Sitting In – Be careful what you wish for…
Posted by: John…you just might get it.
Most amateur musicians with whom I’m acquainted dream of sitting in with their heroes on stage. Actually, most of them would be happy to sit in with anybody playing a gig! They dream of being up there on stage knocking the audience dead with their astounding chops.
It’s an interesting phenomenon that people are so willing to jump in and participate in a musician’s work. You rarely see anybody asking a tax accountant if they can “sit in” and do a couple of 1040’s, for example.
It probably has to do with musicians being so accessible and the perception that playing music isn’t really working. I mean, it’s not like a “real” job, right?
The fact is that professional musicians are working and the stage is their office. Sure, their main job is to entertain and keep the customers coming back for more, so there’s a certain amount of self-interest involved in having amateurs come up on stage to show their stuff. If they suck, the audience usually enjoys watching them suffer, to a point, and if they’re good, everybody enjoys it.
Those pros who do allow sit-ins do a great kindness as it fulfills a dream for many of the wannabe’s. Unfortunately, there are those who see sitting in as more of a right than a privilege. They get up on stage and immediately start acting like they’re the star of the show. They have no clue how to play with a band and they step all over everybody trying to get all their licks in before their 15 minutes of glory is over.
Performers will often allow someone to sit in if that someone happens to be a friend of the club owner or has some similar connection to the musicians’ paycheck. Very often, they will throw the amateur a curve early on as a bit of a test to see if they belong up there with the big boys, so to speak. I witnessed one such incident some months ago at a club in the area.
One of my favorite bands of all time is Magic Slim and the Teardrops. I saw they were playing at a club about an hour from my home and went to catch the show. The first set was vintage Slim and he had the place rockin’ by the first break.
During the break, Slim’s roadie helped a cat set up his vintage tweed Fender amp to the left of the stage next to Slim’s guitar player. Obviously, this dude was planning on sitting in during the second set and sure enough, after a couple of tunes Slim called him to the stage. Grinning from ear to ear, he set himself up, gripped his mike and looked at Slim who said, “Key of D-flat” and launched into the song.
If you don’t play harmonica, a brief bit of background. Most blues harmonica players, especially amateurs, play in what’s called second position. What that means is that if the song is in the key of E, you use a harmonica in the key of A. A is the fourth of E, or E is the fifth of A, however you prefer to look at it.
Harp players get used to doing this transposition for the common keys like E, A, D, C, etc. Having somebody throw D-flat at them is disconcerting, to say the least, because it’s a very uncommon key for harmonica tunes.
With that in mind, picture our amateur harp player with his jaw scraping the floor, his eyes glazed over as his brain desperately tries to remember what key harp goes with the key of D-flat in second position. It’s sort of like watching a hitter freeze when a baseball he wasn’t expecting is headed right for his head.
So, after what probably seemed like an eternity to him, he leaned over to the guitar player and said “What’s the fourth of D-flat?” The guitar player didn’t miss a beat as he leaned over and said, “F-sharp.”
Now, this particular amateur was fortunate in that he actually had an F-sharp harmonica in his arsenal. Many hopefuls would have gone up there with the standard six or seven keys and been completely lost. His wasn’t the standard Marine Band type of harp typically used for blues, but it was the correct key, so he quickly grabbed it and joined in playing with the rest of the band.
Slim let him stay up there through two or three more songs, each in a slightly less obscure key, then he finally tossed him a softball and played the Sonny Boy Williamson classic “Bring It On Home” in E. I can’t say that our hero hit it out of the park, but he at least made contact and got it out of the infield. With that, his “audition” was over.
Now, being a harp player myself, I could definitely feel for this dude, but at the same time, it was pretty obvious that he got up there through his friendship with the club owner rather than any qualifying ability. It was hard not to feel like he deserved to have a few high hard ones thrown at him and had he proved himself to be a killer player, more power to him.
Slim had every right to ask that the guy show him some reason that he deserved to be up there. Whether the cat took the lesson to heart is the question.
