Longtime music business insider Jimmy Guterman, writing over at Boing Boing this morning, makes a reasonable point about the paralyzing effects of perfectionism:
My favorite part of The Promise, a documentary about the making of Bruce Springsteen's 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town that was on pay TV this month and will be available for sale next month, is when we learn that one of the many reasons recording took longer than it should have is that Springsteen felt he could hear the sound of Max Weinberg's stick hitting the drum. That ruined the sound of the song for him, and many hours were devoted to making the drum sound all drum and no stick. Springsteen sits in the control room, says, monotonously, "stick... stick... stick" as he hears the playback, and you can feel the whole recording operation grind to a stop.
There are two responses to this.
First, it's fascinating to watch an artist so dedicated to his work that he's willing to put everything on hold until a minor mistake, one few in his audience would ever suspect is there, is fixed.
Second, he's nuts.
Guterman goes on to wonder: "How much attention to detail is too much? I've spent my career working with creative people and often the hardest part of such an exchange is knowing when you're done, when you've taken it as far as you should, when it's time to share it with other people." And that's the question, isn't it: When do you let the thing go, release it into the wild, beyond your immediate control? This was just the moment director Thom Zimny didn't capture in The Promise. And it's a shame, because in his previous Springsteen doc, Wings For Wheels, about the making of Born To Run, he flat nailed it.
The moment happened like this: Born To Run was done, mastered, ready to go. The label was just waiting for Springsteen's final go-ahead to release it. The band had fled the studio for the road and Springsteen couldn't pull the trigger. The label was pounding at the door, and Springsteen couldn't pull the trigger. He'd lived with the making of the record for so long, dedicated himself to it so obsessively, that he was almost literally frozen in place. One day, as he told the story to Zimny, a friend called him on the road. The friend had heard the record in a test pressing and Springsteen asked him what he thought. The friend said, more or less: "I think it's good." "Oh, you do?" Springsteen said. "Yeah," the friend told him, and 25 years later, you can see the moment again, see the relief and the exhaustion and the That's-it-I'm-done of it as Springsteen recalls it, laughing: "I said, All right. Put the thing out."
It's an illuminating anecdote -- not only because it lets Springsteen poke some holes in the airtight construction of his own myth, but because it's a note-perfect description of a moment in the creative process that doesn't get a lot of attention. It's the moment of collapse, when theorizing fails and strategizing ends and there's simply nothing left to do but let go. It surprises even the people it happens to. Maybe it surprises them most of all. Sometimes you run out of energy; sometimes you just run out of time. But what you do is, you run out.
Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, likes to say "The show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's 11:30." That's a cheering thought, in a way: Art may or may not be perfectible, but it's never going to be going to be perfect, and there's inevitably a moment when all you can do is laugh and say "Put the thing out."