Musician With A Job
Being a musician with a daygig is not always an easy thing to be. What's difficult is mainly the hours. You're basically keeping two schedules, which sometimes clash like hell. It's a juggling act, and I sometimes feel like the guy who used to be on HBO jugging an apple, an egg and a bowling ball(no kidding!)- only in my case I get the worst of all three objects I'm juggling. Yeah yeah, the bowling ball lands where it hurts the most...
Case in point: had a nice Thursday gig about a half-hour out of town. Got home about 10:30 in the pm. Wired from playing the gig, trying to wind down with a few beers. The phone's ringing and I'm trying to get my computer going--it's moving slower than smoke off a turd, which isn't helping. The computer finally downloads everything, and I've sold another 6 CDs on CD Baby! Elated over that, which I'm sure jacks up the WindDown-o-Meter. Still wide awake at 2am , 3am and 4am, not sure if I got any shut-eye at all, and was a complete vegetable the next morning. Had to call in to work. They were cool about it, but I hate to screw up like that.
Well, music just stirs you up. Or it should at any rate. Little wonder it takes more than 2 hours to wind down from a very pleasant gig in which much guitar was played by both guitarists. The 3-Legged Dog Cafe is the name of the establishment where we played, in beautiful Jacksonville IL. It was originally a restaurant(back in '94, called Merrigan's--I played solo guitar gigs there for a meal and gas money)and then a bank and now a restaurant again. I guess it'd be logical for the place to be a bank one more time in there, but we'll see on that one..
So it's taken a day, but I have my head back on straight as far as my lunar cycles. I remember playing Lake Tahoe, back in '85, where we had a 3-week engagement and seemed to go to work later every week. The third week we'd start our first set at 1:15am, wrapping things up about 4:45, after which time the bandleader and I would hit the bar for a few belts and head back to our respective rooms around 5:30. You'd wake up around 1-1:30 in the pm, and after a couple days it almost felt normal. Going back to regular am hours felt like we'd gone full cycle, like we'd orbited the Earth..
It is possible to be a musician with a daygig, though the energy factor rears its ugly head as one gets older and thus less able to handle late nights and early mornings. We need those gigs that are over with by 9 during the week and 12 on weekends. Oh yeah, and someone to carry our gear into the club.
Okay, just kidding about that last item- although I wouldn't turn it down. Next gig up is this coming Friday, from 5:30 to 7:30 in the pm. Plenty of time to unwind from this one, and hopefully it'll be such a good gig as to require it. See http://www.samcrain.com/ or http://www.myspace.com/samcrain for details.
Even though it screws up my hours on occasion, I must say it is nice to have something I feel passionately about to the point it keeps me up. And I feel fortunate in that regard. Makes it easier to have a dayjob, knowing that it's something I leave at the office. And while at the office I have no burning desire to Make Something of Myself, since I already have an area--music--where I'm unimportant.
In that sense, I guess my music and my daygig do feed one another. The daygig makes it so that I don't have to scruff for music gigs, and the music makes it so that I don't have to find meaning in my daygig. Most of the time I'm able to keep everything going, but once in awhile I drop that bowling ball someplace..
Case in point: had a nice Thursday gig about a half-hour out of town. Got home about 10:30 in the pm. Wired from playing the gig, trying to wind down with a few beers. The phone's ringing and I'm trying to get my computer going--it's moving slower than smoke off a turd, which isn't helping. The computer finally downloads everything, and I've sold another 6 CDs on CD Baby! Elated over that, which I'm sure jacks up the WindDown-o-Meter. Still wide awake at 2am , 3am and 4am, not sure if I got any shut-eye at all, and was a complete vegetable the next morning. Had to call in to work. They were cool about it, but I hate to screw up like that.
Well, music just stirs you up. Or it should at any rate. Little wonder it takes more than 2 hours to wind down from a very pleasant gig in which much guitar was played by both guitarists. The 3-Legged Dog Cafe is the name of the establishment where we played, in beautiful Jacksonville IL. It was originally a restaurant(back in '94, called Merrigan's--I played solo guitar gigs there for a meal and gas money)and then a bank and now a restaurant again. I guess it'd be logical for the place to be a bank one more time in there, but we'll see on that one..
So it's taken a day, but I have my head back on straight as far as my lunar cycles. I remember playing Lake Tahoe, back in '85, where we had a 3-week engagement and seemed to go to work later every week. The third week we'd start our first set at 1:15am, wrapping things up about 4:45, after which time the bandleader and I would hit the bar for a few belts and head back to our respective rooms around 5:30. You'd wake up around 1-1:30 in the pm, and after a couple days it almost felt normal. Going back to regular am hours felt like we'd gone full cycle, like we'd orbited the Earth..
It is possible to be a musician with a daygig, though the energy factor rears its ugly head as one gets older and thus less able to handle late nights and early mornings. We need those gigs that are over with by 9 during the week and 12 on weekends. Oh yeah, and someone to carry our gear into the club.
Okay, just kidding about that last item- although I wouldn't turn it down. Next gig up is this coming Friday, from 5:30 to 7:30 in the pm. Plenty of time to unwind from this one, and hopefully it'll be such a good gig as to require it. See http://www.samcrain.com/ or http://www.myspace.com/samcrain for details.
Even though it screws up my hours on occasion, I must say it is nice to have something I feel passionately about to the point it keeps me up. And I feel fortunate in that regard. Makes it easier to have a dayjob, knowing that it's something I leave at the office. And while at the office I have no burning desire to Make Something of Myself, since I already have an area--music--where I'm unimportant.
In that sense, I guess my music and my daygig do feed one another. The daygig makes it so that I don't have to scruff for music gigs, and the music makes it so that I don't have to find meaning in my daygig. Most of the time I'm able to keep everything going, but once in awhile I drop that bowling ball someplace..
posted by Roger U Roundly at 5:13 PM
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