Guest Blogger: Neil Adams on supporting live music

I've written on a number of occassions about my travels as a couchsurfer, staying in good folks' homes for what seems to those who have not experienced such a situation a strange idea. But for those of us who know and understand what CouchSurfing is about, it is more about discovering friends you didn't know you had and forging long lasting bonds with people that would otherwise be extras in your own forsaken movie background.
Neil Adams is one such chap who I happened upon and I can wholeheartedly say that I am better for it. He was a wonderful host, bringing me in to his world of hospitality, English countryside, local sports and music, and what I hope is a longstanding friendship. We both share a passion for music and he brought me into the behind the scenes world of his band The Layers. I was able to catch him shortly afterwards at the Couch Crash Festival in New York City and then last year, between Snowmageddons 1 and 2, Neil and I roadtripped to Kentucky to surf with another Couchsurfer that stayed with him who is like Louisville's music royalty, Brigid Kaelin.
Last year, Neil wrote the following piece about getting out and being a part of the music scene which I have asked him if I could repost here.
*************************************************************
Hi, I’m Neil and I’m deeply honoured to be able to guest briefly in David’s blog. I mention the fact that CouchSurfing has brought some brilliant people into my life – David is one of them. We met when David stayed with me for a few days on his travels in England and we had a terrific time. David came and met the guys in The Layers, put in a sterling performance with my soccer team and proved to be great company. He then proceeded to show just how great a friend he is by driving out to see us gig in New York and then, when I arrived in Washington earlier this year during ‘Snowmageddon’, welcomed me into his home and was my co-driver on a road trip to see friends in Louisville.

It’s for experiences like those that you should definitely check out CouchSurfing, make new friends and have crazy adventures with them. While you’re tapping around on the Internet, check out The Layers too, we’d love some more fans in the US – once we hit a critical mass of fans out there we’ll have no option but to come out and tour!
**************************************************
Low-key adventures in live music.

I realise that in starting a piece of writing with a digression is probably breaking some sort of literary commandment but I am struck, as I title this little passage of ramblings, by the homonymic relationship of low-key and Loki, the Norse trickster god. Low-key and Loki adventures, I imagine, couldn’t be more different...

Although this last week has been very much the former, there’s been evidence of the trickster spirit about this week. The weather, in particular, would seem to have been at the call of some mischievous spirit. Trickster mythology often features a balance, some good and some bad and that would certainly be perspective on the weekend’s gigs. Still, back to some sort of linear narrative...

On Wednesday I popped along to a local open mic evening to meet some friends. It’s one of those events that are sometimes packed, sometimes deserted to the point of eerie. This week was more along the mournfully tolling bell and tumbleweed lines until some of my friends turned up. An old friend of mine kicked off the evening; I sang a little and then made way for Judy. She’s the younger sister of a good friend of mine and is possessed of a voice that could grace stages anywhere in the world. I’m not exaggerating, she’s terrific. As the evening went on we all ended up singing together, the line between audience and performer pretty fuzzy. It wasn’t an epiphany of an evening, just an extremely pleasant evening of making music with friends and being hugely impressed at the talent of people who I see day to day.
It would have been great to have a few more people there to share that with. As a performer, I always feel that I’d like a little bit of an audience, at least. Perhaps I need my ego massaging; perhaps it’s a need to communicate or to feel a part of something. I think that it’s to do with the latter - I really think that music is something that can be shared by a community. I don’t need a huge crowd screaming my name (there must be times when an adoring audience must superficially resemble a lynch mob) but I do enjoy performing a lot more when I feel that it’s entertaining people. I like a bit of banter with a small, appreciative crowd.
I know that I’ve written about this before butI found myself wondering why so many people would stay in of an evening to watch strangers perform on TV talent shows when they could go out and see people in their local communities, sing, dance, act, perform poetry and comedy, present, debate and do all manner of other things – and then meet and talk to those people, join in and get involved. Most of this stuff is going on in every town, free of charge. I know that if you go out to your local open mic there’s a risk of seeing nothing but a bug-eyed hippy poet, an old lady singing wobbly folk songs with a finger in her ear and two slightly stoned teenagers doing a fifteen minute version of ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ and that if there are acts you hate on the TV you can turn over but let’s face it, most people don’t. They sit through the whole thing and then discuss how crap it was the next day at work.
I wonder if it’s the element of risk. We don’t want to be asked to sing along –well, feel free to politely decline. Or we don’t want to risk the performer seeing our expressions when we don’t like what they do? Or is it that we’re just bone idle? Or is it the ‘cool’ issue.
Discuss.
Anyway, give some thought to nipping out to see what’s on down the road. Almost everywhere that I’ve been out to see local musicians perform in their local it’s been a worthwhile and entertaining time.

And on to the weekend’s gigs. On Friday The Layers played at the Green Man festival; more details to follow shortly on the Layers’ blog when I’ve composed something appropriate. I feel honour-bound to mention here how delightful the gang running the Einstein’s Garden stage were – if you’re reading, then thank you, thank you and thrice thank you.
So we had fun, it was wet, we somehow avoided cholera and trench foot. I will expand on the band site, I promise.
There was something else that I picked up on, though, and it’s not just me, that draws me back to the cool issue, above.
Chatting to friends at the festival, we were struck that there were sizeable, enthusiastic crowds in front of stages where what was being performed was not, in our opinions , always that great, either in composition or execution. We can excuse the first on the grounds of taste and the second in that if you love the songs then you don’t notice the mistakes. But not all the time and not all that much.
Actually, it seems to me that people will go and see an act if they’re famous or if the media has held them up as ‘the next big thing’ regardless as to whether they’re that good or not. Some of them are, obviously. Some are really quite poor but still get a much bigger crowd, more money and more kudos than people who are superbly talented but not famous and, crucially, not cool – by some indefinable yardstick.
This quality, though, is simply a marketing invention. It’s like some magic potion that you can sprinkle on anything to make it desirable. Its secret cousin is ‘anti-cool’, formulated in the same laboratory but hushed up, a potion that can be splashed on to anything to make it stink like week-old kitbag.
Well death to cool (I would say that, not cool now, never have been , never will be) – don’t let them control you. Look around you and make up your own mind. And turn off the X factor while you still have one.
Which, in a manner of speaking, brings me on to gig three and a slightly different, if related, point.
The Tourettes played a cricket club barbeque on a day when there simply wasn’t cricket. In the absence of a match, the teams didn’t show up, in spite of the fact that the evening event was supposed to be a fund-raiser for their new pavilion. So we played to a small, friendly crowd.
It was a fun gig to play. We were a little bit over-relaxed in our approach to performance at times, a little improvisation here, a few ‘jazz’ moments while we laughed at ourselves mid-verse but the audience were smiling and asking for more and we felt connected.
The people in the bands that I’m privileged to play in and their loved ones and all the people that help and support us are dear friends to me. More than that, they are my family, my brothers and sisters. The best parts about playing with bands are not restricted to the performances at all. It’s the camaraderie of travelling to a gig, the planning, the rehearsals, the laughter that we share. My life would be so much the lesser without them.
It’s the same when you’re part of a sports team or a troupe of actors.
So I circle back to that first issue. More of us should go out, sing, play create. Make music, comedy, poetry, theatre. Talk about big ideas. Get out from in front of what’s being marketed at us and make our own entertainment – because as we do, the connections between us grow and enrich us.
This might seem like a trivial issue when the world can look as if it’s on the brink of collapse but I really don’t think that it is. I think that getting together to create is the most human thing that we do and that without it, what would we be saving the world for anyway?
So there you have it: the adventure starts here. If that isn’t worth singing about, I don’t know what is.

The Random Traveller/Traveler

Language is a funny thing: full of conventions, rules, stipulations, exceptions, contradictions and a rich lush history. It is amazing what we can find out about language through the words and spellings. I teach my students to look at unfamiliar words and see if there are parts of words that seem similar to others. I teach them Latin and Greek roots and their meanings. I get into it.

Spelling has always been important to me, however in my rush to get ideas down, I may ignore misspellings only to hope that upon proofreading I am able to catch any errors. I teach my students that spelling is vital, but getting your thoughts down is what is most important. All the energy spent on editing can come later. That works in theory, but not always perfectly.

Spellchecking tools have made us lazy and often do not catch mistakes since our language is full of strange words in both spelling and meaning. In addition to all this murky soup we have to navigate, wonderful Noah Webster decided to take it upon himself to make some changes in the spelling of words to make America's English decidedly American. When you are the author of a dictionary you end up having quite a bit of influence on language like that. Colour ----> Color.

However, the history of English, and living languages in general, is more like an evolution of spelling. If you look at historical documents or literature from several centuries ago you find alternate spellings for words you recognize. Until you get a codified set of spellings or rules ( a la Academie francaise) spellings, pronunciations and usage changes like the path of a river. While the British may have been bemoaning America's bastardization of their mother tongue, scholars had been debating the use of -or and -our for some time.
Check out this post from wisegeek.com:
http://www.wisegeek.com/why-does-british-spelling-keep-the-u-in-words-like-colour.htm

What got me thinking about this today is this: I noticed recently that my spelling of "Traveller" is essentially correct, however, it is the British spelling of the word, not American. I find it funny that took me several years to find this out and never really thought about it. Spellcheck didn't find it. I came across the differences quite by accident. Being an American, am I going to change it? Nah, I've kinda gotten attached to it. I think it gives it a certain international flavour.