Sometimes Turn Off All the Mics
I’m all for keeping things simple. I like to say that if you can’t explain yourself in sixteen minutes, you should go back to the drawing board. The preferred venues today seem to be arenas or stadiums. There are always a lot of lights, fireworks, and dancers crowding the stage. I don’t understand how you keep in touch with your audience that way; I prefer beautiful concert halls with excellent acoustics.
America has some of the best halls in the world: Carnegie Hall and Radio City in New York, and Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. Then there are the Fox theaters in Atlanta and St. Louis, which were gorgeous old vaudeville houses—just to name a few. I love to perform where I can see whom I’m singing to; it’s much more intimate. Technology is wonderful when it’s used correctly, but if you don’t have the talent to back it up and you have to rely on bells and whistles, then it all becomes smoke and mirrors.
I’m a big believer in standing on your own two feet without a lot of artifice, and I am inspired by others who believe the same. Once when Maurice Chevalier was performing at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, there was a musicians’ strike. Instead of canceling the show, Chevalier walked onto the stage all alone and sang the entire thing a cappella. The audience loved it, and he wound up getting six standing ovations. If that’s not self-reliance, I don’t know what is.
I always remembered that story, and I worked the idea into my own act. Near the end of my show, I ask my longtime soundman, Tom Young, to turn off all the microphones, and I sing with only the acoustics of the concert hall and without any amplification. People always tend to remember that portion of my show; it leaves quite an impression.
In a way, singing without a mic is an example of taking responsibility for myself and having faith in myself as a performer. There’s nothing artificial affecting my voice; it’s just me belting it out to the audience and hitting the back of the hall. When we put ourselves out there—whether it’s auditioning for a record label or interviewing for a job—we have to know how to stand on our own two feet and believe in ourselves. There won’t always be a mic, or other musicians, or a crowd to fall back on. You have to be able to rely on yourself alone, at crucial times in your life.
Such was the case at age eighteen, when I got drafted into the Army. I’d never been away from home except for a brief time with my relatives upstate when my father died, so heading into basic military training was quite a shock. I was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then on to Little Rock, Arkansas, for six weeks, to prepare before heading to Europe to join the fighting.
Boot camp was much worse than I could have imagined. I was in the infantry rifleman division, and it was very rough. We had to go on seemingly endless marches through brambles and mud, and the officers tried to break our spirits. The whole military philosophy went against everything I was raised to believe in, and the institutionalized bigotry in the Army disgusted me.
Ironically, given that I wound up being a singer, the sergeant was always on me about not being able to keep time when I was marching. Once when we were on a bivouac mission, he began yelling at me and hitting my helmet with his crop. I’d had all I could take; I turned on my heel and walked the six miles back to camp. As punishment, I was put on kitchen duty for a month. I also had to clean the whole unit’s Browning rifles, which got filthy from the gunpowder when they were fired. It took almost an hour to clean one hammer, and I had to do a dozen or so at a time. On top of that, I was stuck working every weekend, instead of being able to take a little R and R with the other guys.
Finally I got to go on leave, and when I arrived home in Queens, I dropped onto the floor in a dead faint. The abusive environment in boot camp, combined with my emotional state, overcame me. A few days later I had to go back, and when the training was over, I went home for a short while, and then was called up with a group of troops bound for Germany.
Instead of replacing an entire division of soldiers when it became exhausted, the way the German and British armies did, the American Army would substitute an individual soldier in a unit when someone became unable to fight. Many of these new guys had never even fired a gun. The idea was that the veteran soldiers would teach them, but it didn’t work that way, and the whole setup was a disaster.
I was shipped out to Le Havre, France, and then to a holding area. None of us knew each other, since we’d all been pulled from different divisions, so it was a time when I really had to go it alone. There was no chance to make friends, because in a few days, I would be shipped out with yet another group of strangers to the front lines. This system, which was called “repple depple” (the soldiers’ term for replacement depot), was impersonal and very lonely. We were a bunch of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds who had been plucked from our homes and families and suddenly put into this terrifying situation without even a friend to lean on.
The American Army had suffered so many casualties that they just needed to keep a flow of young men through the troops to fill up the depleted divisions, no matter how little the new guys knew about combat. Over half of the new soldiers died within the first week on the front line. I was assigned to the Seventh Army, 63rd Infantry Division of the 255th Regiment, G Company. I was put into an Army truck and sent across France during January and February 1945. In March we entered Germany and went straight to the front line. Nothing could have prepared me for what was to come next.
The Battle of the Bulge had just ended in France, and the German army was retreating. Even so, Hitler sent his troops to the Ardennes to try to keep the Americans from occupying his country. When the Allies broke through and went into Germany, I was one of the replacements for the exhausted American soldiers.
The veterans returning from the front acted as if they would rather have died instead of losing their friends, and as I said earlier, I really felt their sadness. The winter was freezing, and being at the front was unbearable. Bombers flew overhead, and shells burst all around us. Fellow soldiers died right before my eyes. I wondered when it would be my turn.
The real horror was the German cannons. We had to dig foxholes before we went to sleep, and sometimes it took forever to break through the frozen ground. You’d eat ice-cold cheese and crackers, pass out for a couple of hours, and then you had to get up again. Talk about being thrown back on your own resources. On my very first night on the line, I was so tired after digging my hole that I fell asleep on the ground next to it. I woke up covered in snow, and right behind me there was a tree trunk with a big piece of shrapnel stuck into it. A few inches lower, and it would have hit me.
The nights were the worst. It was bitter cold, but we couldn’t light a fire to stay warm because the Germans would see it. We’d spend up to sixteen hours lying alone in a foxhole, listening for the enemy. Sometimes we could even hear them talking to each other, they were so close.
Eventually I made it off of the front line and wound up working for the Special Services Band, which was a great experience after the battlefield. But being on the front was definitely a lesson in self-reliance.
It isn’t only traumatic events that help one practice keeping things centered. Painting does that for me in a big way, since I’m all by myself when I’m in my studio. It’s definitely not a board meeting; it’s not six guys making a group decision. When you’re at the canvas, you’re all alone, and you’re thinking about your own story. Just you—not your friends, your wife and family. I find that painting brings me back to myself in a way that makes me aware that in the end, all we really can rely on is ourselves.
It’s similar to performing. The thing about putting on a show is that, although it takes all the people around you to make sure it comes off the way you want it to—the soundmen, the lighting people, the guy who raises the curtain—I’m also aware that it’s really all on my shoulders. It’s me out there again on the front line. When the audience reacts and the reviews hit the street the next morning, it all reflects on me. It’s wonderful and important to be surrounded by people who care about and support you, but when it really comes down to it, we come into and exit this world alone. I’ve worked very hard to be self-reliant, to learn to believe in myself, and to embrace each waking day with confidence that I will be able to accomplish the things I set out to do.
The Zen of Bennett
There won’t always be a mic, or other musicians, or a crowd to fall back on.
The art of painting teaches you who you are. When you’re at the canvas, you’re all alone; you’re thinking about your own story.
In the end, all we really can rely on is ourselves.
Be determined to stay the course and stand on your own two feet.
