I took the Dick Grove music course, and something he said in the introduction sorta branded itself on my frontal lobe; "there's nothing wrong with knowing what you're doing. The vast majority of musicians spend all their time trying to hide what they don't know. Fortunately it's easy to spot them: they criticize others for things they cannot do themselves."
That had a profound effect on me, because at the time I heard that it described me to T. Never again though, and that was three decades ago. What I learned from the experience is that heckling or "band ego traumas" are from jealousy, period, and that comes from trying to hide deficiencies.
That's why I have none.
From a practical viewpoint, I've always used humor to deal with hecklers, because here's something hecklers are totally unaware of: the audience WANTS to laugh at them. You'd be surprised how easy it is, because the audience is already on your side. Something like; "I recognize you from when you were here last night. I don't mean your face. But I never forget an ugly shirt." (One of Mark Twain's favorites.)
As far as racism is concerned, I watched a documentary about the discovery in a South African cave of thousands of bodies from a
previously unknown hominid species that lived over two million years ago. Consider that everything we knew about that branch of our family tree where we developed the hip-sockets that allowed us to stand upright (not counting drummers, of course), one of the defining characteristics of the distinction "hominid," is based on twenty seven bone fragments, and that'll give you an idea of how amazing this is.
The first thing they did was test DNA, of course, and were able to solve the mystery of: "what happened to the
Neanderthals?" Turns out that anthropologists had always assumed Neanderthals (who lived 60-90,000 years ago) were a separate species who were supplanted by Homo sapiens, but they weren't. We absorbed them through interbreeding, along with umpteen other groups, in the usual way (wink, nudge) and now that DNA analysis is so readily available, along with progress in genetic research into inherited traits and behaviors, scientists are able to map the genes for aggressive behaviors to the same genes we got from our Neanderthal kin.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, melatonin has Jack to do with anything, because the real problem is in the genomes of lunkheads who got a little too much DNA from some Neanderthal lurking near the roots of their particular branch. Two, racism is stupid because it's based on the mistaken belief that anyone could pick their parents, and so far nobody ever has. There's also the fact that the newly-discovered ancestors were so highly evolved that they carried their dead
two miles through one of the roughest cave systems ever found, and arranged them in a circle in a "star chamber." They, like Lucy and our other earliest ancestors discovered by the Leakey family, were African.
Neanderthals were from Europe.
Anybody who believes humans and Neanderthals never mated hasn't met my cousin Ricky, believe me.
