If You Can Make It Here, You Can Make It Anywhere

As I sit here in my room, I am listening, upon the "Claudia" computer, to a WAV file of my busking session of last night, with the whole track run through a reverb, which I panned to the hard left, while panning everything else to the hard right.

This is because I have watched a few videos by Rick Beato, and this is how he described how they achieved a stereo effect by doing that in the late 60's.
This just seems to be yet another, in a series of things, that I have stumbled upon recently and learned something from.

I'm sure it has something to do with the self help dialogues that hypnotize me and program my subconscious mind to filter things in order to discern what is going to help me along my path to success.

What I am finding is that I am encountering the latest, cutting edge type of stuff.

From the books that I have been finding at the Goodwill Store, which has been like a college bookstore to me, which bear titles such as "The Best American Short Stories (of 2011, in one case) to the computer books, and even the fact that I found one of Christina Friis CD's there and snapped it up for one dollar, it seems that I am never going to fail for lack of resources, nor inspiration.

The Christina Friis CD is the one that, about a year ago, won the distinction of "CD of the Month" on the CD-baby website, through which she published it.
Learning all about things like that website is in my future curriculum.

The importance of the CD is in that, it represents to me an example of the highest caliber of musicianship that I could aspire towards, in the literal sense.
Sure, I could put on a Miles Davis CD and try to trade licks with John Scofield, but Miles is never going to be playing on a corner on Royal Street.

And so, the degree to which I could learn Christina's repertoire, gives me kind of a yardstick to gauge whether or not I am at least meeting "CD of the month" levels of musicianship.
Her CD was done in a professional studio with each part played by studio musicians who were all about sounding "professional," and are as good at it as anyone who ever played on a Celine Dion album, for example. Their job is to compliment Christina's singing, and otherwise kind of stay out of the way.
 t is just good to be rubbing elbows with the cream of the crop in one's chosen field.

It can't help but make you better.

The game of chess illustrated this to me at an early age.

I was able to beat the kids in my neighborhood. But, when I went downtown, to a certain video arcade, there was a kid named Richie who, on a roll-out rubber chessboard rolled out on top of a Space Invaders machine, would "smoke" almost any player who walked in there, including me.

I was 15 years old and wouldn't try pot for another 2 years, but Richie bragged about smoking "12 joints a day." This worked to infuriate over losing to him.

I thought pot was supposed to make a person goofy and silly, and I was expecting Richie to make goofy and silly chess moves because of the 12 joints a day..."Oh, man, I like totally didn't even see your bishop there, boy am I baked!" type of thing.

I also bore the misconception that, since my parents were rich enough to pay my tuition at a Catholic high school, to which middle class parents sent their kids to prepare them to have more tuition paid at good colleges, but Ritchie went to public school, and would even cut classes to smoke joints, I should have been able to outsmart him; based on that alone.

One thing it did inspire me to do was check a few chess books out of the library and to study such things as the Sicilian Defense and the Ruy Lopez opening, so that I eventually could give Ritchie a decent game, while other kids played Space Invaders around us.

But then, 4 years after that, I was in Basic Training and found that I could beat about 90 percent of the chess players in my company.

It seems that ol' Ritchie, in his cloud of pot smoke, was a good teacher. 

I hadn't anyone to compare him with -hadn't taken a tour of video parlors nation-wide- so I only knew that he was better than me.

So, if fate had thrown a lesser player than Ritchie in my way, I wouldn't have been such a hot shot on the chess boards of Company B.

Fast forward 15 years, and I would be locked up in jail with a guy who was 53 to my 30 years old, and who would conclude: "Yeah, you haven't been playing anyone really good," after he smoked me off the board, our first dozen games.

Wally was his name,* and I calculated that we had played about 100 chess games and that he had won 90, I had won four, and we had drawn 6 of them.

But, then, fast forward another ten years, and I am able to beat the computerized chess game that I bought from Radio Shack, if I think long enough on each move so that the whole game takes about 8 hours.

So, it turned out that Wally was probably an even better chess player than I thought he was.

*Wally was the name that Bob used while in jail. He explained the reason for that as "If I'm out somewhere in public and someone say's 'Hey, Wally, how's it going; remember me from jail?'" he could always tell the people he was hanging out with, whom he might not have told about being in jail: "He must have me confused with some guy named Wally.."

Every town has its "hot" musicians. These are the ones who give lessons at the downtown music store, like Jerry Garcia did when he was a teen.

But, then the local hot guitarist reaches drinking age and his band lands a gig in "the big city (for us that would have been Boston)" and things proceed the same way from there.

His band plays in the opening time slot, to warm the patrons up for the headlining act, and is largely ignored, even when doing the material that always populates the dance floor at the watering hole in their home town.

And then, the band that goes on after them sounds a bit more tight and a bit better rehearsed, and that's "the difference that makes a difference," and they return home with a new found respect for all the intangible things that go into a performance. Things like letting no more than 20 seconds elapse between songs, even if the guitarist has to switch from the electric to an acoustic guitar, or if the drummer is going to sing the next song and it is discovered that his vocal microphone is "hardly" on. The latter should be solvable by a simple gesture to the sound man of pointing to the microphone, then making an upwards gesture -a couple "check, check"s and you should be ready to go.

After that experience though, what happens is that the next time his band plays at the little roadhouse in town, people notice a sudden improvement in them. They sound tighter and better rehearsed, and they hear comments such as "You guy's have gotten a lot better since that last time I heard you!"

This happens to a lot of bands who wind up touring and opening up for a "national" act. They don't come out the same way they went in. 

So it is good to be in New Orleans where the goal is at least in sight because, like New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.