Cable Yanking

The PA dies halfway through the second song. No crackle, no pop, just four people suddenly miming at a room that can’t hear them.

Some bands spend the next five minutes on their knees, chasing a cable across the stage with a phone flashlight clamped in the drummer’s teeth. Some already rehearsed the unplugged version. They step to the lip of the stage, somebody hushes the bar, and the room leans in closer than it has all night.

It took me a long time to swallow that some things only change after they break, and that you are not allowed to break them yourself (somebody would notice, and that somebody signs your checks). So you do the responsible thing. You tape the connection back together every night and play through the hum.

It works, mostly… No one can point to the night it got bad. The crowd just thins a little each month, the best players quietly book other gigs, and the pain you were holding off arrives anyway, spread so thin across a year that nobody can see it well enough to fix it.

A blowup at least comes with a morning after, the one day a stuck company will say yes to almost anything. The hum never gives you that day.

That morning is short, and it goes to whoever walks in with something already built. Not a deck asking for time to think. The unplugged set, tuned and rehearsed, with the people who know the harmonies already standing there. That’s where the good energy belongs. Not in the tape.

The same clock runs outside the building. Two vendors once spent months courting a company I worked for. Then our CMO went on leave, the replies slowed down, and they read the quiet as a no. Their follow-ups had started to get on my nerves, which didn’t help. Both marked us closed-lost right before a new VP walked in with budget and an appetite. Neither came back.

The tape feels like loyalty. It even is loyalty, right up until the room goes quiet and you find out you only ever knew the song plugged in. I, for one, don’t want to be known for only that.

Stay Positive & Learn It Without The Speakers