Owning Audiences
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It is odd to own an audience.
I do not refer to the purchasing of people to populate a performance, as many politicians have been known to do. Instead I comment on those moments when a musical performer changes the mood of a room or stadium full of folk and eliminates all inattention. Even top-shelf touring musicians have to deal with drunken chatter coming from ticket holders. A standing rule at open mics is that performers get one attentive audience member (usually their paramour or spouse) for every ten talkative intoxicants. Yet once in a great while you can connect a crowd.
And it is spooky.
It occurred last night, in a local dive where musicians and bored individuals of all stripes congregate. Taking turns we abused one another for the selfish joy of rehearsing in front of people and working out new twists to old tunes. I had unleashed an odd variation of Ray Hubbard’s Way of the Fallen and reprised my own Old, Wounded and Dangerous (one of my few songs you won’t yet find on this web site). Then in an act of utter audaciousness decided to abuse my stage privileges by launching into Jimmy McMurtry’s Lights of Cheyenne, a long and solemn sounding tune which is perfectly inappropriate for a place with pool tables and pickled livers.
One by one the audience fell silent.
If I hadn’t heard myself in the stage monitors I would have worried that I was going deaf. A peek past the footlights showed faces staring directly at me, and since the drummer and bass banger had left the stage, I had to assume I was the center of attention. The pool balls quit clacking, the barmaid stopped serving, and mine was the only sound resonating in the hall.
Spooky.
Yet there is a vibe, a feeling, a moment of non-interactive interconnectedness that occurs in these moments where the performer and the crowd are actively frozen, communing bilaterally. The audience as one has decided that for a brief spell nothing is more important or appealing than just listening.
I’m no performer, just a wordsmith with a guitar. But in a rare instant I had the strum, the flow, the growl and the lift to fill the room and cancel people’s plans. The only way a performer can achieve this is to make the audience feel what he is feeling, and to the same depth. It can’t be called-in. You need to sink so deeply into your own connection to the song that every spasm of authentic emotive essence leaves the JBLs and lands in the audiences hearts.
Feel it before you perform it and you’ll own an audience.
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If you have polite and articulate comments, please provide them. Rants and flames are discarded.
Being a member of that captivated audience last evening, I must say that you certainly did maintain the uninterrupted attention of the entire audience and had everyone mesmerized with the tonality of your voice and the raw emotion of the song being performed.
It was truly inspiring to witness your performance and the reaction of the crowd. You are immensely talented and it was pure joy to see the crowd go silent and to observe the dropping of the jaws as you drew the folks into your song. Well done!