As I was headed for the last leg before bed last night, around two in the morning, the phone rang. It was our drummer John, wanting an update. I am not complaining about the lateness of the call, as I did tell him that between midnight and three in the morning was the most reliable time to reach me, and he does work until eleven when he’s working, so it makes sense for him to call me then. However, just because that’s the best time to get me doesn’t mean it’s a good time. He always says, “I caught you at a bad time.” I always answer, There are no good times. I try to pressure people into using e-mail to contact me. I can get to it when I actually have time, and can interrupt my response sometimes for hours at a stretch while I put everything else in place. He’s older than I, and was technophobic before that was a word, so he likes talking to someone as close to in person as he can get–which for us is the telephone most of the time.
In any case, when I cut the call short at forty minutes (I believe two and a half hours is closer to his typical conversation, and on one of the first calls we went nearly twice that) I promised that I would somehow let him know the outcome of today’s tech work. Gray Vanaman of Audio-clear, to whom we already owe so much, took a couple hours out of his afternoon to help me fix a few problems. I was right about the problem with the P.A.: it was something simple and stupid that I just did not know about the mixer, which was that all channels have to be assigned to a secondary or they don’t get to the mains. In other words, we have a functional P.A. now. Since that took him all of five minutes and he was there anyway, he also tackled the problem with the Ampeg V4s–beautiful classic bass guitar speaker cabinets, four twelve-inch woofers in each, but they have the old four-pin amphenols Ampeg used on all its speakers back in the day. He replaced these with these newfangled connectors–NL4s, I think he calls them–and made me a pair of patch cords that will connect from the standard phone outputs of my amplifiers to the NL4 inputs.
Already several people have been impressed by Adam’s bass guitar set-up, as he has the classic Ampeg B-15, one of the best portable bass amps ever made, fifteen inch woofer in the cabinet, paired with the external Ampeg V4 bass speaker column, and it sounds wonderful. I’ll be using the other V4 with my amp; I’ve a few things to set up to get that working, but it should be good to go maybe even by tomorrow evening. I expect to have more trouble fixing the vacuum cleaner than I will setting up my equipment, although I’ve lost a needed switchbox and am going to have to buy the components to build another (something of my own invention that no one else has). But I can work without it for the moment. I’m just hoping I have enough patch cords to connect everything.
Rehearsal tomorrow; hopefully it will go well.
–M. J. Young
July 16th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I am so sorry but please consider me the drummer that never was. Mark and I had a debate as to the most effective way to communicate and as I am “old school” i.e. before the impersonal internet and the advent of email I perfered the old fashioned method of 1:1 on the telephone. This is one area where I feel technology has failed us. While this seems to be the prefered method of communicating it has the inevitable quality of robbing us of true interpersonal relations. I guess I’m not savvy enough but I cannot tell a persons real feelings and what their thought process may have been at the time by looking at some cold, generic words. I also understand that some people have other activities or family situations that therefore make it difficult to carry on conversations late/early in the morning. A happy comprimise is what is needed but there are times I realize where someone may not have the ability to answer a phone call particularly when some drunken bafoon is on the other end of the line looking to take a somewhat large chunk of their time which could be devoted to rest or other family obligations. I am almost always available at any hour day or night and I would respond accordingly. I don’t mean this as a slight to M.J. but unless we can communicate as people to people I see no need for future dialog. I will now and until the day that I give up the ghost combat the use of Email as the primary way to communicate with another human being. MJ you have been most tolerant of my late night/early morning rants which I’m sure more than one time this must have caused you pain and an uneasy feeling about how to dispose of the matter without creating any ill will. Since the band has never had a rehersal with the drum set I don’t feel that I have left you in the learch. God bless you and maybe someday we can have a reunion with TLP. Wouldn’t that be something!!!
July 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am
John, I think both of us are overreacting. I’m first.
My reaction stems from the fact that there are a lot of people in my life who on the one hand seem to think that I have all the time in the world to talk with them, run errands, spend time on their behalf, who on the other hand don’t understand why I’m not getting things done. Why has the entire band not gotten together? Because the equipment is not yet ready. Why is the equipment not yet ready? Because I have not put the time into all the little things that have to be done in that connection. So why have I not set aside that time? Because there are so many other things demanding my attention. I lose several hours almost every day doing things for other people, ranging from conversations to long errands to extra work, and I still hear every day that there are things I have not yet done that need my attention. Reminiscing with old friends is not a particularly pleasurable activity for me (unlike you, I have a lot of bad memories of the past) and one for which I do not have much time. When I was in high school I would stay on the phone for an hour just to talk with someone. Today I use the phone to make my point and hang up, ninety-nine calls out of a hundred. That, incidentally, is how my parents use the phone, so maybe I’m the one who’s old-school.
You, on the other hand, are taking my shortage of time and disinterest in reliving the pain of the past as a personal affront. I need you on drums; I’ve planned a lot around having two drummers, and if I wind up not having any I’m going to lose the band before it starts. As far as talking goes, perhaps my memory of the past is not the same as yours, but I think we have spent more hours conversing with each other as friends in the past six months than we did in the entire two years that we were in The Last Psalm and Jacob’s Well. I won’t say we weren’t friends, but I think we can count on one hand the times we just sat and talked back then. Yes, you became a friend in those times, maybe more through the struggles of working together in the bands, such that you were on the very short list–one of the ushers at my wedding, the other two of whom were my own brothers. But we really didn’t get to that point by spending long hours chatting either on the phone or in person, but by working together in the trenches, putting up with each other’s foibles, knocking heads together and coming through it–in short, living lives that put us in the same problems and made us problems for each other.
Now is the opportunity to reinvent that by working together again.
I am not socially adept. I do very poorly in unstructured social settings. Give me a game, a class, a concert, a rehearsal, a gathering with a purpose, and I’m in my element. Put me in a party, a drawing room, a dinner, a conversation, and I’m lost. If I’m going to get to know people, I have to do it in context. I can’t find the rules of engagement in unstructured settings, and I always wind up offending someone. I apologize for doing so yet again. I try to avoid such situations, but they are the norm of human interaction (as poor as I am at them) and cannot be avoided.
I do not know when I can talk. My schedule keeps changing. I sometimes think to call you when I know you are at work–and anyway, usually when I call, I get voice mail/answering machine. That suggests you have exactly the same problem I have: you can’t really talk to people when they have time, and you can’t really predict with any accuracy when you will have time. Even when I think I have time, I’m usually wrong. Time is something I do not have.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to be late on some very important errands I have to do for someone else.
–Mark
M. J. Young
July 18th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I am so sorry for the way things seem to have turned out. We have a difference on the way to properly communicate and I can understand your position on this. You have constraints upon your time as do we all. You seem to be burning the candle at both ends and do not seem to have the necessary time to complete all of the necessary tasks demanded of your time including fielding my calls at all hours of the day and night. I apologize for this. I also did not realize that you had no or little proclivity for reliving “the past.” Unfortunetly, I do. (Why do you think I love “oldies”? That aside, I don’t think you would really like what I’ve become on the traps. I’m old now and not the Keith Moon type basher I once was. My preferences seem to run to the extreme opposite more inclined to softer jazz, i.e. trio, lounge type playing. Again, sorry for all the late nights/early morning rants. You were most gracious to put up with them for as long as you did. Good luck with the band, you’ll be fine without me. J