I have to share some droll biographical details to make the bigger point here, so bear with me. I’ve always agreed with actor Dennis Hopper’s observation that “Just because it happened to you, doesn’t mean it’s interesting”.
If you want to skip a few thousand words of background, just zip down to the part that starts with:
“An Arts Career Is As Valid As An Engineering or Medical Career”
But if you want to hear how I personally screwed up for years, read on!
Maybe you have some interesting early memories of your own. The sparks that lit my fire for music were tiny ones, maybe even corny ones, but the fire still burns today. I must have been about three when I discovered my aunt and uncle had one of those old Thomas organs with the light-up keys and beatbox built in. I’d jam down two buttons on the beatbox at the same time to get new beats (only three-year-olds find hacks like this), and figure out my favorite pop songs using the weird sounds you could get by flipping odd combinations like the “celeste” and “balafon” tabs. My ma managed a music store, so I bought new LP’s and singles constantly, and had quite a music collection already in grade school. Lots of soundtracks, and things unlikely for my age, like Booker T and the MG’s, or Erik Satie.
I tried guitar lessons in fourth grade and gave up angrily because my ma signed me up for classical lessons, and that wide-ass neck was way too wide for my grubby little paws. I learned to read music a little on my own, and played in orchestra in middle school, but by about fourteen, was obsessed with synths and becoming a rock star. So my ma bought me an Arp Axxe, and I asked these dudes I knew if they wanted to start a band. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, but a good lesson.
Two of the guys had been taking lessons since they were like, three months old, so the guitarist would do things like randomly jump into Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and play it note-for-note. And I mean the CLAVINET part. The piano player would play these meandering jams that merged boogie runs with classical riffs that had been drilled into his head. Me? I was the only person that any of us knew who totally understood how to “program” a synth (they were still analog), but honestly couldn’t play keyboards for shit, and it was monophonic anyway, so only good for bass riffs or synth leads or whatever.
This first band lasted all of maybe three practices. We honestly just annoyed the shit out of each other, and none of us knew how to take charge. So the next few years I went into a sort of creative isolation. I still messed a bit with synths, but also started manipulating tape on reel-to-reel, and messing with a sort of faux multitracking by using the old “sound-on-sound” tricks where you put tape over the erase head and dub new tracks until the first one gets buried in noise. I learned to improv on guitar by jamming with ECM jazz records. At the time, I didn’t realize I was developing some weird modal “lead” tendencies.
I had this weird mystical belief that some magical mentor figure would enter my life, and start making things happen. Weirdly enough, one did.
This older fellow was always sitting at a cafe my girlfriend and I went to. It seems relevant to note that my girlfriend looked like the imaginary sister of Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, and Nastassja Kinski in “Cat People”, and I looked like if Nick Rhodes and David Bowie had a child together.
One day, the place was packed, and while we and a friend of ours were waiting for a table, the older guy gestured for us to join him at the four-top he had all to himself, so we did. We were famished. Out of the blue, he asked us what we’d do if we had a million dollars. After my girlfriend and our friend gave nice answers about who they’d help with the money, I arrogantly said “I’d pay for the things I need to become an internationally successful pop star”.
This piqued the fellow’s interest, and strangely, led to him buying us a few thousand dollars’ gear and securing a rehearsal space within just a few weeks. This was the beginning of a lifelong lesson for me. One that many figure out much faster, but which some never do, which is that:
Art is not intrinsically poisoned by commerce, but it CAN be.
I thought I was all set, because I had this guy who paid for gear, and said he was our manager. I assembled a little band (my girlfriend was in it), we had a regular rehearsal schedule, plans for finishing demos and contacting labels — all the basic things you’re allegedly supposed to do to get a label deal and get famous.
In reality though, I was making big mistakes. One was not realizing the guy really had no idea what he was doing as a manager/agent figure. He’d kind of micro-manage songwriting directions, which probably stifled our best creativity without anyone realizing it. He didn’t really have many industry contacts, and wasn’t a hustling promoter type by a long stretch. I have to own my contribution to the ultimate failure of this venture two years later. Mostly because as the central force in the thing, when I abruptly quit, the whole concept dissolved. There were many other problems. We only had a few good songs. We were weak players. We were good looking and arrogant, with little to prop that up. And I was being a typical arrogant dipshit, taking my toys and going home, instead of finding solutions.
But even if we had succeeded, we were absolute idiots about the economics, so things would’ve been a travesty anyway. We were ARTISTS goddammit, our lowly manager should deal with that shit and JUST GIVE US OUR MILLIONS, right? This will be a recurring theme.
Fast forward another year. I have an agent/manager. He thinks I’m a genius. He starts hooking things up. As a result, we met with A&R guys at Island and Geffen and talked to Rough Trade. Around the same time, a guy I knew casually from Detroit got an offer from Warner for his speed metal band. He signed. My management talked me out of signing the offers I was getting. A couple years later, the guy from Detroit was a million dollars in debt and couldn’t release anything, because in spite of Warner’s big spend, the response was tepid on that first release. I felt like I was really smart, and had dodged a bullet.
But had I?
With hindsight, I’m not so sure. In the next few years, I had some moderate success selling a little music online. This was waaaaaaay before today’s platforms, and a lot of it revolved around a site called mp3.com. It was nice to get some attention, and a little revenue. Then, Vivendi/Universal bought the site, it started turning to shite, and I said to myself “Maybe I need to grow up and accept that I have failed at this whole music thing”.
This was the next big mistake. I gave away or sold all my gear, and basically flipped a switch saying “I no longer create music I am now a web and digital media expert”. The latter was basically true, I was getting a reasonably good jump on web technologies without actually being a hardcore programmer / computer sciences guy. It was good money as a freelancer, then I scaled it up a bit to the level where I hired subcontractors. But I never took it to the next level of being a solid, self-sufficient company that didn’t require my presence. Then I very, very slowly started losing any passion for it. Which led to a general malaise, and a more profound manifestation of my existing drinking/addiction issues.
This little tech career took a sharp nosedive briefly. Then I got sober, and rebooted it with some reasonable success. I thought I was doing the right thing with my life, but also, waaaaay in the back of my mind, always felt like a bit of a fraud, or an actor playing a role. Which is something you do when you’re selling a service or an idea. You have to have some acting skills and SELL IT.
I’d been doing this digital media gig for some time, and for fun, when not doing client work, I did offbeat content sites like DissociatedPress.com, and Innoculous.com. These projects let me have fun with writing and parody image creation, and I’d make a little money from Amazon referrals and whatnot.
Then something blew my world to pieces.
A friend called and said “Hey you know that workstation keyboard you gave me a while back? I’m moving, and don’t really have a place to set up music stuff, you want it back?” Without thinking much about it I said “Sure”, and he dropped it off the next day. I had it for a couple weeks, and it was fun to mess with it again, but in my head, I was all like “Ah yes, the memories of yesteryear, but alas I am a grownup now”. I’d had the thing for a few weeks and would randomly plink around on it, but with no big intentions.
Then one Saturday evening, I was dorking around like I had been, playing nothing with any emotional content or great intentions, when my eyes started tearing up. Then I started actually crying but tried to keep playing. I really didn’t understand what was going on. The next thing I knew I was sobbing so hard I literally fell on the floor, and ended up doing those sobbing breaths that only toddlers and kindergartners fall prey to, where they can barely talk because of the interrupting gasps.
When my little crying jag subsided, I stood up, pulled myself together a little, and literally said exactly these words, in a dry observational tone:
“Well THAT must mean something”.
And mean something it did. In fact, a couple HUNDRED somethings. I’ve shared the full story elsewhere, so will cut to the quick. In the next couple years, I wrote over three hundred songs. They literally exploded out of me. I often couldn’t get a demo finished before more songs piled up. I also started going through a lot of uncomfortable personality struggles. Very few of us, whatever we’re doing, are living our authentic selves. Our culture makes that challenging. When we “grow up”, many of us are murdering the best part of us in order to empower the us that our parents tell us to be. There’s a full spectrum of how this all manifests, and thousands of books devoted to the topic of “finding your path” or “how to be successful”.
For better or worse, I didn’t murder my creative self until my late thirties, I just sort of kept him doped up with drugs and self-loathing, then got sober and kept him subdued with some imagined pragmatism. It was kind of a miracle I was able to revive him ten years later, and maybe even more of a miracle that he seemed to have been stockpiling material in the downtime.
So this was all leading up to some simple concepts I feel compelled to share, in the hope someone else may benefit. Some of these things can seem a little hackneyed or cliched, especially in the Post Life Coach Era™ we’re living in, so I hope that sharing some of my miserable background will let you know I’m not just some feeble douchey influencer type.
Although not specifically addressed in my anecdotes above, this first one is maybe the most important.
1) An Arts Career Is As Valid As An Engineering or Medical Career
This is where all the misinformation and utter bullshit begins. Quite often, the parent who asserts that an engineering career is important, while a music career a tragic mistake, has pursued neither, and is just imparting what they believe is common wisdom. It is in fact about as far from wisdom as one can get. If you WANTED to be an engineer, and everyone told you it was the worst choice possible, and that you were doomed to fail, how would most youngsters respond? They’d either pursue it with incredible defiance, and for that reason succeed, or they’d avoid it like the plague, or pursue it pre-loaded with so much self-doubt that the career would be doomed to failure, or at best, eternal dissatisfaction. Which is exactly what happens with music careers! A bold few push through and succeed, tons of folks look back at fifty with regret for the band that wasn’t and their lost youth, and a significant number toil away in the belief that whatever meager income they derive from it through a miserable grind of gigging/teaching/etc. is the best one can do.
Do you ever look into the family backgrounds of commercially successful artists? If you do, you’ll find that while there are indeed a few driven mavericks who overcome cultural and financial adversity and break through (these are often legendary artists) the vast majority either enjoy a bit of “celebrity nepotism”, or at least a supportive family. From Billy Joel, to multiplatinum songwriter Sam Hollander, to Billie Eilish, you’ll find that while there may have been pragmatic admonishments from family based on actual knowledge of the music industry, there was nothing but support for these kids’ careers from their families.
Unlike Tony Sullivant. Remember when Sullivant broke onto the scene? Of course not. Tony’s folks wouldn’t pay for school unless he studied engineering. Because of his negative attitude, he had bad math grades, and got into second-rate school for engineering. He now works in a window-less office for a small company in southern Indiana that stress-tests the little plastic seals for faucets. At fifty, he was making enough to start collecting vintage guitars. He has some cool old Martins and whatnot, but can’t play for shit.
2) Money Is Not Dirty & Your Creations Have Value
Throughout my life I’ve heard artists – especially music artists – express a number of things as if they were universal and unchallengeable truths. Let’s list a few here:
a) The assumption that somehow money is intrinsically some evil thing that will poison everything it touches.
b) The self-belief that “I’m an artist, I don’t understand all this money and marketing stuff”.
c) A general notion that to get compensated well for your work is to “sell out”
d) A belief that you have to “pay dues”, i.e.: get underpaid for hard work before you can be a legit artist and get paid well for your creations.
I’d like to rapidly dismantle these one-by-one, and point up the absurdity of most of the thinking:
a) This is a deeply-ingrained and complex cultural belief, but utter poppycock. Money is just a unit of measure, and what it’s measuring is wealth. The emotional relationship we build with all of this is a choice. It’s a sign of your own lack of practical spiritual growth if you think having tons of money will make you happy, or, conversely, destroy your soul. Having NO money can make life very stressful and difficult, but once your basic needs are covered, your relationship with money says more about you than about the money itself. Don’t let this belief keep you broke in the belief that having lots of money makes you evil. And don’t let it poison your art by believing that selling it makes it less meaningful.
b) This one cracks me up. There’s a fairly safe stereotype of a male music artist, especially if they’re a songwriter/performer. To end up on this path, you have to defy a lot of convention, and you have to be a fairly self-directed person who learns on their own a lot, and forms strong opinions as a result. So these fellows often speak with a broad knowledge on a variety of topics, with a great deal of confidence. They’ll expound about politics, music, culture, economics, environmentalism, and other topics with great certainty in their views. Then, try to talk to them about how they’ll get their music out and make money, and they roll up like a stinkbug, unable to address the simplest aspects of contracts, royalties, or marketing. It’s bizarre and painful to watch this self-defeating behavior over and over in life.
c) I’m not gonna spend much time on this. One of the best examples of how full of shite this concept is would be the history of Hip Hop and black music in the 90’s. Some of the most creative and influential music in decades came about in this era, and much of it was made by artists who were often putting their interest in revenue up front, maybe even IN THE SONG. Wanting to make a lot of money certainly didn’t slow down the outpouring of music that remains influential today. And in a rather different line of thinking, are you going to tell me that a band like ColdPlay or artists like Taylor Swift aren’t massively gifted and able to connect with people? Writing a song people can connect with, and being generally likeable are not what I’d call negative traits. If you resent or judge artists like these in a strongly negative light, try reading some Deepok Chopra and some self-examination. If you spend a lot of energy negatively judging artists you’ll never meet and that no-one is forcing you to listen to, the problem is almost certainly you.
d) There is one culture where this seems to make some sense, and maybe this bleeds into other music-related careers. There has always been an almost guild-like culture surrounding jazz musicians and professional session players in entertainment hotspots like LA, Nashville, Chicago, or New York. Maybe it’s a good thing, busting peoples’ chops all the time to force them to work harder at playing better. But elsewhere? Fuck me, if you spontaneously get some great song idea and get it recorded quickly and it’s hit material, GOD BLESS YOU. And if you can do that multiple times, GOD BLESS YOU EVEN MORE. What the fuck is wrong with springing up out of nowhere with some magic that lends meaning to people’s lives? In the end, isn’t that one of the core reasons we’re doing music? To bring some magic to people’s lives with the magic the universe put into ours as artists?
Fuck paying dues. I want my cake NOW
3) You Have To Know When To Quit
Do you know what all failed artists (or all failed PEOPLE, for that matter) have in common? They quit. This seems like such a statement of the obvious when you say it this simply. But really, walk it through. Stephen King was rejected by 29 publishers for his first manuscript, the book “Carrie”. What if he’d stopped mailing out copies with the 25th publisher? Know why WD-40 is called WD-40? It’s “Water Displacement, 40th formula”. Next time your unjamming whatever you’re unjamming with WD-40, ponder that if the lab guy had given up at the 39th attempt, well, you’d be in a jam.
I’m just gonna let this whole thing go “thunk” here like some shitty mic drop. Because this, more than anything, is the point at which one fails.
It’s the point at which you give up.
So don’t.
