(Originally appeared here. Check out http://www.we-support-local-music.com for other great local bloggers.)
The other night, I was channel surfing – no, it’s not practicing, but my thumb does get a workout, so maybe it counts – and I happened across a half-hour Comedy Central presentation featuring a comedian named Myq Kaplan. This, frankly, astonished me, because the last time I saw Myq Kaplan in person – and I concede that this was several years ago – he was telling jokes at the Club Passim open mike, and, well, he was not, um, funny.
Now, one of the lovely, if slightly demented, things about the folk acoustic open mike scene is that, as my old pal Ken Batts liked to point out, everyone’s good – in other words, we’re too polite not to applaud. It’s like cosmic background radiation – there’s a level below which the applause never goes. That’s nice, and supportive, and welcoming, but it’s also planned. You can plan applause. You can think to yourself, “Well, I’ll give him an A for effort, even though it’s clear that he only took up the glockenspiel yesterday afternoon, perhaps on a dare”, and you’ll calibrate your applause appropriately, but it’ll still be applause.
Not funny, however, can’t hide behind a smattering of polite laughter. You can’t plan laughter. It doesn’t happen. And my primary memory of Myq Kaplan is watching him for five minutes, dying, as they say, in a room occupied mostly by his voice and the occasional cough (followed at the end, of course, by polite applause). Which is why I was kind of astonished to discover that, several years later, Myq Kaplan is a riot. His timing is splendid, his facial expressions are scrumptious, his stage persona is well-crafted, and his jokes made me laugh fairly hard.
How in the world did this happen? Well, it happened because Myq Kaplan stood on stage at Club Passim and died, among other things. There ain’t no substitute for learning in public – none. A few years ago, I wrote a song called “The Band That Never Was” – good song, no room for it in the rotation, don’t perform it much. But it pretty much captured the essence of the “hell, I could do that if I tried” school of performance:
I got blisters on my fingers from the pull tabs on the soda cans
I got carpal tunnel syndrome from waving at my imaginary fans
The pressure’s more than you can know
That’s why we’re mostly incognito
We have parts to learn and songs to write
Maybe we’ll do it tomorrow
I’ve been performing solo since 1997. And in the beginning, I’m absolutely certain I sucked. (Back then, of course, I was convinced I was a genius, but, well, you live and learn.) But I kept getting on stage, over and over, until I became the epic master of stagecraft you see before you today. And sure, it’s had a lot to do with great advice I’ve gotten along the way, but all of it – all of it – happened because it happened in public. After a while, you learn what works and what doesn’t; which rules to follow and which rules to break; when the audience is right and when you are (and yes, sometimes the audience is wrong). But you can’t learn that in your living room (unless your living room is regularly occupied by random strangers).
So the next time you’re at an open mike, or you’re at a coffeehouse and an open mike erupts around you: yes, you’ll hear the glockenspiel guy. And you may be tempted to provide nothing more than a cosmic background radiation level of applause. But for all you know, you may be listening to somebody who will turn into me, or Myq Kaplan, or Lori McKenna. So be generous.