The Glue

A funny thing happened during my number the other night... It kind of fell apart.

Already, the cards were stacked against me. We were coming back from the weekend, and for once, I had actually skipped town. The train ride in from Paris seemed so strange on a show day and I must say, I was not feeling it. Fortunately (unfortunately?), this seemed to be the case for just about everyone.

Now I’ve done shows where my wheel basically did the act without much help from me. And I think that’s probably what would have happened were it not for the bass. And by bass, I mean lack thereof.

The music for my act is pretty rock and roll and has a killer bass line. It normally does, anyway. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but from pretty much the beginning of my act, the bass, as well as the man playing it, disappeared. Now you would think that one missing musician, while noticeable and unfortunate, wouldn’t be completely disastrous. But my music soon went from sounding a little off, to no longer really sounding like music…

The piano soon turned to mush, the sax didn’t seem entirely sure whether or not it should play at all and so cut in and out half-heartedly, the guitarist seemed to be lost without the bass player by his side, and I’m pretty sure the drummer was just trying to hold everything together.

It is a blessing to perform with musicians playing live by your side. But man, when things go awry, do you ever feel it. Already, I was struggling to get through my act. There is one moment where both the guitarist and the bass player step forward and we have a nice, dramatic little moment. I was relying on that moment to give me that little push to make it through the number. So when I turned toward them and saw that the bassist was still nowhere to be found and the guitarist was 80 billion kilometres away because he either forgot or didn’t feel like stepping forward for our exchange, I felt completely and utterly alone. My heart sank and I continued to limp my way through my act.

Later on, one of the technicians could be heard saying (in reference to my act) that the bass is a pretty damn good thing to have, come to think of it. And you know what? I had the same reflection while on stage. And that was well before things really started to get awkward. Without that solid base (sorry), everything just kind of ripped apart at the seams. I’ve always relied quite a lot on the bass player as a friend for moral support, but that was the night I learned that when it comes to my act, he’s kind of the glue.