you do. Drummers are hard enough to get as it is. Treat them like gods and they might just stick around. They tend to suffer in silence, but hold long grudges. While you’re plugging in all your tiny stupid effects pedals he’s busy lugging and constructing a small city known as a drum kit. Help him. Don’t ask, “Hey, do you need a hand?” God that’s lame. Just grab something.
ooooWhether on stage or at practice, no noodling. This is often the quickest way to tell the difference between an amateur and a professional. Amateurs noodle incessantly. This musical incontinence is the result of an odd combination of low self-esteem, the need to show off and just plain nervous energy. Fully conscious musicians of course realize that this annoys the hell out of everyone so they don’t do it, but rookies still believe that everyone within earshot actually wants to hear the screeching pterodactyl moans they can elicit from their guitars.
ooooThe quieter you are between songs, the better. Noodling on stage between songs or before the show while the audience is filing in fills the air with noise that both distracts and dissipates the energy that should be building. Silence is the most powerful sound of all. As in sex, mounting anticipation is a crucial component of a successful coupling between performer and audience. At band practice the same rule holds but for different reasons. Noodling is just annoying. The band is trying to work out arrangements and make crucial decisions and get their heads together on a number of issues and you’re filling the air with obnoxious riffs from some stupid classic rock song, or worse yet, just playing the solo from hell for no particular reason while the rest of the band tries to shout over you and get some actual work done. Respect each other. We’re all busy. The goal here is not just wailing away on our instruments. That’s what home is for. Now is the time to try to build all these components into something bigger.
ooooWhen you’re on stage, pay some attention to how you look. I’m not talking about clothes. We all do a pretty good job of that. Whether your look is casino kitsch, big hair glam, Ramone clone, thrift store chic, has-been goth, carefully cultivated geekdom or I-was-just-cleaning-out-my-garage-and-I-thought-I’d-get-up-here-on-stage, even more important than clothes is the visage that floats above all that clothes, you know, that part of your head where the hole is where all the singing comes out of. Yeah, your face. That’s where people tend to stare. So think about this. If you’re asking a room full of people to look at you, don’t you think you ought to pay some attention to how you look back at them? While playing, some guys look like they’re chewing cud, or having a particularly problematic bowel movement. Others just look scared, like stage is the last place on earth they want to be and at any second they’re going to drop their guitar in terror and run screaming for the exit. Do you like to look at people in that much pain? Sure, you might stare for a while out of curiosity, the way we look at a car accident on the shoulder of the highway. But ultimately it is unpleasant, and we just start feeling sorry. I think performers ought to draw their audience in. Everyone is a closet performer and one of the key tools a performer has is the empathy that can be generated between an audience and a performer. You want the audience to identify with you. They all want to be up here too. Let them live through you. Look like you’re having fun. I mean jeez, you worked your ass off to get up here, you’ve dedicated a large portion of your life to this sort of thing, you’ve rehearsed countless hours, you’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars on gear. Act like you want to be on stage, like you actually enjoy it, like this is the life you’ve chosen and you intend to live it large. Smile once in a while. Laugh. Let your glee out. I’m not talking about pasting on some monstrous Donny Osmond smile and being a big phony. I mean get out of yourself, get over your fear and have a little fun on stage and people will want to be you and people will cheer you on because there is nothing more compelling than a human being living well, doing right, manifesting a magical integration of energies and giving it all away. That’s why we all go to shows.
ooooSo in other words, figure out a way to calm down. You wanted to be up here on stage. Don’t act like it’s some kind of punishment. The audience takes their cue from the performer. You create the environment, you set the mood, you are the guiding spirit of the space. Take everyone with you to a good place.
ooooStage banter. Some guidelines. Never apologize. Never. No matter what. Broken strings, technical problems, blown lyrics, missed chords. None of that should ever become the center of attention. Your job as a performer is to act as a buffer between reality and your audience. Never point out all the mistakes you just made or how nervous you are. Those burdens are for you and you alone to bear. As great as the temptation is to share your burden with your audience, don’t. You think you’re being open and honest by sharing the intimate details of your blunders and difficulties with the audience. You’re not. You’re just killing their buzz. Don’t worry, they already know you’re not perfect. It’s not like you had to tell them that.
ooooMaster your gear. Learn everything about how your instrument and its electronics work. O.K., not everything, but learn how it works and how to adapt it to a wide variety of situations. Learn how to tune on the fly. Learn how to get all the tones you need. Learn what levels work in what kind of rooms. Again, there’s nothing more appealing than confidence. People want to see a performer who is relaxed and integrated and, in a word, masterful. Get your gear figured out so you can get on to the much more gratifying task of connecting souls.
ooooIt’s been said many times, but bears repeating. The house sound engineer is your best friend. They are the most important member of your band. Trust them, defer to them. They are in the house every night. They know what works there and what doesn’t. You’re in their house now. Don’t tell them what to do and how to do it. Let them guide the process. Ask questions. Ask for what you want. You’ll get it. Oh, and when sound checking and setting levels, do us all a favor and always play at the level you will actually be playing at during the show. I’ve seen this a million times. For some reason during sound check, singers sing softer and guitarists keep their amps down low. Then all the levels are set. Then after sound check the show starts and singers suddenly start projecting and everyone cranks their amps up. God I hate that. A good mix is such a delicate thing and such a crucial element in a successful show. Don’t make the engineer’s job any harder than it already is. I’m pretty sure sound engineers have by now come to expect this sort of thing and secretly turn everything down a notch or two after sound check is complete. But all this can be avoided. Your job is to be you during sound check. Let it rip. Don’t hold back. What are you, shy?
ooooNow, one more rule. Break any of the aforementioned rules whenever you need to. To be a compelling performer, the kind who can hold a room in rapt attention, ignore advice column lists about what you are supposed to be doing and not doing. The best thing you have to give an audience is yourself. But be sure to give it, not hide behind your fear or some phony persona you’ve created. Don’t pretend. This is for real. It’s not a game. Don’t waste people’s time. They hunger for contact. They want to be made to know they are alive. They want to feel something. They want to be led into an experience by a gifted guide not a bumbling, frightened dabbler. Be committed. Be happy in the confidence of your craft. In its simplicity, that’s what good performance is. People getting together to commune with the grand truths of existence, to live the lives of the characters in songs, to swim in a wash of sound, to be made over again, to be transformed into their better selves. Artists shed light on the beauties and perils of the way, the glory, the humor, the joy and hopefully, the ecstasy. No one can tell you how to do that. You have to figure it out yourself.

Musings
Peter Bolland
Column 19
1-1-02

Making a Record

ooooI'm making a record. Isn't everybody?
ooooBy the way, I vote for calling them "records" because that's what they are, a record of what was done, a rendering of the musical performance in question, regardless of the specific medium by which they are conveyed. I know a lot of people call them CDs. That's O.K., and literal and everything, but what happens when the technology changes again, as it no doubt will? Did we say we were making an eight track? Did we say we were making a cassette? So why should we say we are making a CD? Who cares what the conveyance is, it is what is conveyed that matters, the experience that takes place between the ears of the listener.

ooooBy the way, "album" is good too, since it also carries the primary meaning of a collection of work regardless of medium. So, let us not be duped into thinking that anyone who uses the terms "record" or "album" is hopelessly anachronistic. They are anachronistic in only one sense. They are ahead of their time. People who insist on calling records CDs will shortly be left behind, but people who call them record albums will always be right.

ooooJust because the term record album conjures up wonderful images of pizza sized black vinyl discs in large square cardboard envelopes with really cool photos and graphics on them doesn't cancel out the future usefulness of the term record album. Mouse used to mean small rodent. Car used to mean horse-drawn carriage or a part of a train. Gay used to mean giddy. Sometimes words are called to their higher, truer purpose long after they have been coined. My advice: go with it.

ooooSo, I'm making a record. It is a delightfully maddening process. As with any artistic project the central task is this: deciding what to leave in and what to leave out. Art is choosing. The dynamics of this process is the nest from which the emerging music takes flight. You must maintain a tender mysterious balance between two apparently contradictory conditions. You have to establish, (perhaps "allow" is a better word), a womb-like space where delicate embryonic ideas can cling, feed and grow. And you must know when to say, "it's done", and push it out of the nest and into the world. There is no wondrous arc of flight without the nurturing kick of the boot.

ooooWe've got a batch of twenty or more songs recorded in various stages of construction. I got it winnowed down to ten. We've taken these ten and mixed them fairly well. They're mostly done. We burned them on a CD and we listen to the CD over and over in different places. I now am charged with the delightful task of building just a few more parts for a few of the songs. An electric guitar here, a lap steel guitar solo there, maybe add some additional backing vocals in this verse here. What to leave in, what to leave out. You don't want to leave something undone. But you don't want to over do it either. You have no choice but to trust your instinct and your own good sense. Make sure every note counts. No noodling. No playing just for the hell of it. I'm giving myself the same advice I give to all the musicians I work with. "Don't play [name your instrument here]. Play the song." If a note doesn't add something, or mean something, or up the impact of the moment it inhabits, don't play it. Worse yet, if a note detracts from or clutters the clarity or beauty of a passage, definitely don't play it. It seems like a lot to think about. But it's really not. If you get your head into the heart of the song in the right way, and then hold back a little more than you want to, you'll do the right thing. The most important tool of any musician is their ear. Listen. Become a positive part of what you hear. Let there be lots of space. Let them wait to hear from you. You will play lots of beautiful notes. But let the silence between your notes be the most beautiful note of all. Silence is the most beautiful note of all because it contains all the notes that were ever played or ever will be played. It is pure potential. It is the totality. It is the alpha and the omega, the Om and the um pah pah all rolled into one. You'd be a fool not to let that glorious sound fill your record album.

ooooAt least that's what I keep telling myself here in the final stages of production, stripping everything away but the essence. Leaving aside the frivolous distractions, the clever tricks, the pointlessly decorative clutter, the ego-driven flash. Now if I could only live my life that way.

Musings
Peter Bolland
Column 18
10-28-01

An Extra Hour on a Day of Rest

ooooI’m sitting outside on a bench near the pond, writing on my laptop. It’s Sunday morning and the sky is low and gray but bright and full of promise. Daylight Savings Time came to an end in the dark last night while we slept and today is granted a one-hour extension. I already changed all the clocks in the house. Why do modern people have so many damn clocks? Please tell the people who design things that not every single electrical device made on earth needs a clock in it. My toaster does not need a clock.
ooooThis laptop, on the other hand, already knew about today’s time change and took care of it for me. I guess you do get what you pay for.
ooooToday is a day of rest. For thousands of years, the Judeo-Christian tradition has recommended that we take one day off a week, a day when we would do not work. A day for eating, for playing, for sex, for laughing, for reading, for contemplation of the infinite, a day to be a human being instead of a human doing. A simple idea really. An idea that’s pretty much dead and gone for the vast majority of people who call that tradition their own.
ooooMachines were supposed to help us rest more. I remember the projections. Machines were supposed to be doing all the work by now. There are two conflicting truths surrounding this issue. Machines help us accomplish more work of a higher quality in a shorter period of time than we would be able to do otherwise. And the other truth is this: we are busier than ever. How is this possible? And whose ass can we kick for causing this ridiculous contradiction?
ooooSince we’re all doing more than ever, with the help of our miraculous machines, I guess a whole hell of a lot more stuff is getting done, although I’m not quite sure what. And our leisure time has all but vanished. I can’t figure it out.
ooooI am no Luddite. I love my machines and I love what technology has done for science, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, communication, medicine and the arts. I love that I can sit in my garden and type on my computer at the same time. I am on the internet everyday. I buy things on the internet. And I can’t go a week without theonion.com. At my school Microsoft Outlook keeps everyone one in touch and cuts way down on the volume of paper we used to go through with all those infernal memos. And e-mail has connected me to my far-flung family in a way that simply was not possible a few years ago.
ooooOne must be able to ask questions about the proper use of technology without being accused of being “anti-technology” whatever that is. That sort of either/or thinking must be transcended for it has little to do with genuine insight and much to do with fallacious dilemmas designed to benefit no one but a few intellectual bullies who use thoughts and words to club their opponents into submission rather than to lift us all to a higher form of knowing where unification, not Balkanization, is the goal.
ooooLast night my 22-year-old niece was giving me a tour of her Palm Pilot. It seems to be a great way to simplify and streamline all the other ways we have of keeping track of meetings and appointments and names and numbers. I think I’m going to get one.
ooooThe purpose of technology is to make our lives better. To help us create beauty. To help us build and shape our world to the form of our ideals. But we must be ruthless masters of our machines. While machines help us do all these great things, they also facilitate our descent into enslavement to our worst obsessions, our undisciplined manias, our relentless desire to twitch and jerk ourselves into over-productive frenzies. We have not yet learned how to set the pace. We have let the machines set the pace for us, and they are not well suited to the task. They are much faster than we are, and they don’t eat, or sleep, or dream, or laugh, or write poems, or perceive irony, or have sex, or contemplate the infinite. Only we can do that. Without their help thank you.

Musings
Peter Bolland
Column 17
9-1-01

Top Ten Reasons You Know You're Getting Old

10. You actually think a tiny man on a tiny horse playing polo
monogrammed on the front of your shirt looks cool.
9. Sudden and inexplicable insights into the musical genius
of Barry Manilow.
8. The self-righteous rage, indignation and condescension of
surly young people just seems kind of silly and sad.
7. A heightened sense of nostalgia for things that haven't
even happened yet.
6. You become annoyed when people use ignorant and
redundant phrases like very unique, absolutely mandatory and more
perfect.
5. You just can't get excited about palm pilots knowing they'll
soon go the way of click-clacks, parachute pants and chia pets. You
prefer your old Month-At-A-Glance and a pencil.
4. You're finally able to admit to yourself that you're wrong
about pretty much everything, and as a result feel oddly liberated.
The dreadful burden of certainty has lifted.
3. You no longer fear the police because you aren't carrying
drugs.
2. Lawrence Welk no longer campy and hysterical, actually
strangely compelling in some unnamable way.
1. Two words: man boobs.

Musings
Peter Bolland
Column 16
8-8-01

Why I Like To Do Laundry

ooooThere is something soothing about the sound of a washing machine. I like
to lift the lid and watch the clothes being inexorably drawn down into the
vortex of soapy transformation. I get lost in the scent of Mountain Spring
Tide.
ooooI like to do laundry. It's simple really. It's one job I thoroughly
comprehend. I know how to take it through its various stages. There are
never any surprises. Unlike the rest of my life.
ooooLaundry anchors me firmly in the here and now, in the comforting cycles
of decay, regeneration, decay and regeneration. Laundry is never abstract.
It is a concrete act of transformation. It is an easy way to make things
better. When you do laundry, you reach out into a dim corner of the world
and light a candle against the darkness. You don't need any help. You don't
need to read any books. You don't need to consult the masters. Deities need
not be involved. It is the very heart of empowerment.
ooooOh how unlike the rest of my life! I wonder, am I doing the right thing?
Is this action going to make things better? How do I balance the myriad
conflicting needs? These questions simply don't plague the process of
laundering.
ooooWhat note should I play here? How long should I hold it? More reverb?
Less? Should I drop the drum track out of this verse for dramatic emptiness?
Or is that too, I don't know, just too...too manipulated. Should I just let
it be? Should I add a third harmony or is it stronger with two? How about
the distortion on this one guitar, should I back it off a little? Or maybe
switch to the neck pick-up for a more soothing sound.
ooooShould I spend an hour reading today, or work on the book review? Should
I write a letter or go through the stack of bills? I haven't been surfing in
a while, I hear the water's warm.
ooooFarley's asking me for a walk, and he'd really like to go to the lake,
it's going to be hot today and Labs love to swim. I look at him with envy.
Oh, too have such clear goals, such simple desires.
ooooLaundry, making the bed, doing the dishes, these simple acts of
life-maintenance have a quietly astonishing way of transforming our
consciousness. When we engage in these simple actions, we are no longer
outside, we step into the stream of life as full participants. The
alleviation of alienation. Such a simple remedy. To step into the present.
To get out of my head. To clear away the brambles and thickets of my
thinking.
ooooThere's an old Zen story. A student went to a Zen monastery to learn
about Zen. They took him in. Soon, two weeks had gone by and no one had
said one word to him about Zen. He went to the Master. "Master", he said,
"I've been here two weeks and no one has taught me anything about Zen".
oooo"Have you eaten?" asked the Master.
oooo"Yes".
oooo"Then go wash your bowl".
ooooThe washing machine is silent. Time to hang the laundry on the clothes
line out back near the lemon tree and the red bougainvillea. The cool wet
sheets will turn hot under the August sun and without worry or thought they
will give up their moisture. The wild green parrots will fly over calling
across the sky, then vanish over the horizon, leaving only the didgeridoo
drone of a distant Cessna in the endless blue. And I'll start another load.
And in the twilight, at the end of this one day, this day that will never
happen again, I will take the sheets in, and make the bed, and sleep like I
belong here.

Musings
Peter Bolland
Column 15
7-4-01

The Same Old World

ooooI didn't write a June column. I didn't know what to write about. I
didn't even start one. I apologize to those of you who come here expecting a
new column every month. June just kind of slipped away.
ooooJune is a weird month. It's the half point of the year. The spring
semester ends. My wife and I both have birthdays, and it's our anniversary.
And we usually go out of town for a while. Travel, family, performances,
recording sessions, county fairs, catching up with all those things you don't
get to during the school year, scheduled chaos, exhaustion. And the garden
starts growing like crazy. Seems like I have to mow the lawn every three
days.
ooooJune is a time of transition, punctuated by moments of tremendous
significance, rendered in time like paintings, edgy yet oddly comforting
works done collaboratively on huge canvases by Norman Rockwell, J.M. Turner
and Jackson Pollock who, after a night of heavy drinking, had their right
hands tied together with a brush duct taped to their bound arm. You wouldn't
want to hear the conversation they had while they worked. I kind of like
what they came up with, it fills a whole