Tuesday was Election Day in the United States, and I had a lot of hopes and fears. As a matter of displacement for those fears, it was also the day I’d scheduled to get back together with Dave Moore to make and record spontaneous musical performances. Like the election, an event I was looking forward to, while retaining some worries. I’ve spent the entire summer rewiring and repatching the recording system in my studio space with the goal of improving captures of this kind of performance. But as the months passed, both Dave and I were getting older. We first started doing this kind of playing and recording over 45 years ago to cassette tapes, and now we have to deal with the frailties and energy levels of old age to continue this.

Monday I tested the new scheme out, as best I could by myself. Everything seemed to be working. Dave would arrive at our accustomed mid-day hour Tuesday. That morning I repeated a quick sound-check and left everything powered up and ready for his arrival.

Dave carefully traversed the rickety stairs and I greeted him. I explained that there was now a computer system at his position running Mainstage* that would allow him to load a variety of soundbank instruments for his main keyboard. I said I’d show him how it worked after we tried an opening song.

So here was yesterday: a country (and to some extent, a world) awaiting to find out what would happen with America’s current ruling cabal and this more localized concern about two older poets/musicians trying to create something with sound and words. I stepped over to my microphone position wearing a Telecaster electric guitar strapped across my body and began to play the first few notes. Dave was looking at a new keyboard setup, and as is our customary scheme, neither of us would have forethought of what were going to play. I quickly told him what key center we’d start in. We were beginning – we had to begin, even not knowing more than that. I had a serious poem of tyranny and the end of empire to present. Heavy stuff.

You can read the entirety of Stephen Vincent Benét’s harrowing poem at this link.

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I keep a stool near my mic, just as I do at Dave’s position in the studio space, so neither of us has to stand for the whole recording session. I stepped back to sit on it –

But I’d moved the stool a few feet away, probably to check or adjust something during my soundcheck. So, there was no stool where my butt was heading. My fat ass sat down on thin air, which I would then traverse much more rapidly than Dave took to the entryway stairs. An utter comic pratfall.

And like any good comic pratfall, no injury, other than the illustration of pride in serious intent. Dave asked if I was all right. I said yes, got up and kept playing. Telecasters are a 76-year-old design, but they aren’t fragile – the guitar, as I, was still intact and in-tune. Five minutes or so later, there was the performance you can hear below with the audio player gadget of a portion of Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Litany for Dictatorships.”

Are you thinking that any such audio player must have fallen off your computer screen? Well, some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player, but this highlighted link will order a recount and pop up returns of a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*Mainstage is an app sold by Apple that allows computer hosted instruments and effects to be selected and controlled from a simplified user interface during live performance or recording. As these things go, Mainstage is getting a bit long in the tooth, and there are more sophisticated systems that more sophisticated modern stage computer musicians might choose to use these days, but it allowed Dave to use the menu I’d set up with only a couple of minutes of instruction.