Realize when you are a liquor salesman

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Life gets easier when you work what you want to do in with what you have to do to get by in the local music business.

Myself and a good friend of mine went to a Microsoft .NET seminar today. The keynote speaker was great, had some great insights and very amusing wit. In short, he cracked me up. So now you are asking yourself "Self, why is dB bringing this up at a recording website?". Well let me answer that. It is pretty common to see when a musician grows up, if they don't don't turn into a professional of some sort in the music industry, they turn to programming, many, many programmer I know are musicians, so at many of these seminars there is a lot of musician-type analogies thrown around.

This guy, Dave Charpell, had a great one that made me think about a thread or two I recall from HRC forums. Every now and then people come to this site, or any other site like it and one of the first things they try to get across is how great of a musician they are, and how much better they are than anyone else. Which is fine, whatever. What's funny is that much of the time these people are very young or very inexperienced in the music industry itself. I remember the day I first thought that when I learned my instrument and got really good at it I would get signed and be a rock star. Ah, the days of youthful ignorance was awesome!

Mr. Charpell talked about those days today, as he as well was a musician back in the day. It seemed like he almost reached in my head and put better words to thoughts I have had but have trouble expressing (the regulars here know I can get testy at time and very short). He remembered the day he was on stage thinking about how they had to get the harmonies just right, his keyboards had to be perfect in the bridge of this song, the chorus has to keep tempo, blah, blah, blah. Then, like a bolt of light it hit him...I remember this bolt of light myself...whether you get asked back to that club or not doesn't depend on any of that, it depends on how many drinks were sold while you were on stage.

When one gets around their local music scene you realize that the best musicians are not always the best paid or the most sought after, actually, they usually are not. If you get to know the bands/musicians that work your circuit (meaning similar music style and such and are regulars on the scene) you realize that each band has it's strong points and weak points. The successful ones learn how to emphasize one while masking the other to get the job done.

That job, my friends and colleagues, is not to play perfectly and be the best player in the scene, it is to get people in the door and show them a good time.

I remember the first time I played First Avenue's Seventh Street Entry (a smaller venue inside First Avenue but separate from the main room) it was four bands and we were the last one. Sound check is done in reverse order of play-order, so the last band to check, and the first to play was a high school band (cuz they had to be out of the venue by 10PM by Minnesota Law). Decent kids, decent band (like an 8 or 10 piece as I recall). When the drum sound check came up you could tell by the way this kid carried himself that he was widely regarded as "the best drummer in the school". He and the sound engineer went through the drums one by one then the sound guy said "OK, play a beat". Well, this kid, in an effort to impress went off on a "solo", not a beat, after his last hit he stopped he heard chuckling scattered throughout the room. As if I didn't feel bad enough for the kid, he looked at the sound guy, the sound guy rolled his eyes and said very sternly "Play a BEAT".

What's the story here. Well, the story is that all the other drummers in the room could have played that same thing, but they don't because that is not how to get the job done.

He had just learned that when he was a liquor salesman. Don't be a braggard, don't think you are the greatest thing in music, don't try to impress, just go out and play, show people a good time, get in with the other bands and you will have a lot of fun while being a liquor salesman.

These are just some random thoughts that came to me during the course of the Microsoft seminar, along with the slight irony of the fact I come home and write up this little rant on my 1.2 Ghz Linux RedHat 8 PC :-)

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User-submitted comments


TheTincanbug
Aug 08, 2003 09:08 am
a valuable lesson...
I couldn't possibly agree more... And it can be a real let-down to learn this. I figured this out at about 18 years of age (I'm 30 now), when I was playing a gig with our high school ages, all-originals-no-covers band with the misspelled name, Euthinasia. :) Wow, we were soooooo original.... hey why play a bunch of radio songs that people expect and WANT to hear, when you could be original and play them much better music that nobody understands but us? I still don't see the logic, but that's the way we felt at the time. Predictably, the audience "didn't get it" and the music was "over their heads". Or, to look at it another way, the high school band that we were had 2 members of 5 with stagefright, a lead guitarist who polished off almost half a 5th of Jim Beam on our break (stashed in his trunk), and a handful of great riffs written into bad songs due to a lack of material and a rush to fill up our song list.
So now I sit in a closet/recording booth of my own design, writing/recording songs that few will ever hear, taking all the time I need to get them the way I really want them. All I ever wanted was to write music and jam - I'm not a "gig" guy. I figured out what I really want - to write any damn kind of music I want - and now I'm doing it. :) For the most part, live music is something I consume, not produce - and realizing this really opened up my writing. I'd rather work a steady job and write in my spare time for the joy of it, than play warmed-over bar tunes for a drunken crowd who only likes the watered down pap they hear on the radio. Ideally, what is get paid for that - but hey, that'll never happen. Someday 100 years from now, my grandchildren will play my songs for my great-grandchildren and say, "see? this is who your great-grandpa was." That's all the fame I need. :)


Dualflip
Aug 09, 2008 12:48 am
A valuable lesson indeed
Ok, so late comment again, but wanted to share a lesson i also had. As all musicians, i was the typical egocentric player that whenever someone played a song different to what i used to hear i would say something like "ohh that music sucks" or "that guy plays only one chord". So i remember telling my father that i was pissed because people didnt appreciate my music or what i hear/play, etc. So my father, who happens to be a dentist told me this, "son, do you think that i enjoy when some guy with filthy teeth and a crap smelling mouth comes to me to fix his mouth?" i said the obvious "no", so he said "its the same as music, its a job, sometimes you'll play what you really like and makes you complete, and other times youll have to play or listen filthy and crappy music, and youll play it because thats what musicians do, they make music" thats the best advice some could give me, he really changed my approach forever, not only towards music but also every other aspect in life. HEHEHE nice memories right?


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