We always hear about sports stars having a bad game, or the comedian having a rough night, and I’ve read a lot of articles and blogs by these folks talking about how they get over those rough patches and pick themselves up to perform at a high level again the next day. Well believe it or not, musicians have bad shows and usually know when the crowd isn’t diggin’ it, and that can translate into a very rough night. So how do we pick ourselves up from that and dust ourselves off, so we can come back and perform at the top of our game the next night?
There are a lot of factors that go into putting on a good show, and any one of them can go wrong and cause a show to be subpar: bad club management, crappy stage gear, poor matching of bands on a bill, lack of audience attendance, the list could go on forever. A musicians job is partly to go out and put on a killer show despite the fact that any one of these things, or a combination, have gone wrong. But sometimes the musician is having a bad night and that can translate into one of these factors having more impact on the show than usual. It’s not an easy thing to overcome a night like that, but there a couple of key philosophies that help musicians at any level get over a night like this.
Just like with any profession, overcoming adversity takes a mental tenacity. The constant rejection of being any kind of artist is actually some of the best training you can have for overcoming difficult performances. Knowing how to pick yourself up and dust yourself off is something that is part nurture and part nature, but you can make up for a lack of nature with some amount of practice. If you’re a touring musician you get plenty of practice with this, but unfortunately if you’re just an every once in a while performer it can be much harder to overcome. When you think about the fact that even the best baseball players only hit the ball 3 out of every 10 times they’re at bat, and the best teams still lose 65 games in a season, it’s no wonder that they can be good at handling adversity. Musicians, on the other hand, have much more pressure to perform flawlessly every night, because they’re usually performing for new fans that didn’t watch them the night before.
Beyond the nature or nurture of your mental toughness, it’s important to maintain a decent diet, get good sleep and keep the partying to a moderate level; all of which can be difficult to do when you’re a touring musician. But the seasoned veterans that perform well every night have systems down for all of those factors, because they know that it will have a huge effect on the quality of their performance, and in turn their musical legacy. When you’re a young, fresh touring musician you may be able to bounce back from those difficulties fairly quickly at first, but it doesn’t take long before it catches up with you and performing can become a drag instead of a blast.
So behind all the excitement and perceived irregularity of being a touring musician, the things that are important to normal everyday people to feel good as they go about their day: diet, exercise, sleep, social interaction, etc., are the things that are even more important for touring musicians to maintain if they want to have the mental stamina to overcome that occasional bad night. The grueling touring schedule, extreme amount of energy expended while performing, and the myriad of logistical and administrative difficulties that musicians are confronted with almost everyday when they’re not performing makes these factors even more critical to maintaining their ability to bounce back from a rough night on stage. And that, in turn, plays a big role in keeping their dreams from becoming as much of a drag as any another job.
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