Paper Bag: Procedures, Rules and Objectives

Basic Piece Procedures.

1. A single person "conducts", i.e. directs the course of the piece. This is done either with a very brief, few word explanation of a mood or an emotion to be evoked (or visual image as in "Water" or "Desert");

or through (a) requested action(s) in the few moments prior to the start of the piece, of one or all of the other musicians (example: "drums come in w/ a slow 4, bass follows, then guitar & keys [or vox or whoever]"- but this much communication before a piece was pretty rare);

or the conductor begins the piece without a word and either lets the other musicians come in as they please or, through nods and gestures, brings them in as he chooses while the music is in progress;

or any or all of the above in combination.

2. Nods and gestures: most of the gestures, or hand signals, were invented by George Radai. Unfortunately many of these were difficult to use unless one stopped playing in order to direct, so only those gestures which were easiest to use while playing survived and became integrated into band habit. The most often used hand signal was the extended pinky, pointed at another musician by the conductor (and occassionaly at himself), indicating that the designated person was now to take a solo.

M. found that almost every gesture but the extended pinky was impossible to perform while holding drumsticks, so he came up with a few of his own, some of which he'd already been using before George joined: crouching down low, indicating a drop in volume; sitting up tall with a crazed look on his face, indicating an increase in volume and intensity; and dragging a drumstick across his throat in a "cut" gesture, to indicate an ending. He would also mouth things at us in code regarding "punches" (full band strikes of a number given at the time) and tempo and style changes. Live, this was seldom intelligible to anyone but us, as far as I know. As I'm sure he would tell you, we didn't always catch it either. At any rate, we all picked up on these and used them too, whenever necessary or convenient.

3. Rotation. Whether in rehearsal, in performance, or in the studio, Paper Bag improvised its pieces in what we called a "rotation"; meaning that someone would start the day's playing, whatever the event, and conduct the first piece. From there, we proceeded to let each player conduct, in either clockwise or counterclockwise order. Each player's turn was his "rotation"; average for live gigs was 3 per member.

(Anyone who has photographs of the band demonstrating any of these activities during performance or rehearsal, particularly the hand gestures, please contact me- I would like to post them. And no sending me shots of you flipping off the camera!)

Rehearsal

Rehearsals were the time to experiment with new ideas, new techniques. Rehearsals were like athletes training for a sports season or an event. They never play the same games twice, do they? The rules might be the same, but the performances will vary with the opposing factors involved. For a sports team, the opposing factors are things like the skill of the opposing team, the weather, etc.; for us it was fighting fatigue (we all worked straight jobs, even when recording albums and taking every available show), coming up with good ideas, fighting frequently ignorant sound people, club owners and audiences for some consideration and respect; so, the usual, but worse because of what an anomaly we were on the club scene. Rehearsals allowed us to train for that part back there about good ideas.

Paper Bag rehearsing at Humphrey's studio in 1986. This is where the band practiced and recorded, from the very first rehearsal in 1983 until Humphrey shut down about 4 years later. This is where most of "Ticket To Trauma", all of our previous independent cassette releases, and the first 7 radio sets were recorded. You can see that we are set up to face each other- communication was totally essential here. Note Kenny's amazing array of equipment- this picture scarcely does it justice, but you can see the music stand draped with tape loops in the foreground at the left. Photos: Steve Shaw.

We experimented with improvising in various musical styles, with textures, with combining ideas which none of us had heard combined before. Here, we all got to try to force the other guys to play in our favorite styles. Each rotation took much longer than at a live show, as we tried to hash through our ideas with the other members. The intent was that these newly learned skills or rehearsed styles would spontaneously turn up live; sometimes they did. But many was the time when a gem would come up in rehearsal and disappear into the anals (sic) of history. Luckily, we taped most of our rehearsals.

(I have broken this up into 3 pages for faster loading- each page has pictures. To continue, hit "next". )

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