Over the weekend my kids were in their school’s production of The Sound of Music.  There is just something fun about watching the kids perform.  For one thing they don’t go to a school for performers so there is not the underfeeling of angst, drama and competition that you can usually feel oozing out of young performers who have already pinned all their dreams on the big prize.  Most of the kids are not really performers, nor will they ever be.  They are just lucky enough to have a director who is a theater person and who puts together pretty amazing productions that push the kids to higher levels than most kids get to experience outside of performing arts schools.  Even the better performers just look they are having fun.  Nobody seems to have overly enthusiastic stage moms (sorry, it’s usually the moms) pushing them.  They have not yet gotten to the point where the few who continue acting will get and realize how intense the pressure is, how nasty and evil the competition is and, very sadly, that for the girls if they want to have any shot at going anywhere they will have to basically stop eating.  

Thinking about what the kids who continue to perform will go through makes me think about my first crash and burn experience in show biz.  I wanted to share that with you, good reader, since it is always interesting to enjoy other people’s misery!  Really though it is about honesty.  Things are going well right now and even though I am by no means on top, I am getting through doors that I never thought I would even get to knock on.  It’s easy to report on that and it’s easy to make yourself look awesome over the internet.  So now I step back to tell you about my first major bombing.

I was 24-years-old when after the second year of sending Audition tapes I got the best news I could get from the group I wanted to sing with – Chanticleer.  The were, and still are, an a cappella men’s group that is about the only one of its kind where the members make a full-time living singing with them.  There aren’t a lot of full-time jobs out there for people with music degrees so this was a biggy for me.   They did about 250 shows a year with about 150 of them on the road – perfect for a young, single man.  The great news I got was that they wanted me to audition live for them the following year which meant I had a solid year to prepare.  I did so by hiring the voice teacher from my college who I had never liked but who I thought was the best.  She was surprised when I asked her to work for me (I don’t think she liked me either) but we put in a good year of work and I felt ready. 

The audition came and I headed from my home in Idaho to San Francisco where the group was based.  I stayed at the Queen Anne Hotel where I roomed with the first person I had ever met who admitted that he was gay.  It was the early 90s and, living in Idaho, I knew a lot of gay people but none who had admitted it.  Sadly you didn’t admit something like that in Idaho in the 90s – you moved to California, New York or maybe Seattle and started a new life.  I don’t know that this has really changed in 2011.  My roommate neither made a pass at me nor tried to indoctrinate me.  He was a great guy and it was a good start toward ripping apart my own silly notions of life formed as a conservative young Idahoan. 

I was 25 at the time of the audition and I had been singing since I was 17.  In that 8 year span I had never failed at any audition ever.  Never.  I got every solo or opera part I wanted.  In my later years in college I hadn’t even had to audition – It would always come down to whether or not I wanted a solo or sometimes being asked to let someone else do it.  I guess I could have felt, from this 8 year streak, that I would always get any music job I ever auditioned for but my feeling was the opposite – that this audition was so much bigger than all the others before it combined and that it would stink if my first failure was not getting into Chanticleer.  I was prophetic.  The first part of the audition was done in a neat way.  There were about 20 people competing for 4 spots and all 20 did a sort of mini-recital where we each sang for the other auditioners as well as the Chanticleer powers that were.  Everyone was surprisingly supportive of each other.  My turn was near the end and the early auditioners had run over their time limits – every single one of them – so the last few of us were cut from 2 songs to 1.  Still I did pretty well on my one Song and the director was smiling and nodding while I sang.  So far so good.  That was the end of the good.  The next step was to go into a small room and to test range and sight-reading ability.  I knew that my range was good, not great, but good enough for the group.  Sight-reading has always been a huge strength of mine.  In college choir I would learn a song in either 1 or at the most 2 times going through it.  I would then sit bored for 2 months, making smart-ass comments while everyone else learned the song.  I was not worried about sight-reading for the audition.  When the testing of range started I somehow lost not only the last year of training I had put in but also all 7 years of formal vocal training I had.  I just couldn’t breathe.  I started to get nervous and it got worse.  The director started yelling “Breathe!”  That didn’t help.  The director is yelling at me disgustedly during my audition.  That probably isn’t a good thing.  He finally gave up on me.  We moved to sight-reading and my shot at redemption.  Then came the curveball.  The director pulled out a song that was written in an ancient chant notation that I had only seen maybe twice in my musical life.   I massacred it.  I don’t even know if I blind-squirreled my way into any right notes.   I went back to my hotel that night knowing I was not going to get the job.  Oh yeah, and it was a 2 day audition so I knew I had to go back the next morning.  My roommate got the heck out to “sightsee” (translation, not have to hang out with the downer guy).  I ordered a pizza and, for the only time in my life, binge-ate the whole thing. 

The next day I woke after all of about 2 hours of sleep with the hope that maybe things were not as bad as I had thought.  That quickly disappeared.  The first thing we did was had doughnuts with all the singers of Chanticleer, sort of a meet and greet.  It didn’t go unnoticed by me that the music director and artistic director hung out only with the auditioners they liked and never came near me.  Then came the highlight and one more shot at redemption.  The auditioners were to be mixed in with Chanticleer in all sorts of combinations to hear how we blended with the group.  Another strength – I can blend with anyone!   I have sung in a lot of settings and often I am asked to do a song or two with someone I don’t know.  When I do I just listen to them and match the way they sing – if they have a bright voice, I go bright.  A richer sound, I go rich.  Heavy vibrato?  Heavy vibrato.  It’s an easy thing for me.  Many times afterwards people will run up to me and say, “you two sound great together!  You should do more stuff together!”  When my wife hears this she just smiles at me because she knows that it isn’t just luck that we sound good together, that I have flipped my voice to sound like them.  The director from Chanticleer handed out the songsheets of the songs we would be singing to each of the auditioners.  That is, to each of the auditioners except me.  He forgot to give me one.  I could hear the hammering of the nail in the coffin as with great embarrassment I had to ask him for one.  I remember that one of the songs we sang was “Blue Skies,” and song that is great for my voice and I even got to solo with the group backing me up.  It should have been a great moment but I can’t even tell you how it went.  I was just done by then. 

So everybody crashes and burns.  It was a long time after that before I gave a rat’s-ass about singing and it took me 15  years before I could listen to Chanticleer sing anything after that.  It also took me 15 years before I could say Chanticleer without adding an expletive adverb before their name.  Now that is all past you know what they say – “what doesn’t kill you only makes you want to kill other people.”  Or something like that.