Once, a long time ago, I went to see Jim Infantino at Passim. This was back when Jim was a big deal solo act, so we’re talking ten years or so. In addition to all his riotous wiseass material, he did this one tune, I can’t even remember what it was about, it killed me, it was so raw and honest. Utterly unlike anything else he’d done that evening, completely out of character.
I wonder how often he played that tune. Knowing what I know now, it’s a bit of a tricky thing, because his act wasn’t really constructed to accommodate it. I had one of those songs, a few years back. It was about my mom – I wrote it just as she was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. I still have the lyrics somewhere. But I don’t remember the tune at all – never recorded it, never performed it.
So what should folks like me be doing with songs like that? Well, on the one hand, there’s the contention that those songs are exactly the sort of thing people should perform, act be damned, because they’re so raw and honest. On the other hand, there are the issues of branding, and setting up and meeting expectations, and, well, just doing what you’re best at doing.
One of the things that makes me very, very cautious about doing serious material is the issue of “jumping the shark”. I’m sure most of you know this expression, and many of you may even know its origin: an episode of Happy Days where Fonzie actually jumps a shark on water skis. It’s commonly regarded as the point at which the series became a parody of itself. One of the easiest ways for humor to jump the shark is by trying to be serious; people of my generation will be familiar with the After School Special moralizing of the final season of M*A*S*H, or Woody Allen’s mad dash away from genuine humor toward the shallow depths of his own neuroses, or, as my wife points out, “A Very Special Episode” of just about anything.
One of my very favorite acts, in fact, learned this lesson well. He has a lovely, lovely voice, and for a number of years he sang both funny and serious material. But he figured out that the funny stuff is what people want to hear, because when he’s funny, he’s utterly original, and when he’s serious, well, he just sounds like every other serious boy with a pretty voice. And he doesn’t do the serious stuff anymore. At all.
Now that’s discipline. And it gives me serious second thoughts about the conventional wisdom. That Jim Infantino song was just amazing – it moved me, it made me ache. There was nothing ordinary or typical about it. Anyone who got up and did that song, no matter who they were, would have blown me away. But maybe that’s not enough. Performances aren’t just individual songs strung together – they’re a show, with a narrative, and a personality. And they’re constrained by expectations – not just the expectations of people who have seen you before, but the expectations that you construct as you perform.
So I’m going to continue to be very, very, very cautious about straying from my meat and potatoes, that high-energy snarkiness that you all seem to like so much. Maybe, once in a while, I’ll play “The Fifth of July” – but I can promise you, for sure, that there will never be “A Very Special Episode” of me.