Hammond and Harmonica

John Hammond’s performance as the opening act for the Blind Boys of Alabama was good. But while I was watching him play, there were certain things I noticed; I’ve decided address them directly to him:

You play a mean guitar… by that I mean that you can play fast, complex and accurately… but the blues don’t respond well to being rushed. They’re meant to be felt and savored… and they need to make the audience empathize with the pain of the song.

I believe that you feel a lot of the blues as you play them. But the speed of your emotion (if there is any such thing) exceeds that of the audience’s emotion. You’re off in your world, feeling the blues, as they watch and listen and are left in the concert hall. I believe there’s some adage about performance that says it must be larger than life– exaggerated to some degree– so that it can be perceived by the largest number of people in the audience. I’m not talking about “dumbing it down”– just that the speed of the performer’s mind and emotion far exceeds that of the audience. Don’t leave ‘em in the dust.

And the harmonica… dude, can’t you just have somebody up there to play the harmonica, while you play the guitar really well? I don’t need to see you wheezing out an oral sex session with a harmonica mount around your neck… I’d rather concentrate on listening to you play the instrument with which you’re truly skilled…

And you don’t need to play the classic blues, either… when you played that Tom Waits song, everything in your performance (even the silly harmonica) seemed to converge to “just right”. To your credit, before this performance, I’d never connected Tom Waits directly to the blues… and your performance illustrated that connection. But somehow I got the feeling that you were “into” the song, and although you “felt” the other songs, they didn’t fit your performace as well as that song.

P.S. If the headline act is expecting you to play on stage with them, you really ought to come out and join them when they ask you to… otherwise– no matter what the real situation/extenuating circumstances are– you end up being perceived as an ungrateful prick. Just so you know.