If The Show Is Sold-Out, Am I a Sellout?
Someone asked drummer, Louie Bellson, what the worst part of the music business was. His reply? The worst part of the music business was… “Waiting to play.” The operative qualifier was business. Nothing about the music presented any general playing difficulties, but business inserts a disruptive element into the process of musical creation. I can remember club owners complaining when we played tunes longer than 4 or 5 minutes, because “people can’t buy drinks while they’re dancing…playing ‘album cuts’ is bad for business!”
Business inserts disruptive elements into all human endeavors. But when you mix Business and Creativity, specifically creative efforts in any one of the performance humanities, you end up with a confusing set of mixed messages for the performing artist. (By ‘performance humanity’, I mean any creative endeavor that makes an artifact or leaves an aesthetic memory, e.g. music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, …ah cooking, etc.) Here’s the source of the confusion: I want a “sold out” banner across my concert flyer, but I don’t want to be called a “sell-out” because I pander to popular tastes. I want to “sell out” the show, but I don’t want anyone to think I “sold out” for the ticket sales.
I found myself on a break one night with a genius keyboard player. He asked me, “Do you remember the first time that you played music in public…for an audience?”
I told him of my first experience. He pointed out that for almost all players the first public performance happened for its own sake. Almost like in the solitude of your practice regimen you looked up and people were watching and listening. He had a way of eliciting those early memories when we talked and it took little prodding to emotionally associate myself with the memory…as a little boy…of that first performance; the adrenalin rush, the titillating anxiety of being ‘exposed’, the self-esteem jolt (up or down depending on the performance quality), and once the performance concluded, the immediate urge to do it again.
Then he asked: “Do you remember the first time you played in public…and got PAID for it?” I didn’t remember the name of the club, but I remembered the gig: $20 for four hours. I know that sounds like a pitiful amount, but it was 1979. Funny thing: I’d walked away from a free ride in the Ivy League to be a musician, but that $20 felt like a better deal than a free college education. Of course, that elation with the money missed the double-edged sword folded up in the bills. It took years of being beaten into cynical submission by the ‘music business’ before I tried to hang up my guitar for more supportive pursuits.
I knew it was time to leave when I’d lost all sense of ‘titillating anxiety’ about the solo I was playing. The adrenalin didn’t show up in my blood as a response to the audience listening. I remember the night. I was playing a five-night-a-week gig in the lounge of an Italian restaurant, and I laid down a lame solo on a lame pop tune and I just didn’t care anymore. I remember looking out at the audience and saying to myself: “Fuck you…I am sick of playing this shit for you!” A sax player friend told me that I needed to get out of the business. I did…but the music kept singing in my ear.
“I began thinking about poems I hadn’t yet written, but wanted to write. What if I never get to write these poems?” –Nicole Sealey
Those conversations about the first time and the first time I got paid came up 30 years after I quit the business. Go figure. I couldn’t really put the guitar down, but it had taken most of that 30 years to get my head …ah… straightened out about the whys and wherefores of my musical aspirations.
It took all that time to get back to the joy of playing — to understand root artistic motivations and to reconcile them with the world I live in.
Getting paid to play the first time had been thrilling, but in the end, getting paid became the function rather than the vehicle of my aspiration to play music. In the beginning, playing all day needed money from playing all night to continue in any serious fashion. But you can only ‘whore’ out your passion so many times before the gift of music is dissipated by commerce. After a time, I realized I didn’t need to practice very much in the day to be capable of playing the crap I was getting paid to play at night. The gift of any human ability to express can be dissipated or enhanced by commerce. The problem is not in the money, per se, but losing root connections to the original reason you play or write, or paint or sing, or dance in the moonlight, can be a big problem.
That ecstatic connection to the joy of a guitar string vibrating. The thrill of writing a coherent sentence of substance. The recognition of the right color to put on the canvas. Experiencing those moments are the root motivation for aesthetically pleasing intentional human behaviors. Money can turn playing (or writing or painting or whatever) into a NEED…not a WANT. A teacher taught me: “It’s not what you want that makes you fat and lazy and kills you in the end …it’s what you think you need.” Ask a junkie.
“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.” — Jane Hirshfield
In the end, I came to see that nothing, except restrictions of my own making, could really keep me from playing. My guitar worked whether there was money in the tip jar or not. I can type this sentence and post it to Medium; nothing can stop me from doing that. My views, my readers, my claps, my followers are all post pen-to-paper phenomena. If I keep those things after the function of my initial aspiration, my creativity expresses itself more authentically. I probably have a better chance of getting those post creative rewards by ignoring them before they arrive. I can have it be like the first time I played in public. I looked up from practicing and there were people there…listening. You never forget that rush if you take the time to remember it on a regular basis.
“Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance (or play guitar;) like nobody’s watching.” — Satchel PaigeCopyright Richard Gibbins, 2019. All Rights Reserved.
If The Show Is Sold-Out, Am I a Sellout? was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
