This evening my band had its first gig in over a year, at Make Music Madison, the city-wide celebration of the summer solstice. We played in the driveway where we always practice, but to my surprise we had quite a crowd to listen to us, including Jilly Moose. Before we started, a guy I knew a little bit from the ukulele group mentioned that he had seen me play my beautiful old round-back mandolin, and it had inspired him so much that he got a mandolin and has been trying to learn to play it. Then when we finished, this same guy told me that he had seen three other mandolin players today at various Make Music Madison venues, and not one of them was as versatile as I am. I suppose that's true, and I told him that while I learned to play violin by the Suzuki method, so I knew exactly what to do, nobody ever really taught me to play the mandolin, so nobody told me I couldn't do whatever I wanted. If I want to play chords, I play chords. If I want to play a harmony, I play a harmony. And if I want to play tremolo through the entire song, well then that's exactly what I do.
I do love playing in a band - it's the closest to "cool" that I'll ever be. We all have to wear our matching dancing cow T-shirts, but I doctored my look up with my little flower necklace and my hemp hat, so I was the Hippie Chick of the group. Still, I think it's the mandolin that really makes people want to come up and talk to me afterwards. It's far more interesting than a violin or a guitar - who hasn't seen one of those before? But people either have no idea what my mandolin is, or they do but they are amazed to see such a beautiful old specimen in good playing shape. There must be some part of me (my moon in Leo?) that secretly likes all the adulation, and the $8 we each got in tips doesn't hurt either. There's nothing like being a "professional" musician, getting paid actual currency to play music! Still, the part I like best is making music with other people, whether we have an audience or not. It's that connection. When I was in the plugged-in Mideastern band (it says something about my musical past that I have to specify which Mideastern band I mean), the guitarist used to improvise, and I was jamming right there with him. He would play some lick, and I would be playing it a third up, like I could just read his mind. How did I do that? I don't even know, and I was the one doing it. I just get that connected to people when we're playing music together. It's like we have a Hive Mind. Maybe that's why I love singing and playing in groups - we all come into this world alone, but being in a musical group is the closest thing to piercing that aloneness that I've ever found. It's being part of something bigger than yourself. And isn't that what we're all made for?
Famous Hat
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