What's not apparent, unless you see an artist multiple times, is when the supposedly spontaneous banter is actually pretty well rehearsed and repeated night after night. Gotta go with what works, I guess, and it's all part of being a pro.

To my mind, wit & brevity (or at least having the timing savvy to know when to get back to playing songs) are the key ingredients. If you're not good at it, skip it (& it shouldn't take long to find out, as the audience is sure to let you know).

Some are masters of this: R. Thompson, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Jon Langford, even Steve Albini, have enough of a sense of timing to know when to stop.

An example of those who try, & fail, as far as I'm concerned, is Pete Townshend, though he started out OK, & is seemingly better now. For a long while there, he seemed to feel a need to explain every song in detail before playing the fucking thing. It got much worse when Moon wasn't around to bring out the whoopee cushion when Towsers started to ramble.

The late, great Joe Strummer was lousy at between song banter. It came out as muddled as their (or Bernie Rhodes') political views.

Anyway, those are two examples of guys who either didn't know what to say, or had too f'ing much to say. People want to be entertained at live shows, so if you're no good at the banter, do like
The Ramones, & drop it.

Robyn Hitchcock has a different kind of between song banter. Seemingly stream of conscious riffs/stories/off-the-wall essays. I find them highly entertaining and I've seen enough shows and heard enough tapes to know there is much less repetition in them than you'd think.

Jarvis Cocker is a beauty. He's a winning mix of candour and caution. The stories around the songs is part of the deal. He came across as down to earth as a 6' 7" rock star could be. But when he played in Melbourne some goose shouted out to 'get on with the songs and shut up with the stories'. Some people.
Me, I love good banter.

I saw Ray Davies perform at the Old South Meeting House in Boston back in 1998. He was supposed to be at the Borders across the street to promote the Storytellers album, but so many people showed up they had to move it there & he did a one-hour show. At one point, he looked around the Colonial interior & proclaimed "I shall reclaim this place for Britain!"

there's a great moment on "the jimi hendrix concerts" where he's engaging in light banter...you know..."we're gonna slow it down, give you all a chance to go get your popcorn," etc.. and in the middle of it, he turns to *someone* (I'm guessing Noel) and casually (but pointedly) says "fuck off, let me talk." Then, without missing a beat, he resumes his generic banter about the next tune ("this is a little thing...we like to call....").

as a performer, i usually blab for too long between songs.

I think the only acceptable time to engage in overbantering is when someone breaks a string. Then I like to tell the pig with the wooden leg joke.

Jeff Tweedy is (perhaps) surprisingly great at banter. Very dry sense of humor. And I've seen enough Wilco shows and heard enough bootlegs to know he's mainly winging it each night.

It's not banter per se, but I always immediately think of the solo show I saw where he launched into a version of "Ripple" with lyrics about how he hates the Grateful Dead. I don't think he ever performed it before or since.

Mick Jagger has moments that crack me up. Never stories, just a quick comment like:
"I fink I busted a button on me trousers. You don't want me trousers to fall down now do ya?"

http://www.johnnyamerica.net/archives/2007/05/22/21.19.47/

August 11th, 2003: The Day Bruce Springsteen Ran Out of Inane Childhood Stories to Talk About Before Starting a New Song

"Good evening, good evening. I remember standing on the corner of Kingsly Ave. and I was just 17 years old and man it was hot, and there were these girls lying out on the beach. So fine man, and you know just out of my reach. We used to call them Pretty Flamingos, you know. Like one of the guys would come by and I’d say hey Clarence, check out those Pretty flamingos and he’d say something like “Shut the fuck up Bruce.” HeHehe, but that was Clarence man, HEheeheHE. Anyway, my old man wouldn’t let me have sugar as a kid and he’d always be yelling at me, “Bruce” he’d say “I better not catch you with any sugar.” You know? He’d be down in the kitchen eating his baloney and cheese on white bread and I hear him yelling up to me, “You better not be eating any god damn sugar up there.”

And there was this old place back then, that we used to play at called the Gaslight, it ain’t around no more, and man we’d be there ’till four in the morning some nights you know, just playing. They had this Mr. Softy soft serve ice cream in the back. Man, sometimes it be all I’d think about. Mr. Softy man, I just couldn’t get him out of my head. Both flavors man, vanilla and chocolate. And there was this bin with that stuff you put on top, Jimmy’s. We used to call them Jimmy’s but I’ve heard them called sprinkles too. Rainbow Jimmy’s man HeHeehe. And I’d be playing up on stage with the guys but I’d be thinking, you know, maybe I could just sneak a cone you know, the old man wouldn’t find out. Or maybe, just maybe, I could stick my head under the tap and Steve could pull the handle, I wouldn’t even need a cone.

But I never did it man, I never did it. I always thought the old man would jump out from somewhere, you know, no matter how late it was. I kept thinking he’d just pop out of nowhere and stab me in the neck with a Spork and yell “I told you no god damn sugar, kid.” You know what a spork is Clarence? It’s like spoon and a fork together in one utensil; it’s good for eating chili and stew, HeeHeehe.

So around this time we started making a little money with the band and I got my first car, a ’57 Chevy, thirty miles highway, and a Hurst on the floor. It had Flames on it and everything, man it was hot! Twenty five city. And once I got that thing going man I just drove and drove you know, I didn’t care where I was going. Days went by, I’m telling you, I just drove, didn’t stop for anything, not gas or food, I didn’t even stop for the bathroom, I just went in the car. HeeheHee. So I found myself at this little ice cream place in the middle of nowhere. And I just knew the old man couldn’t find me out there. And I went up to the lady at the stand and I said ‘I’d like a Mr. Softy’ and she said to me, she said ‘son, the machine’s broke.’ This song’s called The River."

Man, I saw Gordon Lightfoot when I was in High School and he broke a string and sat and replaced it onstage by himself. We had to wait for someone to get him a string, then for him to replace it, then he tuned his guitar, all the while muttering about how he hated when that happened. He could afford a band, and he could afford a band and at least a go-fer type roadie, so why couldn't he have someone offstage restring his guitar and he could play a different one? He mainly sucked anyway (we got free tickets from someone's mom that couldn't go), and Sundown is forever messed up for me because of the weird way he sang it. "Sundown you better take CAY AIR if I find you been creepin' down my back STAY AIR."

I saw Elvis Costello and the Imposters open for The Stones and I swear he squeezed a headliner's worth of songs into his slot by just ending a song, shouting "Two! Three!" and ripping through the next song. I thought it was awesome! He hardly talked at all.

Bootlegs reveal that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger say virtually the same thing every night between songs. In a big place I can hardly understand the between song banter because of the echoes, but in a small place it can be interesting. I imagine guys need the rest, especially if they play fast songs.

Brooce rambles and never says anything that makes sense to me. "Earl Scheib will paint your car for $29.95. Leave your brother in the back seat and he'll paint him, too." I never found that funny or insightful or thought it added anything, but when it came on the radio on Saturday nights, people waited to hear it and they laughed! I guess I'd rather skip the banter.

Hey why can't we add our own answers to the poll anymore?

Neil Young's talk about honey slides (when he played the Bitter End in the early 70s) is a definite classic.

good question, cdm. i'm sure there's a good reason.

dr. john, you are SO RIGHT! on a related note, who can forget our recent thread with csny @ big sur, and steven stills's mindless bullshit response to the crazy dude who was yelling at them for being rich rock stars?

My preference is that they just play, much like Dylan. I'm not interested in listening to banter...just give me the music!

What's the pig joke?

Neil Finn is pretty good with the stage banter/antics, usually. I once saw somebody hand him a demo tape, obviously with the hopes that he'd listen later. Instead, he handed the tape to a stage hand, had it delivered to the sound guy, and the demo was played for the whole crowd.

Another person who is fun is Glenn Tilbrook, seeing him solo was a great, great show. Good banter, great guitar playing, amazing voice, killer tunes...


What about band intros? That can be pretty laborious. My favorite is on the Bowie Tower Theater album, where he names everyone in about five seconds, just pile-driving through. Very cool.

Good stuff, Townspeeps. I'm always down with talk of honey slides!

cdm, I was searching YouTube in hopes of finding countless Boss raps. I wanted to torture myself. The piece you posted makes up for that. The reason we can no longer allow write-in votes is because some genius figured out a way to automatically load up the results with spam as soon as we open a new poll. I can try again, but I doubt there's a human who we've been made waiting all this time. Most likely some "app" will kick right back in.

I'm reminded of the Jim Morrison rap with the audience around astrological signs. It may be from that live Doors album. For years it was my favorite performance by Jimbo. He asks the audience if anyone's a Leo, or whatever, intimating that he's one. All the girls in the audience happen to be the same sign as him. Then he laughs and says he's some other sign.

The 3 legged pig joke can be of variable length depending on the space you need to fill essentially it's this:

A farmer invites a urban friend of his out the the country, and gives the city slicker a tour of his acres. As they were returning to the farmhouse, his friend notices a pig with only three legs run awkwardly around the side of the house. "Did I see a pig with only three legs run behind the house?" he asks.

"Yes, you did, but that's no ordinary pig" said the farmer. "He saved my life. Last year, one late afternoon I was out turning over the south forty getting it ready for next year when the tractor hit a new groundhog hole and turned over, trapping me underneath it. My leg was pinned down and I couldn't reach anything. It was getting late and cold and no one knew that I was there. It looked like I was trapped for the night and would likely lose my leg. Well, I heard a snuffing and there was that little pig. Just using his wee snout, he dug me out."

"Fascinating!" said the city feller, "but I don't see how that explains why that pig only has three legs."

"There is more" the farmer continued. "About a month ago, I was fast asleep after 14 hour day of threshing, when I heard a loud tapping on the window. I looked out and it was that same pig tapping his snout and trotters on the window for all he was worth. As I took a breath, I realized the house was on fire! Well, we had enough time to get everyone out and to put out the fire. There is no doubt that pig saved our house and our lives!"

The friend was astounded. "Amazing," he said, "but I still can't see how that has anything to do with the pig's only having three legs."

"Well," the farmer replied, "a great pig like that...you don't eat him all at once."

It was a real surprise when I first saw Chris Isaak and he had a long line of amusing banter (I remember describing a tie so wide "you could wrap a baby's head with it"), a welcome respite from what I was worried was going to be a long night of watching him pose mournfully in the blue shadows.

db, I was similarly surprised by Isaak's turns in Jonathan Demme movies and that tv show he used to do.

One of my favorites is on the Band of Gypsies album. Before the song Machine Gun Jimi says:

"Happy new year first of all. I hope we'll have a million or two million
more of them... if we can get over this summer, heh heh heh. Right I'd like to dedicate this one to the draggin' scene that's goin' on all the soldiers that are fightin' in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York... oh yeah, and all the soldiers fightin' in Vietnam. Like to do a thing called 'Machine Gun'."

Then after the song, which I think is one of his greatest performances, pure guitar terror, he says, "That's what we don't want to hear anymore, right?" And just as it's fading out you can hear Buddy Miles say "No bullets." Back in the day my buddies and I would say "No bullets" to each other for no reason and in pretty much any context. Good times.

Randy Newman was the main one I was thinking about where I have direct experience of how rehearsed the between song routines are. One of my favorites goes something like this: "My daughters were born quite some time after my sons, and, if I'd had the girls first, I would have thought the boys were retarded."

And I remember hearing bootlegs from a number of stops on a Costello tour back in the 90s, and I was amazed at how the jokes never changed.

Paul McCartney (who I otherwise adore) immediately came to mind in the "BAD stage banter" category. It's all "woo woo!" and "do you want to rock" delivered as cutesy as possible.

He's not a bad interview and lord knows he's got some stories to tell, but he never brought any of that to the stage.

P.S. About repeating banter...

Take it from me, when you find a joke or story that works, you run with it, no matter how tired you are of it.

Paul Stanley's canned stage banter is/was better than the songs that came in between. Nobody could announce a city name, tell the residents how much the band loved them and introduce the next song better. I think he's the greatest single Master of Ceremonies in rock history.

The faux-Bruce banter above is awesome. One of the topics I've wanted to do here for a while, but have never found the time for, was to compare/contrast Springsteen and Stanley as stage hosts and figure out who would have the better chance of succeeding if the two ever had to switch places, reality TV style. Could a make-up free Paul Stanley more successfully front the E-Street Band than Springsteen could front KISS?

That pig joke has been my favorite forever.

Good Talkers.

Jon Langford of the Mekons, although I'm not sure I agree with BobbyB that he knows when to stop. Sally Timms, no slouch in the banter area herself, usually is responsible for shutting him up when the time comes. Tom also has his moments of low key hilarity. He's definitely the Stan Laurel of the band.

John Wesley Harding is generally very entertaining. I reacll him commenting on peoples' inability to distinguish him from Elvis Costello when he was out on tour the first time. "I'm the youger, thinner, good looking one." Very funny.

Robbie Fulks is unbelievably skilled with the banter and as great as his bands are, I think I prefer to sdee him solo because it provides him the freer rein to entertain.

Dash Rip Rock were another group of all star talkers. And talk about bite the hand that feeds you, I remember after the band had been invited and done a national tour with REM, Bill Davis quipped about Stipe and Morissey watching them perform from sidestage with a habitrail running between their butts. They would touch on an amazing range of cultural references, never waivering from their stunningly politically incorrect, drunken knucklehead point of view.

Ouch, sorry for the typos and misspellings.

I remember the Mekons talking a lot and being funny, but I don't recall a thing they said - I may not have been able to actually understand what they were saying, but they smiled a lot while saying it.

I saw one of those four songwriters sitting onstage playing (mostly) solo for each other in a round-robin fashion once. I went to see Graham Parker. The other artists were Gordon Gano (kind of annoying, as I found him in his band, but occasionally engaging), the little woman who first had a song called "I Kissed a Girl" (blanking on her name - Jill Sobule?), and the singer from American Music Club (Mark someone? - more memory loss). The AMC guy was really good at stage banter. I also liked his songs next-best to Parker's. I'd never heard a lick of AMC before, and I don't know that I've ever heard the band since, but solo that guy was all right. The strong banter helped me like him better.

I think it was Nick Lowe who once remarked -- wryly, of course -- that musicians banter longer as they get older in order to catch their breath between songs. Thinking of that, I had to laugh the last time I saw Elvis Costello, who seemed to take perverse pride in not even announcing song titles, just pitching from one old song to the next, all performed at breakneck tempo.

None of which explains the absurdist rambles of Robyn Hitchcock, which are an art form in themselves and well worth the price of admission.

The best banter I ever saw, though, was in an all-acoustic set by John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, and Joe Ely, doing a round-robin singer-songwriter act. Each guy in turn performed one of his own songs with some kind of witty intro, trying to crack each other up. Every night the set list was different as they riffed off one another, pulling out new numbers to amuse each other. Even solo, Lyle Lovett is a great ironical storyteller; he gets the audience hanging on every word.

I love the Dylan shows because of the lack of banter. It's just song after song. A couple of years back, he got into telling these really silly jokes while introducing his band ("On drums...George Receli...George is from Louisiana...they got alot snakes down there...when it rains, he uses his windshied vipers...").

McCartney is the king of the scripted banter. He tells the same stories night after night on a given tour. And the crowd just lap it up. I guess I can forgive the man since he gives his audience a pretty GREAT show (full of GREAT tunes). Not many people leave the Macca arena disappointed.

I was actually hoping for some classic Townshend banter at my Who shows, but he was quite reserved. I did get some "grumpy old Pete" moments during my first show. I pay to see Pete windmill, jump, and curse at the audience.

Recently, I enjoyed Ben Kweller's banter. It was charming and brief. He seemed to enjoy his audience.

TB

McCartney is the ABSOLUTE WORST at his stage banter. I made the mistake of seeing him in Atlanta two nights in a row on the Driving Rain tour, thinking it would be different shows.

Not only was it the exact same setlist, but it was the exact same dialogue in exactly the same spots. It was like he was reading from a damn script.

Macca told this story about when he was in New Orleans for the Super Bowl performance that he got a 'dodgy' massage from a person who told him to imagine that his leg was hollow, etc.
I can't remember the whole spiel but it got a laugh from the audience.

Then, when the bastard comes to New Orleans on the last leg of the tour 6 months later.. he tells the same story, but changes the time and place he got the 'dodgy' massage.. I guess he didn't want to offend the masseuse who could have been in the New Orleans audience.

What a tool!!!

SS

McCartney has always been bad. Even back to the early beatles. Just listen to the Live at the Hollywood Bowl LP.

McCartney did seem like Rain Man in his ability to duplicate the exact words and cadence of his banter. I think I've heard all his Hollywood bowl banter repeated at other early shows on bootlegs. "We'd like to carry on, now..." Exact same pauses and "natural" interruptions to his intros seem to happen in the same spots.

Best banter: Johnnie Thunders. I like when my idols tell me what a boring motherfucker I am.

The Johnnie Thunders comment is great. It actually reminds me of my favorite in-between song banter.

I saw Ryan Adams at the NO House of Blues a few years ago at a VERY packed show where people were stepping over each other. He is notorious for his rants and this one lived up to it.

The common scene at the bar in that place is for people to continuously chit chat. Damn.. If you want to talk about total BS then sit at home with your bottle o'Jack and play the record. Don't disturb me because I paid $$$ to see the show.

Anway, people were being EXTREMELY loud when he was trying to play a soft piano number. Adams starts ranting about how he hates the fucking House of Blues and will NEVER play another show at any of their venues (Right, just not the New Orleans one.)

Then, he goes into a tirade about how all the people at the bar are just talking to impress some chick they want to take home and try to fuck. So, he calls us all a bunch of motherfuckers and tells us that if all we want to do is pick up some chick and take her home and fuck her.. then do it.. He'll give us five minutes to do so and get out.

Then he plays the song, continues the show and bypasses New Orleans on all his subsequent tours.

Thanks.