This is from Robert Fripp‘s blog, and it resonates with me to the point of (nearly) breaking my heart:
<<Conversing with Trey (he is referring the Trey Gunn, former member of King Crimson – cc) on the issues confronting the professional player. Nearly all issues come down to this: it is not possible to earn much of a living playing music. This may not be The Absolute Truth, but to all extent & purposes, it’s close enough. We might add a qualification: it is almost impossible to play music that we know to be true for us, and simultaneously earn a full-time living from it.>>
This echos my previous post about the balance between “job” and “career”, and it also darkens the tone of it when you take into account that the two musicians involved in the above conversation are by almost everyone’s standards, ESTABLISHED ARTISTS. In one case (Fripp), the man is an icon of creative rock music and a guitar hero. As for Trey Gunn, well, he ain’t playing weddings anymore either.
I think the key point is that when one looks at their musicking from a detached perspective (i.e. removes the child-like joy that results from simply communing with their instrument and music itself), the time and effort invested by the professional musician is rarely returned and/or bettered by the marketplace.
In my own corner of the world, I have found myself doing damage-control this week. As the leader and booker for the cover bands I play in, I spend an unmentionable amount of time on the phone and email setting up gigs and generally maintaining client relationships. All too often, I am faced with the reality that the people on the other end of the phone have little respect for the work that I do or the service they are purchasing. I’m not saying they’re nasty people in any way, just typical: they can’t fathom someone playing music for a living (unless it is at the Bon Jovi superstar level), so they automatically assume that we are playing just for fun and as a hobby. As such, they seem to find it impossible to conduct business with me at the level that I extend to them. Deposits come late or not at all, dates wish to be changed at a whim, or worse, they engage our services, agree to send a deposit, and then decide not to proceed, but don’t call or contact me in any way. So, when I place a courtesy call to inquire about the whereabouts of the deposit, they are surprised to have ever heard from me again. (It should be noted that all of the above activity on my part has NOTHING to do with making music, and most people that do this work would be making $40k/year with benefits, just for doing this, not doing this as a preamble to the actual work, which is what I do.)
Suffice to say, my December evenings were looking rather plump, and it was going to allow me to take some Saturdays off from my dance accompaniment to be with my family. That’s been dashed by one or two evaporations of gigs, so I’m not subbing out of anything for the next little while. What is even more distressing (I don’t really mind playing dance classes at all, I was just looking forward to some Saturday daytimes with my family) is that none of this surprises me. Most people who faced a downturn in business at year’s end would be moved to panic (especially if the year end was traditionally their busiest time), but by this point, I’m so used to this that I’m numb.
Numbness suggests that it’s probably time to get out.
On a happier note, I spoke with Pacy Shulman last night as he was doing final mixing on the cc3 record, (pamplemousse) . The select few who have heard this record so far (our wives…) have reacted with such excitement towards it (these women have had to endure our most unsavoury creative explorations and greet them with a “that’s nice honey” response for years) that it stirs me to think that we may have done something good. I’m anxious to get this thing out, but as I was saying to Pacy last night, making a record requires me to accept that the trio is a quartet (cc3+Pacy) and his contribution occurs in a non-linear way. Where it took cc3 3.5 hours to play the music, the craft of preparing it for presentation as a record (as opposed to a simple audio document, a verite if you will) occurs out-of-time, and ultimately takes a while. The time it takes is entirely up to Pacy.
chris cawthray 