Don't Let The Marching Band Stop Your Concert

Don’t Let the Marching Band Stop Your Music

As I thought about June’s Life area of focus in The Source, Balance & Fulfillment I wanted to write about music which brings great fulfillment to my life. I love it even when there are mishaps.

I have had the wonderful privilege of performing in concerts from the east coast to the west coast and even as far as the nations of Haiti and New Zealand. But I’ve never experienced such a fiasco as the day my daughter and I were doing a concert at Freedom Park, near where we live in the Charlotte, North Carolina area.

There had been heavy rains for days, and the stage was surrounded by mud. We had no time for a sound check, and it probably wouldn’t have done much good anyway, for the sound man seemed to have no clue about how to work the sound board. Two other volunteer soundmen tried to help him throughout the concert, but all this did was make the sound levels change during every song. For half the concert, the only sound was coming out of the monitors, not the main speakers.

I should have known we were in for a bad afternoon when a marching band strutted right past our stage during one of the first songs, completely drowning out our performance. If this wasn’t bad enough, they marched back the other direction toward the end of our concert. I’ve seen concerts with annoying distractions like crying babies humming amplifiers, but I’ve never before had to compete with a marching band.

That wasn’t all. When it seemed that we were finally gaining some momentum with our songs, the electricity suddenly went out. We had to sing a capella for a while, and when the electricity returned, our CD player had switched to the next song on the sound track! What could we do? We rolled with the punches, and started singing the next song. Later we learned that the electricity went out when a man from the booth next to us got angry and started switching the circuit breakers on and off.

This terrible experience was made all the more embarrassing by the fact that one of my daughter’s best friends had come to watch our concert. Finally, when I broke a string on my guitar, my daughter had seen enough. She walked off the stage and vowed never to sing in public again. After a minute or two, she had cooled down enough to come back on the stage—but it was a concert neither of us will ever forget.

What lessons can be learned from our disastrous concert? We had practiced. We had good songs. We came to perform our best and connect with those who came to the concert. Yet everything seemed to unravel.

If you’re anything like me, your pride gets hurt when things don’t go your way. You want to succeed…to look good…to impress people! But I love what Winston Churchill discovered about the pathway to true success: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm…Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Sometimes a marching band—or some other distraction—can mess up your day and spoil your “success.”  

But the next time your success gets interrupted, take my advice: Keep right on singing, and soon the distraction will march away.

What about you?

•             Share an experience in your life when uncontrollable events conspired to interrupt or change your plans. How did you respond?