I’ve had dozens of jobs in my adult life, but I’ve never been anyone’s boss. I never stuck around long enough at any one place to rise up beyond an entry-level position. But in my band all the fellas like to call me Boss. It started out as kind of a joke a few years ago and now it has replaced my name. They don’t say Nick or Jaina or anything that other people would call me. They just call me Boss. And when they say it, their lips pop on the first ‘B’ like when a bass singer in a doo wop band crouches down and sings “doo-be-doo-wah.” And when my boys call me Boss they plunge their hands to the bottoms of their pockets and kick at a stray piece of gravel and look off shyly. “Hey Boss, can I get a payout?” They adopt southern accents the further south we get, and I do too. And the grammar gets all turned around as the sun gets hotter. “Hey, Boss, where’s the gig at?” “How much that is?” And we’re all Cool Hand Luke in the hot sun, working on some project just to work on it, forgetting what for or who sent us or where we’d go if we ever got out. Digging a hole, filling it in, digging another hole.
Except that, instead of staying in one place we are instead sailing on a great ship. Our ship was christened Rose before it ever reached our hands and it’s bad luck to rename a ship (or is it bad luck to NOT rename a ship?) But this borrowed Rose is a large ship, built for comfort and luxuriating. She is as wide as the horizon, longer than a beam of light. A six foot tall human like myself can lay down in the back seat and entirely stretch his legs, and fall into a deep deep sleep and go through all the deepest parts of their REM cycle and experience the only kind of time travel that science will allow. Three hours go by and you wake up and you have traversed time and space, ending up hundreds of miles from where you went to sleep. And you wake up and you feel rested, unlike the normal kind of car sleep where you try to lean against the window and use your sweater as a pillow and your neck gets kinked like a pipe cleaner and you never really get to sleep.
Before we left our Port-land, we buckled down the straps and tied down the load. If there was a hatch, we battened it. If there was a sail, we trimmed it. And we set our course down the heart of America. And now every day is a new project, culminating in the night-time where we dig ourselves out of a hole of our own doing, and either jump up onto the ground and receive our applause, or fall back down and let the cool dirt bury us. Either way, every town is a new chance. We can dazzle Omaha and get carried off on the backs of the townspeople like conquering heroes, and then the next day we’re in Lawrence and nobody cares. The same song that one night grips a dark roomful of people in a small midwestern town falls flat the next night in a different dark roomful of people in another midwestern town. And you squint out to the audience and think, “Didn’t we decide this song was brilliant last night? How come tonight it feels impotent? Why that is?”
It’s because we are the underdogs, fighting with just a sling and some rocks, against an adversary as big as America itself. We look out at the map of our tour route, and we see a swath of land that on the weather forecast is red with tornado warnings, and a swath of land that on the health cast is blue with swine flu warnings. The purple overlapping portion is the path we must drive, the best-case scenario perhaps being a miraculous moment where a tornado comes and carries away a rabid pig and we hit a triumphant final chord as the assembled crowd erupts in applause that they are still alive.
As Malcolm Gladwell writes in a recent New Yorker article about the strategy of underdogs:
“David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. ‘I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,’ he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, ‘even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.’”
And so we must create our own rules. Take on Goliath at the speed that we feel comfortable with. Not change our uniforms or our tactics because we are afraid. Despite how impossible it sounds, we are actually the favorites.
In our case, the battlefield is the stage. And sometimes the stage is more like a castle with a moat around us. It isolates us from the audience, distances us, make it hard for either of us to relate to the other. So sometimes we have to get off the stage, disarm ourselves in some way, and let the audience in, slowly… slowly… slowly… Charm them with our flowers and our musical arrangements. Let them walk right up to us, let them jump into our arms. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be just fine. Juuust fine. And then…
We kill them!
With music, of course. Kill them in a way that they thoroughly long for.
And so it was in Omaha. A town we’d never been to. A room that listened. And a group of sailors who rose up and played their best. And for the last song, I went to the back of the room and played an un-miked out-of-tune piano and shouted back towards the stage, where the rest of the band was swaying together and singing along. A woman stood up, beaming with pride. A victory against long odds. We sailed off in our ship into the storms and diseases, to try once again the next night.
