The Austin Art of Performance by C Scott

The Austin Art of Performance

Shows in the live music capital of the world

By C Scott

ustin, Texas, the live music

Acapital of the world. Musicians from all around come to play shows here; at the Saxon Pub, the Broken Spoke, and Antone’s, just to name a few. The scene is competitive and diverse, with all kinds of genres and all kinds of people. They perform for all kinds of reasons, for money, for fun, or something entirely different. Some of them are locals who know the city and its venues like the back of their hand, others are from out of state, looking for a new place to share their sound. “You’ll find that there’s very few cities that are like this,” said Chris Melas, a local guitar player and music teacher. He goes on to say that it’s rare to find cities with as many good venues as Austin, and that he hopes it stays that way. Melas plays with several bluegrass bands at different venues around the city, and he also has a couple of his students play with him at open mictype shows at places like the Butterfly Bar, a venue with an outdoor stage in East Austin. He says that his goal as a teacher is to get his students to a level where they can play in bands and be able to perform live shows. “You’re in the business of selling parties,” Melas explained. There’s a process to finding the venues you want to play at, “you need to be interesting to a booker. You need to have a good video that shows you playing well, that the audio is good, the image is nice and crisp, all that.” He said that, though getting to play at venues may be a bit of work, it’s worth it. Playing for an audience adds to a musician’s playing, to a band’s spontaneity. The audience and the band are reacting to each other, “so you’ve got feedback right away as to what they find exciting, so that you do more of it.” Playing for an audience lets you know what works and what doesn’t about your music and your performance. Todd Thompson, a keyboard player and singer-songwriter who runs a recording studio in Austin, describes the experience of performing as “an energy, which is hard to define. But it’s really thrilling when it goes well.” He compared playing live to just being in the studio, saying that there’s a control while recording and being without an audience that you lose entirely when you play for an audience, when nothing can be redone. “The kind of chaos of playing on stage, you never quite know how it’s going to work.” He has good nights and bad nights, “but it’s always exciting.” He says he prefers performing live to being in the studio now. Thompson is a songwriter, and he plays his songs with his band at shows. He said his favorite part of performing was, “When they’re singing your music back to you. That’s, in general, probably the best feeling I can have on stage.” Melas said that the best thing for him was just having fun playing music with his friends. Live shows appeal differently

to different people, but most would agree that performing is a valuable experience for a musician. They make you better at putting on a show, at reacting to a crowd, at moving past mistakes, and persevering through a bad night. “I think in the music industry… persistence is the name of the game,” says Nino Cooper, a member of the Dirty River Boys, an Austin band. When asked what he liked best about performing, he said, “I just, it feels natural. I like performing, playing songs we’ve created to an audience and feeling that energy, feeling that feedback, and just that real time engagement with the audience.” He plays venues all around the country, but says that in Austin’s music scene, “There’s constantly great talent, constantly great shows going on.” There’s something for everyone, every night. And that saturation makes things competitive, but it also makes the community flourish. To get started playing in a scene like this, musicians have to book everything that comes their way, from ticketed shows to three hour background gigs at restaurants. They get their footing opening for other bands, reaching out to venues and the people playing at them to see who wants to add another act to their show, sending recordings and information. And after their band becomes a little more well known, they can make a website, start playing shows on their own, and start picking and choosing where they want to play. “So we have a policy as to what we book,” Melas said, talking about the

band he plays with. “It’s either it pays good, or it’s fun.” He explains that gigs aren’t going to be fun if you take every one. Once you’re able to, step back and make sure you want to do what you’re doing. Because, if it isn’t fun, and it doesn’t pay, “What are you doing all the difficulty for?” Playing a show can require a lot of work, from bringing your instruments and your equipment to getting schedules worked out. And some venues won’t have microphones or working PA systems (sound systems), so it’s good to have your own, even if it makes more things for you to carry. “You have situations where there’s not much of a stage, when you’re promised a PA system with microphones, and there’s not that. Maybe there’s only one microphone, and it’s not very loud,” Thompson said. “That’s one thing about being in Austin and playing a lot of live shows. You definitely see every kind of problem that can happen.” A member of your band could get sick, and you’d have to play with someone you don’t know, and you just have to make it work. “One of the most important things I’ve dealt with is once you’re good at playing music and you’re starting to book, buy a PA. Buy your own PA because venues have crap PAs in Texas,” Melas explains. PAs are your speakers, and they’re very important to the way your playing sounds, the impact it’s able to have on your audience. If the venue you play at has a broken PA, are you going to use that? “Or is it better to have your PA in your trunk and be like, ‘You know what, this PA sucks. I’m gonna use my PA.’” Melas said, shrugging. He stressed that being prepared is one of the most important elements of playing a show. “I’m getting paid to carry the PA,

“An energy, which is hard to define. But it’s really thrilling when it goes well.” - Todd Thompson

The Dirty River Boys performing at the Saxon Pub

I’m getting paid to drive there, I’m getting paid to park on Sixth Street. I’m getting paid to do all that crappy stuff, but the show’s for free,” Melas said, “The show is for free.” He’d do a show for nothing, the only thing the money is for is getting there and doing all the work to get set up. Playing music is what he and his band love to do. It’s what Thompson and Cooper have based their lives around. Playing shows is a huge part of their lives, giving them the feedback and support they need to keep their careers going. “You play shows and you see people singing the lyrics back to you on songs that you wrote, and it’s an indescribable feeling,” Cooper said. Thompson also talked about how having an audience that knows your lyrics is one of the best feelings you can get as a songwriter. “Some stages are better than others. Some places in Austin are more listening rooms or real stages. Other places are just restaurants, or bars. So really, as you get better, you play more of the places where there’s more people there just to hear you play instead of going out to have a drink and maybe see some music,” Thompson explained. You get nights where the audience is great, they sing your music back to you, they clap when you’re done, and you get nights where they’re preoccupied, they don’t know who you are. But all of it is experience. It makes you better at putting on shows, at dealing with mistakes, at standing up on stage and just playing, not thinking about anything else. Playing a show for a live audience is one of the best things about being a musician, it gives you all this immediate reward and feedback for your craft. It connects you with people you’ve never even talked to, but they’re cheering you on because they like your music. “I think it’s something that we can all relate to, no matter what language we speak, no matter what culture we come from, we can all connect through music. And I think that, you know, that’s the beautiful thing about it,” Cooper said. Music can bring people together without so much as a meeting beforehand. Whether you’re in the audience or on stage, a show can be an experience of connection. Even for musicians who have been playing for years, there will always be a thrill to performing. There will always be a rush of excitement at the applause and the atmosphere and the connection. “I mean [music] is the only thing I ever wanted to do,” Melas says. He’s been playing music for his entire life, and he still has fun doing it. It’s still very important to him. “It’s one of the things that keeps me sane,” Thompson said, “I really do enjoy it.” He said that many of the people he knew fell out of doing music as they got older, but for him, and many people, music is his passion, his thing. “It’s an interaction that happens between you and your band and you and the audience that is really unique compared to just conversation.” A show is full of interaction. Filled with unexpected good and unexpected bad. You have nights where the power blacks out and then you just have drums and vocals. Or maybe you didn’t expect to have a full crowd, but suddenly there are fifty people out there singing your songs. You get to make music with your friends, for people you don’t know who came to hear your craft, who came to support you. The PA system might be broken, and you have to

send someone out to go get yours from the car. It could be an open mic, and you get to hear someone sing who you’ve never heard before, who just did it on a whim, but pulled everyone’s attention to the stage in just a few notes. The songs might be made up on the spot, deliberation seeping out into the crowd through the microphone. You get people who don’t even listen to your genre clapping and cheering just because you’re up on stage, doing what you love. You pull sound into the dark night and the colored lights and you make it belong to everyone. You put your voice and the singsong of guitar strings, the beat of the drums, the high fortepiano of a violin, the sound of boots on a wooden stage into everyone’s hands. And you make the audience feel your music. You make the air resound with the chorus.

All because you’ve gotten up on a platform and made noise into a speaker. All because someone came to see it. And why, what’s the bottom-line, atthe-heart-of-it reason? “It’s the best thing in the world. I mean, it’s my favorite thing to do, ever,” was Melas’ answer. Cooper said, “I love music. I can’t imagine life without it.” Thompson gave a look and answered, “Man, why do I drink water?” To a musician, performing is just what they do. It’s their love and their joy, and the nature of it is to be shared. Music is not private, it’s a message sung, strung, tuned, picked, and broadcasted out to the world. It’s a connectivity that can’t be matched by anything else. It’s in every language and every culture, every tap-tap beat of a pencil on a desk, every elegant sweep of a piano in a concert hall, every absent hum, and every heartfelt refrain. Music is one of the few things the world shares wholeheartedly, that spans across years and generations, miles and oceans. And musicians are the carriers, the conductors of our grand orchestra. The ones who pull our a school pep rally to the quiet anticipation of a great orchestral performance, it’s all music. It’s all a melody. And in Austin, it is made loud in the street corners and the venues. On Rainey Street and against the old walls of the Broken Spoke. It is made deafening in the nights while the bats fly out from under the bridge, it is heard among the skyscrapers downtown, on the steps of the Capitol. From the doors of the Continental Club to Emo’s to the Moody Theater, on the stages set up for ACL, on the radio and in people’s homes, music floods the streets and keeps the city’s beat with an uneven, testy, incredible metronome. Letting anyone and no one know its lyrics so they can sing them in their own language, their own way. The sky watches as guitarists step up

to microphones and fiddle players pull their bows, as singers close their eyes and the bass pulls out the rhythm, as the middle of the Lone Star State lights up with hundreds of voices, all of them performing, all of them music.

Chris Melas performing at the Butterfly Bar

disjointed melody into something that comes out a speaker in a dark room, that falls away from a cello’s strings, that fills your head and doesn’t let go when it’s finished. That can be as simple as a clever lyric or as complicated as an entire symphony. And from the clapping hands of