I wrote this essay during the pandemic, and somehow never sent it out to you lovely people, but now? Now it’s time, because my pal Rob Mattson figures strongly in it and he’s promised to be at my next show and do the photography for the upcoming album and take pictures of my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, for her new Web site with which she plans to take over the world. So.
Those of you who allow your email to load images – not a fantastic idea in this day and age where bad guys practically reach through your WiFi connection and do the Three Stooges thing with your chin, but whatever – will be quite familiar with my favorite publicity photo, the one where you see half of my face. I love this photo. SWMBTs old friend Steve Black took it, along with a bunch of other photographs of me, all when I was younger and handsomer and less, how do you say, bald.
If it were up to me, I’d keep that photograph forever, right up to the point where my geriatric fans ask me, “Who is that handsome man?”, and I answer, “Eh? Speak up, sonny, I ain’t as young as I used to be.” It’s a race between vanity and aging gracefully, and, well, in the interest of honest publicity, vanity has to lose. Plus, none of these publicity photographs actually show me doing what I do best, namely, making an ass of myself on stage.
So a while back, I explained this problem to my pal, the aforementioned Rob Mattson, man about town and all-around marketing genius, and he said, well, next time I come to one of your shows, I’ll snap some pix (well, he said something much cooler and more marketing genius-like than that, but, remember, I’m getting old, so don’t expect me to recall his exact words). And he did! And he sent me two of the photographs that he really, really liked. One of them is exceptionally cool – one of the best live shots of me anyone has ever done. And the other, well.
One of the things that a performance coach will tell you is, video yourself. And watch it. And stop cringing! Yes, you, there, in the front, with your fingers over your face, you. Stop it. If you can’t watch yourself without cringing, you can’t fix what’s cringeworthy. So rewind the damn thing and watch it again.
I’ve watched myself on video a lot. And I’ve noticed a bunch of things that have troubled me. For instance, you will never, ever see me again on stage wearing shorts. No one needs to see my knees (although SWMBT insists they’re cute). And there are a few other things which I’ll decline to share here, which I’ve either fixed and thus aren’t worth talking about or I haven’t fixed and if I tell you about them you’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. But there is one thing – something I’m absolutely going to fix – that I will tell you about, because Rob caught me doing it, and I’m damn well going to fix it, because, well, yeesh.
Here goes.
When I’m really getting into a tune – when I’m expressing a certain depth of emotion – I get this expression that looks like, um, hmm, how to put this, it looks like I’m in the middle of a strenuous bodily function that is not frequently executed in public.
Now, don’t you dare go through my old videos looking for this. You’ve got better things to do. If I’d sent this essay out during the pandemic, back when I wrote it, you might have been able to justify it, but now? There’s groceries and the kids are screaming and your dishwasher has some objections it would like to register about its working conditions, and really, just trust me that it’s there. It doesn’t happen a lot; it doesn’t last for more than a second or so; but it has, well, something of the opposite effect that I’m intending, and it has to stop. And I’ve been practicing – in front of the sliding door in my office at night, which pretty much amounts to a mirror – and I am slowly, but determinedly, eliminating this particular expression from my facial repertoire. And I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. One of the things I like about my very expressive face is that, almost always, I know exactly what expression I’m making – but in this case, my inner face is doing “soulful and intense”, and my outer face is doing “strenuous bodily function”.
But the camera, and the mirror, they do not lie. I have seen the enemy and they are me. And they shall be defeated. So the next time you see me perform, you will look in vain for this particular defect, because shame, and practice, and Rob’s damning photo, will have flogged it out of me.