For years, I’ve had this quote in my signature: “You ain’t got nuthin’ to do but count it off.” And every once in a while someone asks me why. It isn’t a command to others, or even a pithy statement everyone should know; it’s a reminder to me.
It’s something Chester Burnett (aka “Howlin’ Wolf”) said to the other musicians at what has come to be known as the “London Sessions.” They’re working on the song “Little Red Rooster,” and the other guitarist is having trouble following him. That guitarist (Eric Clapton) tells Wolf that he doesn’t think he can follow unless Wolf plays acoustic on the recording. Wolf says, “Ah, man, c’mon, you ain’t got nuthin’ to do but count it off,” and proceeds to count it off. Except he doesn’t, really. What he does is much more complicated than just counting it off.
Clapton was almost certainly bullshitting Wolf to some extent—he could play it without Wolf, since he did so on final version–, but it’s equally certain that what Wolf was describing as “nuthin” was actually very complicated and difficult, even for Clapton.
For Wolf, though, it really was “nuthin,” because it’s what he did all the time, and what he’d done for years.
A lot of my email is giving advice or explaining things to people who haven’t spent as long neck-deep in the things I’ve been reading, writing, and thinking about as I have. Those tasks might seem really easy and straightforward to me, but they’re actually complicated, and they just seem straightforward because of how often I’ve done them. It’s easy to slide into an explanation that makes sense to me, but wouldn’t to someone else. To someone who’s not done them a lot, they’re hard. And so that quote in the signature is to remind me that it isn’t always just counting it off.