I was sitting there at the first IAMA LCS concert of the 2017-2018 season, just minding my own business. (Which is to say that I was minding both the audience’s and the band’s business, at least in terms of sound.)

Suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Tony Holiday and The Velvetones were fully in the groove and having a great night. Now, The Velvetones have always been a very good band. There have been many incarnations and cast members. Eeach iteration has marked some improvement over an older version, but there was never a point where Tony failed to bring a great lineup to the table. This particular ensemble on this particular night, though, had reached a remarkable apex. They had entered a zone that not many bands (even good ones) gain an ingress to.

They had reached the point where they, by the very nature of their rehearsal and experience, required no intervention from me in order to function perfectly as a band. I could have locked out my remote-control laptop, left the building, had a late dinner at a restaurant, and come back just in time for load-out, and the show would have been pretty much fine. I didn’t do that, of course – I needed to make some tweaks because the mix was being built entirely on the fly, and not all of my assumptions were complete or correct.

But that was the key: The only reason I needed to make adjustments was because I needed to change what I was doing to the band, not because a modification was required for what the band was doing to us in the seats.

The mix for a really good group should display characteristics that (I’ve heard) are what can be expected from a well-behaved airplane. The whole thing should have a tendency to settle into a stable, controlled trajectory, where you don’t have to sledgehammer or wrestle the ship into obeying you. This was one of those times, and it was glorious. The band was on point, and I didn’t screw it up. Such things are commonly referred to as “wins,” I believe, and are worth pursuing due to their sheer enjoy-ability alone.