I can play this instrument for people ANYWHERE, as long as it’s not raining!
In a field! In an alleyway! On the bus!! On a beach!!! In a closet!!!
People will listen to me sing, and I don’t need a stage!
I will never have to be enslaved behind a piano again!
I hadn’t realized how limiting the piano had been, but now that I knew, I’d had it. I decided to start dating other instruments.
This combination of Ukulele Freedom and Twitter Freedom led to the birth of the Ninja Gig, which was the name I gave the flash events I started creating once I realized how easy it was to whip a crowd up to any place at any time. Before and after official gigs, on off days when I was in the mood, or when I was visiting cities where I didn’t have any official gigs planned, I could summon a crowd using Twitter on only a few hours’ notice.
There’s something uniquely thrilling about conjuring up a crowd of five hundred people and watching an instant free festival sprout up before your very eyes in a public place, but it took me a few years of bouncing between official gigs and ninja ones to realize what really drew me to the latter: I felt like I was in control of my life again. I had missed the freedom of the street.
The “freedom” of ninja gigs didn’t actually translate to more free time. Adding them last-minute to a tour made my schedule more hectic on paper, but I didn’t really notice that I was taking my off days to play spontaneously any more than you would have seen complaints from a high-security prisoner who was given the option to spend their recreational yard time out at the local bar. I loved waking up and thinking, MAYBE I’LL PLAY IN A PARK TODAY!
Sometimes I’d go to bed thinking I’d do an afternoon ninja gig the next day, then wake up, feel tired, and cancel on myself. Canceling an official show is never an option. Not really. A canceled show wreaks havoc on the schedules and pocketbooks of the ticket-holders, the venues, and the promoters, to say nothing of the work of rescheduling and the black mark on your reputation. It’s almost always easier to take the “show must go on” approach; take the stage sick and barrel through. During the long winter tours of The Dresden Dolls, Brian and I would sometimes get the flu simultaneously and still play the gig, both battling fevers, boxes of tissues beside our instruments transforming into foot-high snot-covered mountains by the end of each night. The crowd would sympathize.
But ninja gigs aren’t at all pre-organized, so they aren’t hard to un-organize.
All the intimacy, none of the commitment. So nice.
I also realized that ninja gigging solved an irritating problem that I’d been battling for years: the dearth of all-ages venues. I’d battled many promoters and agents to ensure that my gigs would be all-ages at all costs, because a good handful of my fans are teenagers. The ninja gigs are always free, always all-ages, and generally never announced more than a day in advance. There is no advertising: only Internet posts and word of mouth. People are encouraged to bring instruments, cameras, children, pets, or whatever else they think of, and there’s no official end time or shape to the event. I usually throw the attention to another musician for a while if I have songwriter friends in town or on tour with me who can show up with an acoustic instrument. It feels a little like an old-school folk hootenanny.
I once paraded a group of two hundred people in Brisbane from a corset shop to a modern art museum and played gigs at either end. I’ve done ninja gigs on the steps of the Sydney Opera House to a crowd of seven hundred in the rain (we paraded to shelter). I played a string of Occupy sites up and down the West Coast when I was on tour there during the height of the movement. I did a silent ninja gig inside Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where I wordlessly recommended and signed books of poetry for hundreds of people.
I found out that the people of Byron Bay, Australia, don’t really do Twitter. They don’t even really do the Internet. I morning-twittered an evening ninja gig on the beach, expecting one to two hundred people. Seven people came. I played on the beach and then we all went for ice cream.
I did a ninja gig in Canberra, the Australian capital. All of my fans showed up on bikes, or were loaned bikes, at the headquarters of Rat Patrol, a “freak bike community” of men, women, and children who ride through the city regularly on tall bikes, choppers, and other creatively Frankensteined cycles, wearing flamboyant helmets. We all rode, a pack of a hundred people, to the strains of a battery-powered boom box, passing beers back and forth, through the center of town and to the National Carillon, the five-story bell tower to which someone had a key. I was given a tour of the tower and allowed to play one of my songs on the bells for the crowd gathered down below. A local band played acoustically as thunder roared in the distance. Someone showed up with a surprise upright piano, which they offloaded from their flatbed truck. We wheeled the piano under the bell tower, and I played an all-request concert as the rain pelted us. Everyone was soaked and freezing, we covered the precious piano with jackets, and it was one of the best gigs of my life.
Exactly one year after my TED talk, I arrived in Vancouver for a guest performance at the conference and twittered:
THINKING OF A NINJA GIG AT TED! WHO’S GOT IDEAS?
Three days later, the Vogue Theatre had volunteered their space, and about a dozen TED speakers and performers showed up and shared whatever they felt like. It was like a 1,500-capacity living room. Chris Hadfield, the astronaut and songwriter, played “Space Oddity” on guitar while everybody sang along. A local punk marching band showed up and hung out onstage. The Vancouver food bank, who’d recruited volunteers through my Twitter feed, passed buckets through the crowd and raised almost $10,000.
The most miraculous part of this gig, though, was Sarah Shandl, a girl who raised her hand on Twitter the night I announced the gig, volunteering her services as a last-minute stage manager. I hired her over Twitter, and we spent the next eighteen hours emailing and texting back and forth at least ninety times. She created order in the chaos, helping arrange food and booze, liaising with the food bank, emailing all the performers updated info. She even brought along a friend to manage the guest list of TED people and guest artists for whom we had agreed to save seats. I’d barely met her and she’d saved my ass.
When I took her out to lunch the following day to thank her and get to know her better, I learned that she’d never heard of me, or my music, before the moment she’d volunteered. She’d just seen that someone with a bunch of Twitter followers was throwing a free gig in Vancouver, and thought that that person might need a hand.
Neil got to know me better. I had a bad habit of wanting to disappear completely for a few full days after freshly separating. When we first got together, I couldn’t stand that he wanted to send back-and-forth texts as soon as we separated. Like, five minutes after saying good-bye at the airport.
He learned to adjust to my Run Away! Run Away! approach every time we parted company, and I was learning to resist emotionally vanishing once we weren’t in the same space together.
I started learning how Neil worked. I figured out how to reassure him that I wasn’t actually leaving him; I was just thrilled to be alone and able to work, to make art, to think, and to email by my lonesome. We pissed each other off, royally, frequently, in those early days. But we were getting better, bit by bit. I stopped thinking he was going to cage me, and he stopped thinking I was trying to flee. The poetry wasn’t lost on us: He had abandonment issues, and I had commitment issues. Go figure.
Also, the sex, which had been fumbling and awkward at the beginning of our relationship, got really hot. We figured that was a promising sign of general relationship progress.
Mostly we realized it was about leaving the doors and windows of the relationship wide-open enough. That way, he could see in, and I could see out.
I was backstage talking with a friend I knew from the road, the lead singer of a pretty big indie band, after their show at a club in Boston. I’d come to visit, since I was off tour.
Our shows are selling li
ke shit, he said, tossing his sweaty shirt onto the couch and putting on a fresh one.
You sounded great, I said. And the new album is amazing. But you know—it couldn’t hurt if you would actually talk to your fans from stage. They’re there. They’re crowdsurfing. They’re screaming and yelling. But most of the time you acted like the audience wasn’t even in the room. You barely talked to them.
He opened a beer for himself. Easy for you to say. I remember when you stopped in the middle of your set in Seattle and asked them all to text people they knew in Portland for the next night, because it wasn’t sold out. My whole band was backstage, like, in PAIN because it was so awkward. I mean…it’s kind of genius. But we could never do that. You’re such a freak.
Why? Because I talk to my fans?
But, like, who DOES that? I mean, YOU can get away with it because you’re Amanda Palmer Queen Of The Internet “it’s all one big happy family” and whatever. But that is NOT us. Do you know how fucking CRUCIFIED we’d get if we even so much as mentioned that we had a mailing list? We don’t even announce that we have merchandise for sale…it just seems so tacky.
Well, dude, you’ve got nothing to lose. Your tour is tanking. And it might not be so bad. In fact, if you ask your fans for help, they might surprise you.
How?
They might be really flattered that you trusted them enough to look uncool.
Crowdsurfing is like couchsurfing is like crowdsourcing.
You’re falling into the audience—you’re asking them to help you. By asking, you’re building.
Crowdsurfing is where this moment of trust is at its physical paragon, and best of all, it’s set to the climactic soundtrack of the art itself: the music.
You stand at the lip of the stage, you trust, and you dive.
There is nothing in the world like being held aloft in the cloud of loudness by a sea of random, sweaty arms, every single one of them like a tree in a huge, storm-blustered forest of trust, being floated along by hundreds of fingers and palms. I also feel a sympathetic rush when I look out into the crowd during shows and see the audience hoisting each other up, holding one another in the air, carefully but impulsively pushing each other over the crowd with the cooperative, fevered camaraderie of a barn raising set to a rock-and-roll score. You’re a human-sized symbol of trust, and if you don’t stay in circulation, you not only cease being a gift…you become a liability. Falling to the ground from a crowdsurf isn’t pretty. But you survive. And, usually, people grab your arm and pull you back up. That’s also a wonderful feeling.
Side note: If you ever get a chance to crowdsurf, do it. It’s a blast. Stash your wallet somewhere you won’t lose it, don’t wear loose jewelry, and for god’s sake, no sharp heels, you wanna kill someone?
After almost four years of nonstop touring and recording side by side, Brian and I experienced classic band burnout. Even though we’d graduated from The Vulva to a van (named Ludwig) to a rented tour bus, we were driving each other mad. We took a break and I started working on my first solo record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, the one with the dead/naked-Amanda photo book I’d asked Neil to help me caption. Touring on my own sounded liberating and lonely at the same time—so I hired Zoë Keating, who plays intricate, electronically looped solo cello music, to open for me and play on a handful of my new songs during the stage show. Then I called my friend Steven Mitchell Wright, an Australian theater director whose work draws on the Japanese Butoh tradition, in which performers paint themselves white and writhe in joyously painful existential ecstasy.
Want to figure out a way to add some theater to my tour? I asked him. There’s almost no budget. But we’ll create something magnificent with some actors, I’ll pay for their flights and make sure everybody has a place to stay and food to eat. We’ll need to pass the hat for your salaries. You may also have to help me find couches for us to sleep on.
Steven, who is crazy in the very best ways, said yes and selected three equally crazed and committed Australian performers, and threw in Lyndon, his classical violinist friend, as a bonus. Steven named this company The Danger Ensemble, and they became my touring art family for the next year.
We drove around America, Canada, Europe, and Australia in various cheap tour buses and vans, relying heavily on crowdsourced generosity. Zoë and my sound and light crew were paid a regular support wage, but Steven and The Danger Ensemble relied on the generosity of the crowd throughout the entire tour. Each night onstage, I would introduce them all towards the end of the show and announce that these performers had come on tour with me for no fixed salary and were relying on the audience. The five of them would rove through the crowd during the next song, holding their boots to collect donations. Some nights, they made less than a few hundred dollars. Other nights, they’d make over a thousand. It balanced out. I was relieved, but I wasn’t surprised that the crowd liked helping.
While my busking, bohemian circus friends had no problem passing the hat, not everybody was quite so comfortable. I once brought an opening band on tour with me: five guys in dapper suits who played cabaret music for half an hour before I hit the stage. As the tour progressed, they got into the spirit of all-hands-on-deck and backed me up for five or six of my own songs—learning a new song each night during our soundcheck. I suggested we ask the audience to directly reward their extra effort, and so they went into the crowd, each night, hats in hand, where the fans happily gave them an extra few hundred dollars. It all worked splendidly, but there was one musician in the band who hung back in the dressing room and refused to take part. I asked him one night why he didn’t join the others.
I just…can’t, he said. It’s embarrassing, Amanda. It feels too much like…begging.
But the fans didn’t seem to mind being asked. On the contrary, it made them feel included at a new level.
We also crowdsourced our nightly meals, which was a new test for my professional crew, who were accustomed to a tour diet of ordinary takeout pizza, falafel, and pad thai. I wasn’t certain they’d be thrilled about trading consistency for adventure. Towards the beginning of the tour, I had a conversation in Dublin with one of my sound guys who was somewhat suspicious.
Are you sure about this? Some of your fans are pretty intense and I mean…doesn’t it sort of creep you out? They could put, like, anything in our food.
But I trust these people, I said. I trust them more than I trust, I dunno, random line cooks in restaurants who might piss in my food because they hate their jobs. These people like me. Why would they hurt me?
I’m just saying…watch yourself, Amanda. You trust people too much.
Sometimes a supreme feast would arrive: In Philly and Seattle we were treated to five-course dinners created by chefs who spent two days in preparation for the meal and arrived backstage with burners, sauces, and flambées. In Chicago, a restaurant owner who was dating a fan supplied us with twenty-five varieties of sushi rolls. There was also a flip side. In one Austrian city, a girl arrived with a single red plastic beach pail filled with undercooked pasta. We supplemented that night’s dinner with takeout falafel.
Neil and I were in a giant drugstore, in a hurry, and all we needed to buy were condoms and tampons. I approached a woman who worked there who seemed to be in her late seventies, and asked her. Then I proudly called out to Neil, who was in another aisle, loud enough that he, and everyone else in the drugstore, could hear me:
HONEY, I FOUND OUT WHERE THE CONDOMS AND THE TAMPONS ARE. THEY’RE BOTH HERE IN AISLE FIVE.
Neil came around the corner into the aisle I was in, looked at me, and began to laugh.
Darling, he said, you’re human after all. You’re blushing. You’re embarrassable.
I could feel my cheeks burning. He was right. I’d been trying to prove how fearless I was, but truthfully, I had embarrassed myself.
He loves telling people the story of the time that he learned I was not quite as shameless as he had believed: the time he saw Amanda blush, when she asked for a tampon.
/> I had a manager who couldn’t understand why I was upset that his assistant had booked me a hotel with no wireless during a three-day press trip in London.
I NEED A NEW HOTEL WITH INTERNET, I tried to explain over the phone. I NEED THE INTERNET TO LIVE.
You’re on a three-day press trip doing ten hours of interviews a day. What do you need the Internet for?
Another manager didn’t understand why I thought it was so important that she read my Twitter feed to understand what was actually happening. To see what the fanbase was feeling, saying, sharing, complaining about, and how they were responding to the shows.
It was a massive leap of faith for these people to believe that “just connecting with people,” in an authentic, non-promotional, non-monetary way, is so valuable.
But it is. It’s invaluable.
Those managers seemed really reluctant to believe that if you just trusted and listened to, talked to, and connected with the fanbase, the money and the profits would come—when the time came.
Managers kept telling me to stop twittering and get back to work.
I broke up with a lot of managers.
They didn’t understand. That was the work.
As we barreled along, crowdsourcing food and passing the hat, I continued crashing with fans, and when I left the Dolls and brought along my merry, motley crew of Australian performance artists, things became even more challenging: there were seven of us. We offered our typical exchange of tickets, merch, and gratitude—and with Steven at the helm, we sorted through hundreds of email offers of crash pads. My traditional road crew—sound person, light person, tour manager, and merchandise vendor—were all on full salary, and I paid for their hotels. But nobody bitched about a double standard. The road crew weren’t taking a job with me for an exercise in humanity-trusting. They were taking a job with me to tour in a bus, get their off days in hotels, get paid, and do their jobs. I could afford to put them up. The rest of the performers and I tried our luck on the couches of the universe.
The Art of Asking Page 15