Excellent interview with Louis C.K. in the current Rolling Stone (but I can’t find a public URL for it). He says something about how he performs that I think is also a good explanation of why I (and my inspiration, the Grateful Dead) prefer to do it differently every time rather than settle on one perfect way or performing:
“…if you perform something twice and you do it differently each time, that means you’re doing it well, because you’re focusing on the intention and not the mechanics. I’ve always thought about that in stand-up: Whenever you have success, which is getting laugh, you’e going to keep doing it, and it’s a path that gets grooved in deeper and deeper, but it starts to lose its luster after a while. Sometimes with certain bits, I realize they’re getting kind of crusty, so I go, ‘Forget how you say this bit, go back to the wordless idea, and express it as if you never said it before.’ If you do that with a joke five times and then mix the five versions, you get this amazing thing.”
He also says: “The Grateful Dead, for one minute, I got into.” But later in the interview he uses the phrase “crackling with energy,” which Jerry Garcia also says in a brief interview in the Grateful Dead Movie.
Coincidence? Oh, probably.