It’s funny how some things happen, and it’s even funnier that they can happen without you even trying, or without you even knowing about it. I’ll give you an example:
About two weeks ago my brother and I were playing a gig at a local British pub called Crown and Anchor. It was a typical gig; Jason plays acoustic guitar, I play electric bass, and we both sing. Setup for this gig is as simple as it gets: both of our instruments and our mics get plugged directly into a handheld 500w PA that you can carry with one hand. We sit in the corner of an outdoor patio and do what we like to call ‘Live Band Jukebox with the Brothers Lewis.’ You call out the songs, we play them. Both my brother and I have an awkward ability to play whatever we hear (within reason), so we end up playing a lot of songs that we’ve never played before. Obviously the songs don’t sound like the originals, given our instrumentation and the fact that we’re functioning off sheer memory, but it makes for a very entertaining show. We mess up, everyone laughs. We play it well, everyone laughs. It’s a win/win.
And two weeks ago was no different. We set up, played for about three hours, went home and that was it. The next morning I get about 25 texts/phone calls/tweets/fb messages:
“Dude! You’re on the first page of Reddit!”
My initial reaction: “What’s Reddit?” I didn’t get what all the fuss was about, but figured it was cool, I guess?
Turns out that someone posted a video of us playing. It began with someone yelling, “Hey! Play ‘Through the Fire and the Flames’ by DragonForce!” My brother and I looked at each other, shrugged, and began playing the absolute WORST rendition of this song (mainly because I had no idea how it went!). It was our first time ever attempting the song, as usual for this gig, and my brother was just reading lyrics off his iPhone while I followed his lead for the changes. To us it was just like any other song; we goofed up and tried our best to recreate the song and everyone cheered and went nuts as we fumbled through it.
As soon as I saw the video myself I went, “Oh no, please tell me that no one can tell that’s me.” It was embarrassing how bad I sounded (in my opinion). And with that I went on with the rest of my day. I tracked some tunes for an artist all morning, taught for 7 hours at the Lewis Music Academy, and came home. I checked YouTube at 6:30 pm.
140,000 views.
At first I was blown away, that it did that well in one day. Then my heart sank, as I realized that THIS many people had seen me playing a song I didn’t know. Uh oh. Then I checked again at around midnight before I went to bed.
310,000 views.
What?!?!?!
You can imagine my disbelief. Here I’ve been trying to advertise my own music/videos/media for the past 2 months and had been (I thought) successful at it, and this stupid song did 30 times better in ONE DAY without any promotion on my behalf. At this point I was no longer worried about my reputation or embarrassed by my performance. I began laughing. It’s so funny that this can happen to anyone, because we certainly did nothing worthy of 300k+ views in less than 24 hours. But this excites me as well. We are at an amazing point in time where people who are trying to ‘make it’ in this industry have an immeasurable tool at their disposal.
In this day and age you can reach the world at large and get them to listen to you, and in some circumstances you can do so without ease. On one hand this is comforting, but at the same time it’s daunting. If you had 300k people listening to you, what would you tell them? What would you say? What would you want them to know? Kinda scary to think about, isn’t it?
In any case, we’ll see what becomes of this whole thing; hopefully we can turn it into a touring act and make our living as the Tenacious D lookalikes (read some of the comments, everyone thought my brother was KG). One thing is certain though: I’ll always be on my guard from now on. I’m going to play every note as if the world is watching, because you may not know if they actually are.
Here’s the video if you want to see it:
