Ten Years Old

You know, the drummer was only 10 years old in that video. Not 10 years old like 10 years and 364 days, either. He was 10.

He’s not 10 any more. He’s gotten big for his age, so no one gets the extra frisson that they got when you could only see the top of his head behind the drums. He looks older than his 13 years now. He plays even better, but he’s always been good.

I said it at the time, and upon reflection, I’ll say it again: He was the best 10-year-old drummer in the world. I have no idea why the world wasn’t particularly interested in him or his brother. They were rara avises, man. He was playing for folding money, for hours at a time, when he was 10. Hell, I think big brother was only 17 at the time. He was performing live with only a 10-year-old drummer to back him up. I ask again, why did the world not care about them much? I still don’t get it. This video has 800 views. If they had stepped on a rake while recording it with their phone held vertically, it would have gotten 800,000. Ah well, that’s the way of the world, and we must live in it.

You might not notice it, but he was exhausted when this song was filmed. It was fairly late at night. My kids were supposed to play in the afternoon, but the gig got postponed over and over because of monsoon rains. Biblical rain. We go to music jobs early, because I’ve taught my children to act professionally right from the get-go. We sat in our van, listening to drops like dinner plates hammer the roof, ate our bag lunches, and waited. The job kept getting put off. The nice people who hired us offered to pay us and send us home, but we said we’d signed up to do a job, and we’d do it. We waited some more, and then drove to a local fast-food restaurant, sat in the van, and ate that. Then we waited some more. The kids didn’t play until 8 hours after we left our house.

The crowd was really enthusiastic and pleasant. They were sophisticates. They were art college students from New York City. They were pleasantly surprised that my older son had a repertoire of hipster-compliant songs like this one to play. Their enthusiasm turned into an extra hour of performance.

Watch the little man. His arms are like lead. He’s been playing for two hours straight. He was waiting in a car for eight more before that. This was the latest he’d ever been awake, never mind playing. Watch his eyes at the one-minute-and-twenty-five-second mark.

That’s my boy.

Imagine How the World Could Be, So Very Fine

So, happy together.

This is rehearsal. There’s no microphone. The Spare Heir uses a form of brushes to keep the volume down. They’re like little bundles of sticks. You can’t do things like ratamacues with them very effectively. It’s not that important for rehearsal.

The Heir doesn’t use a microphone when they rehearse. I forbade a sonic arms race early on. It’s in their bones now. They play as quietly as they can. The Heir just belts it out. His guitar is amplified only enough to be heard along with the drumming. It builds up your voice to sing like that.

No one much understands the difference between practice and rehearsal. You practice to learn rudiments and new material. This is done on your own. You gather to rehearse to prepare to perform. You do not practice at rehearsal. Then you perform. You do not rehearse during a performance. My children do not practice, really. Well, I think The Heir does, but it’s always classical piano.

My kids rehearse like this to prepare for shows. All of their contemporaries can’t or won’t do the work necessary to perform in public. Other kids refuse to practice until an audience is assembled for them. One that can’t leave. Other kids can never really rehearse, because they never practice. They can’t perform properly, because they never rehearse. You can spot this species, and hear them, a mile away. They get in front of an audience of people who can’t leave, and then noodle, i.e.: practice, at flight-deck volume, in between songs that weren’t rehearsed.

Unorganized Hancock will be performing at the Fryeburg Fair on Sunday, October 9th. Three big shows, at 1PM, 2PM, and 3 PM, at the Draft Horse Park bandstand. Watch your step.

Perfect Pitch and Perfect Suits

Here’s a video of my two children, AKA Unorganized Hancock, appearing on The Breakfast Club on Z 105.5 a couple of weeks ago. The host is a genial fellow named Matty. The woman’s voice you hear in the background is Bonnie McHugh, the station manager, who took this video with her phone. She’s a peach.

The kids enjoy appearing on the show. Nice people like nice people, I guess. This is the third time they’ve been on. The radio station is over an hour away from our house, and the show is on early in the morning, so we have to roust the kids out of bed extra early to make it on time. You’ll notice the young feller yawning and stretching to illustrate the hour. He has Perfect Pitch, sometimes known as Absolute Pitch. He can identify any note he hears without any other reference. He can even do it with ambient noises out in the world, like bird songs or sirens. They didn’t get around to it in the video, but you can play multiple notes on the piano, and he can tell you all of them. It’s a very unusual ability. Of course his father, in his infinite wisdom, taught him how to play the drums.

My sons have a certain amount of aplomb, I must say. The little fellow, Garrett, is about to be put on the spot, but he’s never nervous before a show. When he was only ten, the boys played under a little tent outside the Pickup Cafe in Skowhegan, Maine. They played one set, and then took a breather. There was a little courtyard behind the restaurant where the kids took their break. When they returned, the little fellow handed my wife one of his teeth. He had pulled it out while they waited around. Then he sat down and did the second set.

The big one is poised, too. He does get nervous before shows, but he doesn’t reveal it. I can tell, though. The boys entered a contest sponsored by Z 105 and the Lewiston-Auburn Fighting Spirit hockey team to write their fight song. There was a battle of the bands to decide the winner. Miles, the big one, had mononucleosis, and was very sick during the weeks before the show. His first day out of bed in three weeks, he appeared on Z 105, and the next day, he played at the Lewiston Colisee, and the boys won the contest. No one knew he had been sick. But I knew what an effort it was for him.

After the Perfect Pitch interview you see in this video, the radio station hired Miles. I knew they were nice people. Now I know they’re smart people, too.

[Update: Many thanks to Donald P. from California for his generous contribution to our PayPal tipjar. It is much appreciated]