The Peril of Perfection

The Gong Is Necessary

Back in my pre-marketing and advertising past, I was a musician.

Well, to be completely honest about it, I was a singer/songwriter, who also bankrolled a band. Musicians, generally, have more skill in their instruments than I do, and I was never completely secure in the title. I worked hard at it, took voice lessons, thought about it all the time, and hustled up hundreds of gigs. We completed four recording projects and I don't regret the experience.

Anyway, back to the story. (I promise this will have something to do with marketing and advertising. Honest.)

We had a drummer that wanted to be John Bonham (that's the guy who played for Led Zeppelin, and is also pictured above). Which is a fine thing for a drummer to want to be, honestly. But his ambitions, at least at the point in time when we recorded, weren't quite up to his chops.

On a specific track in question, he was trying to execute a particular difficult part, and he didn't quite get it right. It was close, but it wasn't in the exact point. He could have just done something simpler, but that wasn't where his art demanded him to be.

Enter technology.

At the time, we were recording on analog tape, which is prized by many recording musicians and studio engineers for its warmth. The story goes is that since digital music is all just 1s and 0s, you don't get the full nuance. (It's a similar story with people who prefer vinyl.)

Which means that you can only edit, or "punch", the tape so much before the tape degrades. And if you are editing the music in question, you have to be extremely exact, and maybe even break out a razor and do splice work, to get a "correct" track.

Which is how we spent way too much time into the wee hours of a Saturday night / Sunday morning, at billable hours, to get a single drum hit in a complicated fill to move a fraction of a percentage of a second... all so the drummer was happy. (Well, more relieved than happy.)

To him, that fix meant everything. It meant that he could hear the song in the future without dwelling on his mistake, that he could take pride in ownership, and that his dreams of sounding like his hero weren't beyond his grasp.

Needless to say, no other person in the world noticed it.

Also, everyone else in the room wanted to murder him.

Which leads me back to digital advertising, and our nearly limitless ability to get things just, exactly, perfect. Often, to the pixel.

And which leaves me thinking, far too often, about my old drummer.

And how often people need to be just like him...