Paying Dues Evermore

Of late, I've been paying more attention to Craig's List than I should. Ostensibly, I'm fishing for new gigs for me & the boys, or new likeminded bands to network with, but --if I'm completely honest-- I'm largely in it for the bickering.

Having children has made me highly-attuned to the tiniest hint of tension, and constantly ready to spring into action as arbiter for any petty conflict that reaches my ears. And when I'm not embroiled in true childish argument, I fill the aching void with the next best thing: reading the semi-materialized gripes of my fellow struggling musicians.

Of late, their bloods been a-boilin' over what they perceive to be the weedlike creep of open stages across the Portland music scene. Here are some actual caricatures to present the rabble-rabble arguments of those opposed:

CARICATURE #1: Rabble-rabble! Those durn venue owners and their confounded open stages! Tarnation! They're getting music fer free and makin' musicians pay for beer to boot!

CARICATURE #2: Rabble-rabble! You fool sucker musicians playing these open stages are ruining our tenuous grip on the market. BOYCOTT OPEN STAGES! Insist on fair pay for all musicians! Living wage! Unionize!

False, false, false, and false, sirs.

Look, I'd love to make my living from playing. I'm passionate about it, I'm dedicated, and I'm skilled, but get real. An attempted career in music has an arc. There is a ladder, and the bottom rungs exist to position you for your ascent.

• Learn your instrument(s)
• Learn to play with others
• Write something
• Learn to play in public (here's where open stages come in)
• Improve
• Book a gig
• Attract some fans
• Improve
• Make an album
• Book bigger gigs
• Attract the notice of the press
• Improve
• repeat, repeat, repeat, or so I've been told

Being an aspiring musician is more like being an aspiring astronaut than being an aspiring accountant. You've got to work as hard as you can, take advantage of every opportunity, distinguish yourself at every step and still come to grips with the fact that you will probably not make the final cut despite your dedication and deservedly-hard work. In all likelihood, you will find yourself resting breathless on a middle rung, still looking upward, still paying dues --too committed to quit, but so very far away from success.

Oh, and incidentally, open stages aren't generally free to the venues. 90% of the time, this off-night event is hosted by a professional musician who is getting paid. It's possible I know this for a fact.

Now, do some venues seek that bottom rung population? Yes. There are venues with only open stage nights. There are venues that book artists to play for tips only. But there are times where that is the right opportunity. If your band is comfortable playing open stages, you've got to move on to full-night sets. And tips-only gigs may be your next step up. Take full advantage of them. You need video. You need live recordings. You need new fans. You need a list of places you've played to help convice bigger venues that you know what you're doing.

Great musicians can find places to play. I'm not even great, and I've had no trouble landing small paying gigs within a month of re-entering the scene. But I still like hitting open stages to meet other musicians and to tune up new material. Boycott, shmoycott. If you want a living wage, go do something that has an unsaturated market value. There are fewer people who can effectively use apostrophes than can get up on stage and belt out the old sing-songs. I hate to break it to you, but this is a quixotic dreamer's life, destined for failure, but unrelentingly tantalizing to those that're bit.

The fact of the matter is that there are literally 10,000 bands who are failing more effectively than me.

The fact of the matter is I'm way better than 100,000 bands who are failing worse than me.

The fact of the matter is no one reading this post will make it big.

The fact of the matter is, we all deserve our shot.

Jonatha Brooke Wants To Be My Friend

I first stumbled across Jonatha Brooke at a listening station in the now-defunct Sound Warehouse chain in Denver in 1995. I played the first few tracks of Plumb and was interested enough to buy the album. This was back when I was still steadfastly clinging to the notion that I didn't need to own a CD player, so I actually bought it on cassette. Incidentally, that embarassing anecdotal display of naive technological anti-savvy has nothing to do with the fact that it has taken me however many years to set up a MySpace page, or my continuing failure to post videos of any kind over on Youth Tube despite the sensible urgings of my technological betters to do so. I am merely convinced that those fads will fade shortly after I bother getting around to it, so you know, two kids, mortgage, why bother? One of these days, I'm going to be so right about that, and that's the day the funny face you're making will tragically freeze that way. Incidentally, financial tip: it looks to me like a good time to buy real estate or REIT shares. In any event, to this day, that remains one of my favorite albums (though now on CD), growing stronger in my mind with each listen, and I've been a big fan of hers ever since.


And amazingly, the very first thing that happened when I set this page up last year was that I received the second most exciting email I've ever gotten, next to the opportunity I seized to help a desperate Nigerian diplomat flee his war-torn country and the certain cruel doom that surely awaited him for but 500 of my hard-earned ruples. "Jonatha Brooke wants to be your friend." I enthusiastically approved her and awaited the first of our many inevitable compadre-to-compadre chit-chats.

Alas, as you already knew at least one paragraph ago, Jonatha was no Nigerian diplomat, and her friendship was not as it first seemed.

Indeed, I got the distinct impression that ours was a one-way relationship, existing only to allow her to inundate me with impersonal marketing posts. Can you imagine?! I know! I can't either! I'm so incredibly indignant, I just may need to utilize an emoticon on this surly occasion! And normally, I'm just like Jon Bon Jovi --a manly chiseled stone of iconless emotions. But not today!

When I first set up this MySpace page, being the naivenik that I am, I imagined that my friends would be MyFriends and that MyNewFriends would be my new friends. Of course, everybody but me understands the difference between "My Friends" and "MyFriends." When I was in elementary school, Chuckie Kapelke was my friend, but surprisingly, my Greatest American Hero lunch box was not immediately full of impersonal advertisements about his new lemonade stand. Then again, that could be because I forgot to thank him for the add.

Well, there were only two sensible options at my disposal: I could either go off the Andy Rooney deep end, bestrew my desk with garbage (or as my wife would say, more garbage), and start in with the non-stop grumbling OR --and you can see it's a big "or"-- I could take this high road I've heard so much about and convert MyFriend into my friend.

So when for just about the first time ever, Jonatha played a show closer to me than Dublin or Amsterdam (apparently her listserv monitor believes that I hail from Dover, not Denver, and now live in Portsmouth, not Portland), the wife and I went down, saw her play, and met her. As you can see, we are clearly actual friends at this point.

The end result of all of this hoo-ha is that I've decided not to accept any friends with whom I have had some actual connection. So in looking at my short list of MyBuddies, you can rest assured that each of them represents someone who I think is worth checking out. Or something like that. I don't know. I've been futzing with how to wrap up this stupid blog post for like six months, and I give up. Hooray, I got a C+!!!!