For a short time (less than a month), I was the caretaker on a farm near Cortez, Colorado. I fed and counted hundreds of pigs, chickens, cows, and sheep, chased the neighbor's bulls off the property with a tractor, and repaired the barbed-wire fence where the horny beasts had broken through. I monitored and cleared the irrigation system of crayfish, fed the dogs, and buried things when they died (if their parents hadn't eaten them). One of my projects was to re-fence an entire line of one section of the property, which was a daunting challenge. It took a lot less time than I thought it would. I thought it was a pretty good fence. The owner, who was an actual farmer, was totally displeased. He was friendly about it, but it got weird, due to my lack of skills and his expectation to follow him to Durango every week to help them sell meat, for free. He wasn't paying, you understand. I was working for free, and a place to stay. It was a nice little back-house. The best I've ever seen. That's it in the picture, with my good friend Cope the dog, who I will see again in Heaven. In the ad it said I could do extra work "at the employee's discretion," but once I got there, it was expected. It pissed me off, and we crossed swords, and that was it. I was the 10th caretaker he'd been through in a year.
One time, the neighbor, who was an actual cowboy, came by to retrieve his bulls. He had the bulls corralled and on his property, with the breach in the fence fixed, almost before I knew he was there.
The cowboy neighbor was the guy who the owner actually wanted: a farmer, a cowboy, a ranch hand. But he was paying guitar-player prices. He wasn't paying cowboy prices, he was paying prices that would only attract guitar players. Which means, in our society, nothing.
As a professional bandleader, I have the same problem with musicians. Rhythm sections usually, in my case. I don't get bass players, I get bartenders with a bass guitar habit. I have met MANY great musicians over the years, and when I meet a real one who is "in the trenches" alongside me in the real-musician slog through oblivion which lasts for years,
it's like finding an oasis in the desert. A bag of weed in the forest. Some money on the sidewalk.
I have a great drummer now, at least, I'm looking forward to hiring as soon as possible.
It only took 25 or 30 years to meet him.
Is it 25, or 30? Round it down to 20, to make the bummer of it easier for the offended amateurs to understand. As though that were possible.
* * *
The reason for this article is to address the inevitable sanctimonious whining that will result from the "harshness" in my last message about terrible Christian music. Forget about your fake, Illuminati pop stars who are manufactured and sold to the masses, and whose popularity is as manufactured and false as their music. Kanye West is the anti-genius those people deserve. Has anyone with true artistic vision and talent captured the zeitgeist of any given English-speaking culture to the point that they've been able to break out of the local scene of power-tripping amateurs since.....
who? Biggie Smalls & Tupac? Jack White? Who isn't necessarily mind-blowing, and who's been big for what, 20+ years?
I'm talking about household-name independence. Not some one-off surge of attention that looks big but never leaves the city, or the region. Almost everybody (who is a professional) has had that at least once in their life. I'm talking about not being dependent on the whims of the control freaks who manage the bar (and what a great amazing gig it almost always never is). Not being dependent on the artless, art-savvy hipsters, whose strength comes from the practice of exclusion. Exclusion, of course, is the glue that also keeps religious cults and the social scenes of yuppie housewives together. "We exclude you from our church/heaven/scene, because we are superior," is the general theme. You're never cool enough, or holy enough, or gay enough, or whatever it is, for them. Never (hopefully). They demand total compliance, or exile.
The troll will produce a name, unaware that the fact that this name has never been heard of outside of his comment section and/or generationally-isolated social circle means he's missed the point.
Everybody has heard of Prince. Of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, blah blah blah all those old names from ancient history we haven't replaced yet because*
WE'RE TOO EASY ON HALF-ASSED PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO BUSINESS PRETENDING TO PLAY MUSIC.
The reason we're "too easy" on them, is because we think music is a PERMANENT VACATION.
We think that, because we can't do it.
That was the farmer's problem in Colorado. It came up once in conversation. "What I really do," etc. Within minutes, it was clear that the guy actually believed that playing guitar was something you did if you didn't have anything better to do. It was an optional hobby engaged in by people with too much time on their hands: idlers, losers, drug addicts. He was a real man, and had an obvious sense of self-superiority because he was a resourceful person who knew how to repair fences.
He could see the problems with my fence, things that my amateur eyes couldn't see, but he didn't appreciate "what I really do."
It's an optional hobby that nobody could possibly be talented in, because I can't do it.
My profession is valid, yours isn't a profession. You can put out a tip jar though, if you like.
That's the theme.
* * *
I'm rambling, because I've lost respect for my own society and don't care if anything I say makes any real sense to anyone. I get it, you're amazing. We're all winners. So much "anger" and "negativity" here, I know. The script really is quite boring. Your offendedness is a hard diamond truth, as unimaginative and predictable as the 40-year-old cover songs you churn out on open mic night, or the miserable rhyming couplets you broke out of your 7th-grade notebook and put to a factory beat with a guy who knows how to use reverb and compression (a fun and valid art in itself, by the way), I get it. It doesn't take years of pursuit to achieve excellence at this craft, if you have the natural ability. Nope. You love God and have a friend who produces prefabricated beats for a living, none of you have ever thought to actually study music, or listen to anything other than the spoonfed pap you're too intellectually and artistically incurious and lazy to even choke on,
* * *
That isn't going anywhere pleasant. Enough. The reason I'm writing this article is for the future reference of all whiny half-asses who want a participation trophy for waking up in the morning..... If the criticism of artless sound-files of any religious persuasion is "negative" or harsh,
WHAT DO YOU THINK IT'S LIKE TRYING TO MAKE A LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE EVERYBODY THINKS THEY'RE BETTER THAN YOU BECAUSE WHAT YOU DO IS ESSENTIALLY A HOBBY, AND THERE IS NO WAY TO EXCEL IN IT, BECAUSE A DIVERSITY OF ABILITIES IN THE WORLD WOULD MEAN THAT "I'M NOT ALWAYS A WINNER," NEVERMIND THE FACT THAT IT'S ONE OF THE ONLY TRADES AND SKILLS THAT THE WORLD FEELS ENTITLED TO FOR FREE?
In a word: Harsh.
It's harsh.
Have you ever heard the term "paying your dues," or is that something else that's been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual integrity?
You have to pay your dues. You don't fall into an ability to become a MUSICAL ARTIST. You develop what is already there, or you abandon it because there's nothing to abandon.
It's as simple as that.
* * *
Throw your stones. You have no idea how immune I am.
p.s. By all means, learn to sing and play guitar, harmonica, ukulele, whatever you like, for its own sake as an amateur kick, of course. By all means. It is a wonderful thing to do. Have a good time with it. Go to the open mic, karaoke, have a concert in the shower. Play guitar by the fire. Have song circles with your friends. There's no reason not to. Absolutely no reason. If you like writing songs, there's a hint. If you can't not do it, there's another hint. But if you make professional music videos based on nothing more than having a high subscriber count (and therefore high thumbs-up rate) on a non-artistic YouTube channel, be prepared for some blowback.
Don't be like the farmer, and assume that because you have a spiritual YouTube channel, that the criticism is a spiritual attack.
It might be a simple artistic criticism from people who have been pursuing the craft for over 30 years.
If you think I'm being harsh, you can't do it, and you should quit.
Good luck.
A Bad Show Is Better Than A Good Practice:
Fight gigs are necessary for anyone who wants to go to the next level of professionalism. Your career may or may not do anything for the time being, but your skills are being refined in the fire, dragged behind the van for ten thousand miles until they are hardened beyond the point of stone, and start to turn to diamonds. People who spend their lives kicking ass in the practice room will only ever “play rockstar” on the weekends. They will think more highly of their skills, talents, and abilities than they ought, because those skills and abilities have never been tried. And they might go into business in old age, probably a bar. They’ll think musicians are whiny, and they’ll stop pretending to sympathize, which, they should do both. Go into business, fine. Good. Don’t let those entitled bitches onstage act like unprofessionals just because someone told them they were good. Make them prove it. Do it, it needs to be done. Make those bitches jump. Show them how irrelevant art and feelings are to the balance sheet. Just stop pretending you’re a rockstar. It’s unsightly.
*Amy Winehouse, of course. I knew I was forgetting somebody. Illuminati-resistant, brilliant, true.... I can't think of anybody else.
