Breaking Badass

I snapped a string on stage last night. The Castaways were playing Loverboy’s Working for the Weekend. It’s a fun song to play, it’s fast and drives, and even though I don’t know how to do the fancy chord progression, I feel like I’m part of it because of the beat underneath. I was hammering on that D chord hard, fast, when the string went. It stung my wrist, sharp and fast, and surprised the hell out of me. The fretboard felt naked without the string there but I couldn’t quit right in the middle of the song. Apparently, I am a consummate professional because I literally did not miss a beat.

When we were done, I leaned into to the mic and said “Can I tell you guys something? I broke a string.”

Everyone in the room burst out laughing and howling and whooping. A lot of PG-13 jokes followed, references to virginity lost, and I confessed to the room of 30 or so people that “I was glad it happened like this, with all of you. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” Then I skittered off stage to get the extra set of strings I had in my bag (see above under consummate professional!) while the boys carried on.

I did a bad job replacing the string. In my hurry I used the wrong one, I did not wind it properly, and I had it tuned to the wrong key for the first two songs I played when I was back on stage. I have yet to walk away from a show feeling like I have played as well as I would have liked. In my nervousness at the front of the room my hands go to the wrong place or I can not hit the high notes. But while it’s a clumsy weird feeling, it’s also always hugely exciting. The mistakes I make share space in my head with the mad fun of playing live music.

I joke, often, about my fast track school of rock. My lateness to live music, to being in a band, means that I want to do everything, now, to make up for not doing it when I was 22. I want to make calls from a phone booth while a tour bus idles at a truck stop. “Yeah, baby, I miss you too, just a few more weeks….” I joke about getting a regrettable tattoo and writing up a tour rider that includes perfectly ridiculous things like a requirement for organic strawberries dipped in 77% dark chocolate, no more, no less, I swear to god, is it so hard, it says on the label 50%, and that is not what I asked for did you read the contract? I joke about rehab and trashing hotel rooms and rumors of liaisons with professional athletes. I suppose I should want band drama, too, but I honestly, I’d prefer to skip that and stick with the comedic chemistry we have, the absurd email exchanges and rehearsal banter and onstage silliness.

When I snapped that string and had to deal with the aftermath, I did not immediately think, “Oh, this is rock star material, right here, check this off the list.”  I thought, “This is hilarious, this is possibly the funniest thing that has ever happened to me in public.” I joked about it for the rest of the night, about how it was like crossing the rock star equator, and now, I was going to have to get that regrettable tattoo. (I’m thinking an anarchist “A” because unlike what we said publicly, it was not the G string, but the A that snapped. A G string is inherently funnier, so I let the fiction stand.)

Later that night, while we were breaking everything down, a few people asked me what was next, now that I’d broken a string.  I said, again, without missing a beat, “I think I’ll set something on fire.”

I might be joking. But after last night, I think, hey, it could happen.

[Thanks, Barry, for the great picture.]