Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz by Greg Lawrence, John Kander, Fred Ebb Read Free Book Online Page B

deals. I loved performing. I was very sick for a while, and my voice went. Then I realized I wasn’t good anymore. I became nasal and insecure. What you need is confidence, and I lost that. But even recently we received a couple offers to perform professionally.
    KANDER: Four little words: “Not on your life.” You would have liked to, but I just couldn’t do it. I was terrified every time we performed together, mostly that I would forget how to play the piano. It’s absolutely true. I’ve had terrible stage fright ever since college. I was playing a show that I had written at Oberlin. I was all there was in the pit, just me and the piano. Between the matinee and evening performance, I had a drink. It was just one
glass of wine, but it did something to my concentration. When I came back and started the show, I began to think, Why am I pushing down this white thing? What’s the next thing my hands are supposed to do? It was as if I were a dancer and suddenly had to remember what muscles to use to lift my leg. I became totally involved in the mechanics of how the machine worked, and I froze. It was only a second or two, but I never got over it. It wasn’t a fear of forgetting how a song goes, it was a fear of forgetting how to make the machine work.
    I never lost that stage fright, and that was the reason I stopped performing years ago. Even to this day, I actually think that I’m going to forget how to play the instrument. You and our friend Liza Minnelli used to tease me about that. I remember the three of us once got up and performed a tribute for George Abbott, and the two of you were going like gangbusters. At some point you looked over and saw my eyeballs rolling to the back of my head. During moments like that, I felt that if I took my hands off the keyboard I would never put them back down. You and Liza never teased me about it again after that because you knew it was real.
    EBB: I’ve seen your hands shake.
    KANDER: It’s never there when we’re working or when I’m playing something for myself. I think if you start to think about how you do something, you freeze. If we’re working on a scene in a rehearsal and suddenly the director says, “We need some music to get from this point to that point,” if I think about it, I can’t do it. If I just go to the piano and put my hands down, immediately my fingers will invent. It has nothing to do with my brain. It just happens, but I have to let myself do it. When I watch you working, I don’t think of it as an intellectual exercise. I think of it as an oral or verbal process. You get the rhyme scheme worked out, and there is suddenly a quatrain that didn’t exist before. It’s not because you sit down and think and take notes and examine
it. Sometimes that may be true, but most of the time it comes out in this effortless way like what I feel when I put my fingers on the piano.
    EBB: I think the reason for that effortlessness is confidence. I feel confident when I’ve written something that you will properly set it musically and that I will like the song when you’re finished. We know how to please each other musically and the collaboration works on the basis of that kind of mutual support, which we agree neither of us would necessarily have if we were to sit in a room and try to write with someone else.
    KANDER: I think when we’re at our best, we sound like one person. But there’s no pride in it. We would be paralyzed if we had someone looking over our shoulder and telling us that what we were writing had to be good. We have finished whole songs and come back the next day and torn them up. Neither of us says, “Oh my God, what am I going to do with my life now that I’ve written something so terrible?”
    EBB: It’s back to square one.
    KANDER: That was our philosophy from the very beginning.
    EBB: When it doesn’t work, go back to square one and try again and hope we get lucky this time. Maybe this time , get it?

TWO
    Flora, the Red Menace
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