Im on ur stage, fuckin' with ur songs...

I was just merrily uploading old video clips of SMG live shows to YouTube, and this particular one got me thinking. If you’re not familiar with the catalog of Sister Machine Gun (and frankly, for the most part, I wouldn’t expect you to be) this particular song, written in 1989, was fairly bog-standard “industrial” dance/rock for its time. Since I’ve had to play it what seems like 165,000 times live (in actuality probably only 1500 or so; we didn’t do it on every tour because it is too hard on my throat) I have a tendency to change it up a bit.

In the above iteration, we eschewed the nu-beat (in the A Split Second sense of the term) origins in favor of a Chicago wrawk kind of sound, pretty much indicative of that entire show and the surrounding tour. I personally don’t really have any problems doing that sort of thing, as unlike some artists, I can get bored fairly easy playing my own music. That’s not really what this post is about, though.

At the end of the first verse, when the chorus is right about to kick, the band has to stop to wait for a measure for me to sing the intro to the chorus. For some hare-brained reason, I just didn’t. Obviously, as you can plainly see in the video, the audience, the light guy, and the soundman were all expecting it. To the band’s extreme merit, they were quite used to my ways and waited until I actually sang it rather than going with the general flow, and for that I give them great credit, since we didn’t plan to do anything like this.

In any case, to the actual point of this post: how much do you feel you should be allowed to fuck with your own released music on stage? As much as the audience will put up with? Or should you hew close to the origins in general. I suppose it depends on whether you have a resilient (read: long-established) audience, and whether you have resilient music in the first place. Obviously, you know my feelings on the matter: as long as the song is recognizable as such, everything else is fair game.