Maxit Mag

• You Are Not Ric Ocasek, Mr. Rundgren. That's OK. Relax. No one expects you to be. So you just focus on notes and words and that guitar stuff you do so good. If you try too hard to be a sound-alike, all your timing and consonants will go right out the window, and while it's nice to hear the audience singing along so loudly, you probably don't want it to be because they're trying to keep from hearing you.
  
  
• We Want The Classics! No no, really, it's good that you're still making music in 2006. But your new songs won't get the same reaction as "You Might Think" (Cars) and "One Way Or Another" (Blondie). See, we wanna sing along and shake our booties. We wanna pretend we're still teenagers. "Not Tonight" (New Cars) is a fun song, but it's not what we grew up with.
  
  
• Audience Participation Has Its Limits. "Heart of Glass" (Blondie) is a great song with lovely vocals. You know that sighing refrain that starts high, jumps down the octave, and then swoops up from the 7th to the root? Beautiful. But not flawlessly reproduceable by the untrained audience. By all means, ask us to sing that with you again, but don't be surprised if all you get is a sort of vague howl.
  
  
• Audience Participation Can Be Cool. By the same token, "Good Times Roll" (Cars) is an awesome sing-along song. The refrain is melodically simple--but not everyone remembers the same three notes of each of those three chords. So when the band goes silent and the house lights come up, you get hundreds of perfect strangers singing in complex harmony, and that's neat.
  
  
• You're All Looking Good. Overheard in the women's restroom between sets: "She's 60? Well, I figured she was in her 50s, but... Damn, I hope I look that good when I'm 60!"
  

Lastly: Who else out there (raise your hand) knew that the members of Blondie harbored aspirations to be a reggae band? Huh. It's like realizing that Geddy Lee could have, had he wanted to, been a country singer. *shudder*