Covid On My Mind

Longing to go out.

My sister-in-law, Carolyn, had an idea for the family: keep a daily log (or blog) of our lives during this hopefully rare pandemic. Personally, I don't expect that these things will be all that rare.

Global warming is changing our planetary climate system and highly adaptable organisms are likely to adapt more quickly during this time of rapid change. If the weather doesn't get us, the microorganisms will...eventually.

I've been thinking about the idea of keeping a journal or something, but to be honest, my life isn't dramatically different. I am a scrum master, which is a person that works with software development teams to help them be agile. That means adapting to change quickly. My company, ITHAKA, is well along on our agle journey, so we're already quite adaptable. We also have multiple offices and various people working remotely, so we have all the tools in place to work from home.

My Home Office Rig

Furthermore, having been a work-at-home entrepreneur in the past, I already have a sweet set-up at home. Let's just say I don't worry too much about bad ergonomics. I did purchase a little 10" LED display so that I can see the people I'm online with while looking at shared screens. Oh, and this picture doesn't show my Herman Miller Aeron chair, which I was happy to buy for only $350 out of the back of a van in a Burger King parking lot in Belleville. I have it on good authority that is was legitimately purchased in a bulk office furniture buyout from an office closure. I'm going with that story. I love Herman Miller chairs. They fit my back just right.

The Man Cave!

I also have a Herman Miller chair in the basement -- my man cave! This picture was taken before I removed the sofa from the room. There's a little more space over in that corner now.

Music is a great hobby to have when you're homebound. I have a band called Sweet Melissa. I left the band to pursue other musical interests, but when they lost both their bass player and guitar player, Melissa called and asked if I wanted to rejoin. I did. We found a great new guitar player and we are all good friends. I have been trying to keep up with my friends by doing regular video chats, but with the band, "getting together" is a bit more challenging. Elan, our drummer, is a pilot for Delta. He still has to go to work...at airports! He's a bit more stressed than the rest of us, who are in a better position to isolate ourselves.

We found a system called jamkazam.com that might let us jam together over the Internet, but everyone has to figure out how to get their instruments hooked up first. That hasn't happened yet. A couple summers ago, I hooked up with my friend JP and occasionally my friend Noah and we jammed in the street. I really liked busking. JP moved to NYC, so I've decided to try out the one-man band thing. I was thinking that I might take it to the street this summer.

Well, with this nasty little virus spreading wildly, that may not happen. It seems the music world has taken to streaming live. So, yesterday I started trying to figure out how to do my own live streams on Facebook. I tried something called OBS, which only sorta worked. Today, I switched to trying something called livestream and lo and behold, it worked! I was just testing it out, but apparently various friends, family and acquaintances saw it anyway.

We're about to take the dog for another walk. Going for walks is one of the only things anyone can do out of the house these days, so lots of people are doing it. Most people around here are getting the social distancing thing, but a few people don't. I worry most about the kids. They may just forget or maybe they don't understand that just because they're not vulnerable doesn't mean the people around them aren't. Anyway, it's easy to catch up with the neighbors during walks, which seems sort of backwards since we're all supposed to be staying away from each other. Now that we've purchased enough food and toilet paper to stay home for a few months, it's just neighbors for a while.

Building a Band: Not as Easy as You Might Think

I've been a musician most of my life and because I play bass guitar, being a solo act has always been out of the  question. That has left me with two choices: join a band, or start a band. Joining an established band is pretty easy because someone else has already done the heavy lifting for you. All I need to do is fit in, which has its own challenges, but at least I control most of them.

The thing about joining someone else's band is that its difficult to find something that's just what I want, so I need to come to it in the spirit of supporting the existing mission. By mission, I mean the type of music, the places the band wants to play, and the frequency of rehearsal. Even if all that works out, having longevity with a group of musicians is hard.

Let me be clear, the secret to a successful band is simple -- stay together! It really is that simple. I know what you're thinking. There needs to be talent. There needs to be good material. There needs to be organization. Well, yeah, but that will all come with time (okay, maybe not talent). The old saying that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while is true for a lot of things. Even a no-talent group of musicians will create some good tunes once in a while, so if they stay together long enough, they will eventually have some good material.

So, what's the secret to longevity? The family model comes to mind. Families are formed when two people fall in love and then they produce some offspring. The Offspring don't get a say in the matter, so building a family is a lot easier than a band, where every member of the family has to be recruited.

Beyond that, the characteristics that go into a tight knit family are similar (with some additions).

Reliability - I have limited tolerance for unreliable people. Others may be more flexible about this, but I expect bandmates to do what they say, so things break down quickly when people don't keep their word.

Passion - I am committed to being a musician and all that it means. Other things may vye for my time, but some of them will need to get in line behind music because I'm not giving it up. People who are just passing through a musician phase probably won't have the staying power needed.

Work - Having a strong work ethic is common across all successful people (assuming they were self-made). I can't tell you how many times we've tossed out a musician who chronically showed up to rehearsal unprepared. It becomes a giant waste of everyone's time and gets annoying really quickly.

Commitment - Commitment to what? Good question. For me, the most important things are goals. Setting them and staying on the path to reaching them. I suppose I could have also called this one persistence because it goes hand in glove with commitment. Commitment isn't something you can have every third Tuesday. It's an every day sort of thing.

Patience - Everything is not going to go right. Well, maybe it will, but I never count on it. When obstacles emerge, dealing with them harshly or hastily can often result in emotional damage that is hard to repair. Not all problems require the kid glove treatment, but sometimes you just need to give people time to get back on track when things happen (family issues, work issues, etc.)

Transportation - This one could be left out, but having dealt with people who did not have reliable means of getting around, I decided that I couldn't bury it under reliability. I've been in bands with a musician that didn't drive and they were always reliant on someone else to get them to rehearsals and gigs. It's never worked.

Now, all the things above could be applied to any endeavor, but there are some things that apply specifically to musicians.

Musical Preferences - Given that there are countless genres and subgenres of music, finding people that want to play what you want to play can be challenging. So challenging in fact, that we often compromise on this one. The problem with this is that compromise has a nasty way of gnawing at you over time. I've left a few good bands because I just couldn't enjoy the music anymore. Hard as it was to walk away from something that was working on all other fronts, I'm in it for the love of the music first.

Equipment - This isn't usually a problem, but I have had situations in which band members had faulty or inadequate equipment and the frustration eventually boils over. I was in one band many years ago in which the drummer was so broke that he couldn't afford sticks. This was compounded by the fact that he was a banger and regularly broke them. One time, he showed up to a major gig with one pair of sticks. In fact, one flew out of his hand during Jimi Hendrix's Manic Depression and he had to finish with his hand while I attempted to flag down a roadie (who was busy chatting up a girl) to fetch it for him.

Skill - I put this one last, not because it is least important, but because it may be the best one of these characteristics to sacrifice. If someone has all the other qualities listed here, lack of skill should be a transient issue, meaning it will be resolved over time. Now, if you're looking to start a jazz/rock fusion band, you may want to stay away from beginners, but most genres of music can be played in fairly basic form. If you have more skill that other members of the band and become frustrated, see patience above.

There you have it! What are the odds of finding a whole group of people that share all of these characteristics? If that isn't enough, it's always helpful when you actually enjoy each other's company. You can build friendships just around music, but it helps longevity if you actually want to be together anyway. I have many lifelong friends who performed with me somewhere along the way, but now don't. We still get together to jam sometimes, but we're not in a band anymore.

If you want to assemble your own band, make a checklist of the things above and make sure all of the members of your newly formed band have them. You're going to be tempted to look past a few of these when you find a really great musician or someone you really like. Good luck with that!

Jam Band Lament

My fellow bandmates and I recently saw Spafford opening for Umphrey's McGee. We were giddy as a bunch of school girls with excitement to learn from the masters. Spafford has big time competency and Umphrey's...well...they make it look easy. In fact, too easy! The energy from both bands was very different.

From Spafford I got the sense that they had worked very hard to put together a seriously tight and solid show. Mission accomplished, but the fear of a mistake was almost palpable.

Umphrey's, on the other hand, played like a mistake was highly improbable. They now have the skills and experience to put on an improvisational pyrotechnical show of massive proportions without busting a sweat.

Unfortunately, to really bare your soul to an audience, you need to be willing to cut the tethers of what has worked before, and neither band did that. How do I know this, you ask? Answer: Mistakes. Mistakes are the only signal. A wise person knows that "you never know how far you can go until you've gone too far.'

I am encouraging my band to continue making "mistakes." As a continuous improvement professional by day, I know that people who embrace their mistakes as learning opportunities end up making ever-smaller mistakes.

Further, I would encourage all of our jam band brethren out there to keep making them too. Give jam band audiences some credit for knowing what it means when you really hang yourself out there without a net. They love it just as much as the band members who are pushing their individual envelopes. That's the juice, baby!