Re: attitude

["todd reynolds" <toddreyn@gmail.com>]

I've been waiting a while to throw down on this issue, and really value all the opinions going to and fro through my inbox, and as always love the wisdom and comraderie found on our humble list.

David, I concur, and appreciate you equalizing the 'unappreciated' field here. My dad was a music highschoolteacher.  The first and really only time I ever wanted to kill someone was when the principal called my mom and put dad on the phone, having finally broken down crying after being egged as he walked across the quad.  He taught in South Central LA, and with Prop 13, all his wonderful music classes which changed a lot of lives just vanished. Dark, I know, but worth mentioning.  He ended his career as a remedial english teacher for gang members with a cop in the room.  Also noble, but quite a different place from which he started. 

Also to David for reference. I'm the violinist on the Blues for Allah project of years ago with Joe Gallant, I think we met once or twice, and have many friends in common.

A comment on this thread, if I may.

I'm a New Yorker, and as such have played more gigs than I can count at the Knitting Factory for 3 people or less.  I've gotten unreal fees which are sometimes embarrassing, and have worked with great artists on all 'levels' of the visibility spectrum.  I've had a band which was very successful with a budget in the 6 figures, and now, on my own, am humbled by low fees once again. I play for free sometimes as well, and never complain unless I've been hired without my knowledge as audio wallpaper.  That's just not what I hope to offer, that's all.  On the other hand, I still do concert halls and clubs with my own material and am compensated very well. 

It's not a union world anymore, as I think Krispen mentioned, and nobody is taking anything from anyone anymore I don't think.  ESPECIALLY in the creative field.  At the same time, I've been underbid before, which is fine.  I just try to make sure I'm not underbidding anyone else!, lol.

As our careers and politics and money ebbs and flows, I think it only serves to beg the question of why we do this at all.  For me, it's some imperative lodged between entertaining, feeding (spiritually) myself, and just having done it since I was 4, and a desire to bring the world (even the small world of the 3-2000 member audience) into a place of community interaction with a voice which goes beyond words. Not to get too warm and fuzzy about it, but when I'm engaged in bringing folks together around a common enjoyed experience and goal, even for a moment, it pays more than money. I'd assume it is very much the same for most of us.  Should we artists get paid to do that?  I think so.  Absolutely.  We are the shamans, the priests, the alchemists of our society.  I know we're often commercially oriented, but even those folks who make that their goal are often simply speaking a spiritual and galvanizing language, with their intent riding somewhere on the continuum of the purely musical and artistic to the commercial, the music still being what it is from them, heartfelt, we hope, and healing and inspiring.  We're all on there somewhere, and all fighting the same battle to stay alive and to keep singing... May we all be celebrated for our offerings to the degree we all desire, someday.  And someday, when I'm feeling just like s**t about my own career, and underappreciated, someone remind me I wrote this...

My dos pesos... offered up in kindness and solidarity, glad to have this convo up on the list!

Bests,

Todd

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:22 PM, David Gans <david@trufun.com> wrote:

My wife is a schoolteacher.  Talk about a profession that is undervalued in this society!  (But she's got a great health plan, which means we're not on the streets as a result of her bout with lymphoma five years ago.  She won, by the way.)

Every one of us in this bidness watches in horror as profoundly unworthy artists prosper while genius and innovation go begging. There is no justice, and it's damn hard to get any.  I don't see much point in raging about it.

Just yesterday, I put myself into a funk after hearing I was turned down for a gig at a festival that I was sure I'd be perfect for.  And the promoter is someone I thought was favorably inclined toward me and my music. I grumbled to my booking agent briefly ("...reminded that if you want a friend in the music business, get a dog.  And hope he plays the banjo.') and then went back to work.

I make music that doesn't fall neatly into any category.  I write songs that don't all sound like this or that, and I intersperse them in performance with loop pieces, composed and improvised.  I'm too weird for the singer-songwriter world and not weird enough for the avant-garde or whatever you call it.  And on top of that, I'm too fucking old to go to folk/bluegrass festivals in remote locations on my own dime, sleep in the dirt, and work my way up from the campground jams to the mainstage.  Plus: damn hard to schlep an Echoplex and pedal board from campfire to campfire.

You deal with it.  You take the gig.  You do the best you can and build your fan base the only way it's done: one at a time.  I figure if I sell one CD Im ahead of the game, and if I bring home a few email addresses for the spam list, that's a win too.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came when I interviewed producer Ted Templeman for BAM Magazine.  He described his first encounter with Van Halen, at a grubby club in Hollywood: a dozen people in the room, but they were belting it out like it was a sold-out show at the Forum.

I call it the "you-shoulda-been-there" approach: If there are four people in the audience, send 'em all out of there telling their friends they missed something great.




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David Gans - david@trufun.com or david@gdhour.com
Truth and Fun, Inc., 484 Lake Park Ave. #102, Oakland CA 94610-2730
Blog:  http://cloudsurfing.gdhour.com
Web site: http://www.dgans.com

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