Til We Get It Right
On Rehearsals, Potential & Faking It Til You Make It
When my youngest son was in Kindergarten, they had a kind of getting to know each other ‘Show & Tell’ session, describing what their parents did for work. He told the class that his dad made adult films and that I rehearsed.
I’ve always loved rehearsals. Maybe it’s all that potential in the air, the willingness of all involved to give up their precious time towards a greater good, a sonic destiny. We’re all trying to climb to the peak of musical promise together.
I’ll never forget the thrill of early rehearsals for my first band Honky Tonk Angels. There was twelve of us in the band - plus my baby daughter Holiday who luckily could sleep through anything - so simply organising it via old fashioned landline was a monumental effort. My dad, who was the band leader, wrote charts for every song which made life easier for the musicians trying to learn fifteen new songs. Rehearsals would last for hours; songs were written, stage wear planned, lifelong friendships were formed, books were read, meals were cooked and the air was redolent with smoke of all kinds.
An important part of what happens at rehearsal is simply forging connection. When you’re onstage with a group of people, pressure’s on and you’re limited in your communications, but if you’ve gone to that place where you get each other musically, where you know what’s going to take flight and when it won’t make it out the door, most of your work is done. You’re a united front with the freedom to fly anywhere and you speak an unspoken language.
Stan Lynch, who toured with Bob Dylan throughout the 80s describes one such moment perfectly for Ray Padgett’s Dylan Live Substack “Flagging Down The Double Es”:
Bob started playing something reggae, and I decided, well tonight I'm going with— I got about four bars into it. It's the only time he ever did it to me, he looked at me and gave me the international “No.”
What do you mean?
He took the cigarette and butted it out on the floor, and did the thing under his neck, where he went like, "No."
Like, cut it out?
Yeah. Like, that's not going to fly.
Everything is stripped away in rehearsal. There’s no pretty lights, your microphone is always shonky, things rattle and squeak and feedback and its raw and real and often smells and is freezing or airless and you’re all plonking away together in your street clothes with your eyes closed trying to find that elusive ‘it’ moment, where you can relax knowing you’ve got it, or at least you know that the next time you do it, onstage and with all the trimmings, you’re gonna make it happen. It’s so close you can touch it.
Revealing your vulnerabilities and your weak spots makes you stronger as a unit. You can start to work together as an organism, protecting each other, bringing out the best in each other. There’s something about this rehearsal audio of Billie Holiday where she’s just laughing and shooting the breeze with her band, regaling them with stories about how much people have literally despised her voice in the past, where you can almost feel their collective amazement at her revelations and the determination and love for her in the room. It’s kind of chilling and tough and beautifully fragile all at once. But stories are what brings us together, and some of the best rehearsals are 70% stories and 30% songs.
There’s another thing that happens in rehearsal that is someone presents a half formed idea, or a tremulous, wobbly legged unformed song, and in fits and starts the song takes shape and finds its feel and its mojo and eventually dances its own way out of the room. You know it when you’ve got it. There’s a story about James Brown and his band working up ‘Cold Sweat’ on the tour bus, and as soon as it was ready they just pulled over in the first town they could find a studio and put it to tape. There’s an incredible compilation on YouTube, a document of the Rolling Stones getting ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ together to record, from its ramshackle, sloppy acoustic beginnings to its final evolution and that joyous, snaky, irresistibly evil grind and groove.
When a band is already really tight, rehearsals can be more about perfecting and finessing rather than reaching and searching. You might just focus on a confusing middle eight or a harmony or a feel or a stop. There’s a thing where pro musicians say ‘let’s just top and tail it’, meaning you just practise the intro and the outro, til its smooth and flawless and you won’t be left to navigate a bumpy exit.
‘Let’s just do the whole song’ Renee Geyer
This grainy, soft focus rehearsal footage from Soundlevel in the 80s - where I have also put in hours of rehearsal time with multiple bands - of Australia’s Queens of Soul Renee Geyer and Wendy Saddington preparing for a concert at the State Theatre just kills me… when Renee says to Wendy if she’d like to sing it differently, take it to another place, she’s welcome to, the camaraderie and respect between them is so beautiful. And then when their voices find each other in that sweet spot together, oh my god….goosebumps.
And there’s just pure dedicated persistence and repetition, doing it over and over til you get it right, til its second nature and you can execute your moves, your strums and your beats and your high notes without second guesses, til its just coiled inside you like its a part of you that you can access anytime. Watch Tina Turner and The Ikettes casually perfecting their moves in their dressing room, the command they already possess is obvious, they are all about fine tuning and polish. Onstage they are a machine, oiled and shiny and working in awe-evoking tandem, without even needing to look at each other to know what’s going on.
Rehearsing hard makes the show easy. Captain Beefheart notoriously made his Magic Band live together in the Californian desert and rehearse all day, often without him there. He had apparently composed all the songs in a single eight hour session, then had taught them to his musicians ‘through piano, whistling, or evocative poetical images’ - he didn’t have any real musical training. When they were ready to record, producer Frank Zappa booked them in for a six hour session, expecting them to get a few songs down - they recorded fourteen songs in four and a half hours.
Drummer Bobby Z. and bassist Mark Brown, aka BrownMark who were in The Revolution with Prince, talked to Niall Doherty from The New Cue about rehearsal Prince style.
Mark Brown:When I first joined the band, Prince made me stand eight hours in front of a mirror for the first week at his house.
What?!
Mark Brown: I’d have to stand in front of a mirror and look at myself. I’m like, ‘what is this, this is nuts!’ and he would leave the room and then I would sit down on the couch. I’d hear him coming back up the steps or down the stairs and I jump up and get back in front of the mirror to make him think I was doing something!
Bobby Z.: We’d rehearse in front of big ballet mirrors and you’d really find out what your left hand is doing, what your eyes are doing, but he was working the same sweat, he was pushing himself so hard that you rose to it on a kind of a supernatural level. We watched ourselves on tape, we listened to ourselves on tape, we’d practice in front of a mirror, this was our daily routine.
The Revolution: Brown Mark on bass, Wendy Melvoin on guitar, Dr. Fink and Lisa Coleman on keyboards and Bobby Z. on drums
‘The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful’ Peter Brook
The verb practice means ‘to do something repeatedly in order to master it’ or ‘to pursue as an occupation or art’. While there’s undeniable merit in that kind of hard edged brutal dedication to absolute perfection, and it’s a jaw dropping treat to witness, thats never been a way I like working. I prefer warmth and vibes and intimate feel over displays of precision. This is our rehearsal style. We played our first show in over a year a couple of weeks ago, without a chance to practice together. Though we were a little shaky at first, we knew we had each other’s backs and we found ourselves back in the rock’n’roll saddle and rode it home.
We have a bunch of shows coming up on our ‘Lovers Dreamers Fighters’ tour now, and are putting in the practice time to make them special. Our first one is next Thursday 7th July at the Great Club in Marrickville (Sydney, Australia). All tix and info HERE. We’d love you to come and witness our hard work paying off.
I had a conversation with fellow musician/writer Madelaine Lucas for RUSSH Magazine recently (read it here), and one of my favourite parts was where we talked about the relationship between art and the work that goes into it.
Effort is cumulative. Practice something a little bit every day, and eventually, incrementally, you’ll get there if you want it bad enough. So go forth and practice whatever it is you love and I’ll see you on the other side, in two weeks time, a little more experienced, a little more convincing, a little bit better.
Til then, work it baby. x
Bonus Content One: Bob Dylan rehearsing for ‘We Are The World’ with Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder, looking completely baffled and uncomfortable and out of place, though he nails his part with iconic aplomb eventually. Apparently Prince was also invited to participate, but refused because he hated the song so much.
Bonus Content Two: Buddy Rich being an absolute asshole telling his band ‘Assholes are playing like fucking children… what do you play? Clams?’ amidst other never ending hurled insults.
Bonus Palate Cleanser: Dolly sings Kenny some of her old songs that never saw the light of day, including one with the lyric ‘I don’t want to throw rice, I want to throw rocks at her’.