I checked the news — it's all provocative and harsh.  Your enlightening comments help; thanks for the kindness shown.  Yesterday, I wrote about guitars, today the people who fill the life of a musician.  Guitars will return soon.  Tongue firmly in cheek?  Let's go.

Most of my life, I have been a sideman, but I once led a band for a short time.  It had a successful run — two solid years of five or six nights a week — but then I graduated and went to work in a public school.  At that moment, I didn't enjoy leading a band enough to continue.  Singers, bassists, keyboardists — they were all nuts.

Singers are the most courageous and therefore unstable because they go out there and put themselves on the line.  They bare their souls.  I have a shield, a guitar between myself and the audience; they can listen to my spirit but can't read my soul.  That soul-baring stuff is a heavy load.  And boy, do singers emote — I mean, they bare them souls.  Singers practice emotive chops every measure of every day.

It wears a man down.

Bassists who are permanent fixtures of the band are smooth and cool as today's sunrise.  But when you need a sub for a few days, the aches gather.  One guy came in and loudly popped all night like Jaco Pastorius — just oblivious to everyone.  He didn't use his bass as the aforementioned shield; rather, it was a spear wielded from a high horse.  He seemed heroically off to slay a dragon.  As I paid him, he said it was a little less than his "nut," and he couldn't afford to musically ignore everybody in our band on any further occasion.  What followed was my personal crowning performance of silence.

But it wears a man down.

Keyboardists were the worst.  You'll notice I don't call this type a "pianist."  No, this guy lines up behind some nasal-sounding contraption and just trots out blues riffs.  He's colorful.  He tosses two bars of the theme from "Looney Tunes" into a ballad and smiles to himself because he's just so clever.  Like a three-year-old, he is creatively destructive.  You must work with the three-year-old, but thankfully, you can regularly exchange this keyboardist for another guy with an even more adenoidal contrivance.

It really wears a man down.

So the singer practices emotive flourish throughout rehearsal while the keyboarder diddles and blats.  Drummers are constantly adjusting this, adjusting that, and saying, "Wait a minute; I've got to adjust something."

I've had way better control of twenty-five kindergarten sweethearts than this cluster.

This is because the little ones arrive in your class on day one with open heart and mind.  They file in just lookin' aroun' and wondering if the tiring walk from homeroom will end well.  The already slightly jaded few talk boldly, but you haven't taught silent lines yet, so you smile out a warm greeting.  

The door closes, and you begin to work with a fresh slate.

"Hey, let's listen to some silence, and later we can put some music on top of it."

You can see and feel that almost everybody thinks this makes sense — this is logical; this is interesting.  They approve.

And it lifts a man up.

Michael James has been a professional guitarist and public-school music educator for over forty years.