I was casting about for something interesting to post about and, while looking for a different image, came across this. It's from the contact sheets for publicity pics for our band Metropolis; circa 1982 (?). Your humble bloghost is to the far left, apparently rating a "10". (smirk) My colleague at the school job, Pat, is on the far right, sporting the super-tasty Gibson Thunderbird bass (an original, 1963 model). I'm holding my '66 Fender Musicmaster, which I'd modified with a hot humbucker in the bridge. It was a fun little guitar, but I mainly played my "big-boy" strats. Note the "flair" on my strap! That was a common feature for me back in the day, before I went all plain-jane. I'm wearing a girl's satin blouse that I'd dumpster-dived from the apartment complex I worked at-it had a matching scarf that I wore sometimes.
Next to me is my friend Tim, our keyboard player, and the only one in the pic that's still making his living as a musician-he does what he calls "the Geritol Tour", playing at retirement and nursing homes. It is apparently a going concern. The last character is our drummer, Don; last I heard, he was a cop! Funny story: to get Don, Pat and I, who were trying to create a new band, joined up with him and a couple of guys he'd been playing with for awhile. We didn't think too much of the other guys, but Don was a decent drummer and had a very good voice (singing drummers aren't exactly common!). We drafted Tim and had a six-man band, more than we really wanted; splitting our small wages 6 ways didn't exactly make anyone flush. One day before rehearsal, after we'd played about 4 jobs as a sextet, Pat, Tim and I managed to talk to Don alone. As we began to broach the subject of letting the other two guys go, Don looked at the ground and then looked up at us with a shit-eating grin and said "thank God you guys brought this up-I've been trying to think of how to propose the same thing to you!"
In true cheesy musician fashion, by the time the other guys showed up, we had most of our gear packed and just told them "this isn't really working out, we're gonna disband and sort things out for awhile." It was pretty awkward, with the other guys trying to persuade us to stick together, but we were firm. I even got a little prima-donna-ish, to try to help things move along. We helped them pack up their gear and load out, making mouth noises about maybe trying again a bit later, and kind of shuffled them off. Then we set up our gear again and started rehearsing the "new" band.
A couple of weeks later, I ran into the dismissed guitarist at a club, and he told me after they left, he and the other guy went to a bar and pretty much figured it all out. To their great credit, they didn't really feel that bad about it, or so he said. They could see we were working on a different level than their previous band, were more committed, more serious, and they knew we could've just told them "you're out!" instead of trying to preserve their "face".
I appreciated that more when, about 8 months later, I was "invited onward" by my bandmates; we'd come to some pretty serious differences in opinion, which I won't bore you with now. Another party had been added to the band, and by ousting me assumed much greater influence over the band's direction. Metropolis went on for several years after I left; for my part, I entered into the most lucrative and productive period of my life as a professional musician. As I was putting my next band together, I had a bizarre accident and lost the tip of my little finger on my left hand-my "neck" hand. I trashed that effort and spent a couple of months recuperating and figuring out how to adapt my playing from being a real four-finger player to being mostly a three-finger guy--and, while that was one of the most depressing times of my life, I discovered that a lot of folks in the STL musician community didn't care about my "handicap", and were interested to see if I wouldn't focus more on singing after the accident. I did, and that really transformed my career. In a way, good guitar players were a dime-a-dozen, but good guitar players who could sing well were more desireable. I got almost all my subsequent jobs on the basis of my singing, more than my playing.
And so your humble narrator was launched onto the road in a succession of lounge and Holiday Inn bands; I made a lot of money, and had a lot of fun, and really got to work thru my "I want to be a professional musician" angst. After several years of that, I realized the sacrifices to try to make it in the music biz were just more than I wanted to make, so I sought out and found a day-job and enrolled in college. I still played music, and indeed, had a sort-of second career running sound for friend's bands; I'm still a dedicated guitarist and spend a lot of my time tinkering with gear and playing. I'll always be a musician; I'll always be a guitarist. It's a big part of who I am.
And I'll always cherish those glory days.
I thought you were going to say the guy you released was Eric Clapton or something :)
ReplyDeleteCool story, although don't sell yourself or guitarists short. I don't agree with your statement good guitar players are a dime-a-dozen. In my opinion they are in fact very rare indeed. Only a fraction of a percent of the guitarists I hear a worth a damn. Most of them are "guitar mechanics" who learn to string licks together by listening to real players but who have no actual musical ability themselves.
In Bach's time a measure of a musician was their abilty to compose and improvise music on the fly. Simply learning to pluck strings, no matter how well you did it, didn't make you a musician. It simply made you a mechanic.
I think that distinction has been lost which has given us all these lousy guitarists who think playing is like turning the handle on a jack-in-th-box.
I can relate to the Bach comment; I've never been one of those guys who played everything note-for-note every night. Early in my career, I was impressed by the fact that the bands I went to see in concert rarely played the songs exactly like the record. Some things need to be exact, true, but a lot of it invites variation, and it keeps the material from getting stale. So when I went to learn a song, I would sit down, get it pretty much note-for-note, and then, in rehearsal and performance, adapt things more to my style, and left plenty of room for nightly experimentation. For solos that left room for interpretation, I would quote the first 8 bars or so and then go off into my own thing, then end quoting the last 8-12 bars...it kept it familiar to the audience, but gave me some liberty to be myself. Some solos just have to be exact, but most can be pretty freely adapted.
ReplyDeleteLater in my career, when we got pretty liberal adapting songs to our own band's style, that was essential-one had to be able to come up with fresh stuff every night. And that's the mark of a "REAL" musician, to me.
Wow! Look at that! You looked like a rockin' dude - well, actually, you all did. Sorry we couldn't see down to your bell bottoms and platforms.
ReplyDeleteIf everyone could be so lucky as to have "paying musician" gigs in their resume.
I think the bass player looks like very cool frood who knows where is towel is.
ReplyDelete