LISTENER SUBMITTED CONTENT: Being in a band was all I ever wanted to do. Then I got my my wish: I got a record deal (twice — once at Geffen and once at the now-defunct Chrysalis), played with big name artists (Beck, Liz Phair, John Doe, The Dan Band, Spain — I even played tambourine on one track of a Stevie Nicks’ greatest hits package), and stopped working shitty jobs. After 12 years, I got out. Let me take a moment to shine a light on a few factors you may want to consider before making the mistake of a career in music. YOUR BAND PROBABLY SUCKS Most of them do. That’s why the great ones are so special. It doesn’t matter how much you want to be good, if you’ve played more than three shows and there’s no one there except your close friends, um, let’s just say you’re not “resonating with people.” BAND MATES ARE DICKS, DRUNK OR IDIOTS Not to make wild generalizations, but who’s drawn to the idea of being in a band? Junkies, drunks, losers, rejects, and you. There are two kinds of people in bands: true artists, who are driven by a compulsion to express their innermost soul through music, and the dilettantes that want to dress like them. If you’re not the former, you’re just some douche in hip clothing. Girls from chaotic, dysfunctional homes become strippers. Guys join bands. TOURING IS BORING On tour, you spend one hour a day on stage, six days a week. The other 162 hours of the week, you’re loading, unloading, or sitting in a van. YOU DON’T MAKE MONEY I got out of the music business before it imploded, so the environment now is much more hostile than what I had to deal with. At one point, I made $2,000 a week on tour. But even at that rate, the only way to support a family was to be on the road so much, you’d never see them. YOU DON’T GET TO SEE THE WORLD I have played all over Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, the United States, and Canada. The cathedral at Chartres: drove past it. Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin: drove past it. The Louvre, Lake Como, Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, Grand Canyon — you get the picture. All a touring band sees is the inside of clubs, TV and radio studios, planes, buses, vans, and hotels. HOTELS ARE NOTHING TO COME HOME TO No dishes to wash or bed to make or vegan roommate who’s on a juice fast. Bands generally stay at crappy hotels, but occasionally, fortune smiles and you get a night at the Four Seasons or a family-run townhouse hotel in Vienna that has toilets with a little ceramic shelf that seems to be intended to give you the opportunity to examine your poop before you flush. OK fine, touring isn’t all bad. THE HOT GIRL CONUNDRUM It’s true that being in a band can help you get a much hotter girlfriend than you would otherwise deserve. But there’s a problem with hot girls: They’ve spent their whole life being treated like rock stars. People want to know them. When they enter a room, heads turn. Everyone laughs at their jokes and tells them how smart they are in hopes of seeing their tits. But most of all, they’re used to being catered to. They’re not going to be OK with you being on the road away from them getting lots of attention from beautiful strangers. Who’s going to pay attention to them? A beautiful girl is like a small child — she needs constant careful maintenance or eventually she will insist that you quit the band, even though that’s what attracted her to you in the first place. Then she will leave you because she’s “fallen out of love” with you. This is a situation that demands the same asymmetrical thinking Capt. Kirk used to defeat the Kobayashi Maru scenario in “The Wrath of Khan.” You have to marry an actress — they get external validation elsewhere and understand the idea of working away from home. Wait, that’s not going to work. An actress will leave you for a director. And then your only consolation would be that you got to nail her during her prime hotness years. Which might be consolation enough. That’s a decision every man must make for himself. YOU CAN’T DO IT WHEN YOU’RE OLD Did you see The Who at the Super Bowl? I didn’t. I saw some old men playing Who covers. I watched “The Kids Are Alright” 28 weeks in a row when I was 13 and the band in that film has nothing to do with the travesty that interrupted the Saints’ march to victory over Peyton-Christ Superstar. It’s not that the old can’t play or sing or don’t have something to say. It’s that we’ve already heard their best stuff when they were young and no one cares what old people say unless they’re Leonard Cohen or a black man who weighs over 275 lbs. Being in a band spits you out at 30 with no job skills and a drinking problem. Then you end up working in the warehouse of a screen printing company in Fresno. Or, if you’re like me, you end up in the much more stable, reasonable, down-to-earth world of television. -DAVID HARTE
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 20:16:30 +0000
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