DAVID SOLWAY ON BEING IN THE ZONE — AND OUT OF IT:
We have no way of knowing when the angel of perfection will descend into our world—as it did on the day, for example, when the L.A. Dodgers’ Kirk Gibson limped to the plate on two gimpy legs and hit a two-out, 3 and 2 count, ninth inning home run to win the first game of the 1988 World Series. Or on March 21, 1991, in a hockey game between the Quebec Nordiques, the worst team in the NHL, and the second-best Boston Bruins, when the Quebec goaltender, the “leaky,” vertically challenged Ron Tugnutt, stopped 70 of 73 shots, a modern record, to backstop his team to a 3-3 tie. So utterly zonal was his performance that, after the game, the Boston players broke protocol and skated over to congratulate him.
When the sacred space opens, magic happens. Even adversity is no match for the zone or its peripheries. In the music realm one thinks of Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, one of the great guitarists, who played brilliantly with plastic fingertips after suffering a serious accident, or of Django Reinhardt, who could catch “three fingered” lightning in a bottle despite playing with fingers badly burned in a caravan fire. For sublimely talented musicians such as these, the zone is far more accessible than it is for many, or most, of us, who can only gape in exiled wonderment.
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Eddie Van Halen was a regular visitor; discussing his substance-enhanced practice in a Billboard article/interview, Van Halen said “I’m sure there were musical things I would not have attempted were I not in that mental state. You just play by yourself with a tape running, and after about an hour, your mind goes to a place where you’re not thinking about anything.”
Read the whole thing.
A couple of years ago, Cakewalk added a “comping” feature to their Sonar digital audio workstation program that automatically loops and records take after take of a certain segment (say an eight or 12 bar guitar solo), and then afterwards, you can go through bar by bar (even down to note by note) compare your results, and cut together phrases either to have a perfect mistake-free lead vocal or rhythm track, or to composite together an improvisation you would have never played in real life. (Lots of pro musicians improvise a solo with this technique and then learn the solo afterwards to play live.) Recording in the fashion made me understand a bit better why Stanley Kubrick was legendary (some would say infamous) for filming take after take after take after take of his actors: you know the part so much better, and you begin working on autopilot.
That’s as close as I’ve come to feeling “in the zone,” at least with music, but as David writes, for some, their zone might be on the playing field, at an easel, the steering wheel, writing, or elsewhere. Where’s yours?
