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| From | carl.peel@bmg.com |
| Subject | Definition of Success |
| Date | Mon, 14 Jul 2003 18:35:18 -0500 |
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I just turned 36 years old and am haunted by this question of what is
"success." I have never made any money at music. If I made a thousand
dollars, it cost me two thousand to make it. So to the members of my family,
I am a failure. My friend in Pennsylvania has never seen one of my records
on the shelf of his local record store. He has no idea of my "success." My
New York friends, who are way into music and find all the best stuff, have
never heard any of my recorded music, or read fawning reviews in the latest
and trendiest magazines with ads for hip hop footwear. To them I am not a
success. I resigned long ago that the idea of success would have to come
from within.
So am I a success?
No. I am a complete and utter failure.
This fact slapped me into reality while playing a show a year ago at a tiny
club called the Crooked Bar here in LA. It was the only place I could get a
gig, after being told I wasn't drawing enough at the other tiny rooms I was
playing. Even the booker at Crooked Bar, a room with a capacity of 60 people
in sardine conditions (where 15 would make the room feel full) does not want
"hobbyists" playing her club, she wants stars, or people obviously on their
way up. I'm on the way up, I told her. I've always been on the way up. So
she booked me. I told everyone I knew about the show. I put flyers in record
stores and in peoples hands at the same club. When the date came I played to
absolutely no one. Not one soul came to see me (or the amazing singer before
me). Actually, let me take that back. There was the bartender and the
soundman. This was not in some obscure town in Wyoming where I've never
played. This was in my hometown, where I have lived all my life.
I must suck.
While playing the first song, praying someone would show up, but not anyone
I'd want to see me playing to a pathetically empty room, I was freaked out
and nervous, my voice dry, my eyes surely a little glazed with disbelief and
sadness. By the middle of the next song, I relaxed, lost the fear that I
might actually cry and pretended I was in my living room just playing guitar
and singing my songs, but with a PA. It sounded great. I sang well. The
bartender assured me it was the room, that no one came to see anyone there.
But I had seen the room full when a not well known but not unknown TV
actress played there a week earlier. I think I gave everyone in the room a
flyer for my own upcoming show. Obviously I wasted the $20 I spent on
fliers.
I must be ugly as sin.
It wouldn't have been so bad if playing to an empty room was a fluke, but
sadly, it wasn't. I've never really been a big draw, except when I was
incredibly young, in my teens. I'd played in bands since I was 12. I was
playing in my own bands with my own songs when I was 14. I had to get a
fake ID just to do it. People came to shows then. There were lines around
the block at clubs, not just my shows, but in general. But as an adult, with
pop fading and metal reigning I didn't draw, but I would always get a few
people telling me after the shows that the songs were great. Managers wanted
to manage us. Labels "talked," and compared my bands to other bands, and,
based on whether those bands they could put us on tour with sold, they would
decide my fate about whether I got to put a record or not (this was well
before home studios). Generally the bands they compared us to did not sell
well.
This was the post-punk days, before alternative music was called such. Way
before mainstream music was called alternative. There was a cultural
aversion to chasing the money. We just played because we loved doing it.
Self promotion was so distasteful that I was self conscious even handing out
flyers to a show. I am amazed how the culture has changed, how sports and
hip hop and 7 figure salaries for new MBA graduates make chasing the money
expected, even respectable. It's a new culture where money is everything,
not being rich is a sign of stupidity and the top selling albums and the
biggest box office grosses are reported in the evening news as if they
affect the electorate's lives. And then there's people like me, too
embarrassed, or weak spined to chase the money, who are completely
bewildered by REM songs being used in commercials. Weren't they our role
models, our cultural touchstones who would NEVER sell out like that?
I must be stupid.
The years just rolled by. I fought off the inquiries from parents about when
I was going to get a real job and earn money. (Parents worry about your
ability to survive - it's been their whole purpose, teaching you how.) I
avoided taking jobs that wiped me out too much to want to drag an SVT bass
cabinet into a club at 1am on a Tuesday night. I kept going and going
because 1) I wrote songs and wanted to hear how they sound, in a room with a
band, and 2) I was always encouraged by the people telling me that these
were great songs and that they loved my voice. Even if it was a small amount
of people. They were strangers who were speaking genuinely and I believed
them. People couldn't believe I wasn't bigger than I was. But more to the
point: I couldn't. Certainly the audience would grow. People seek out great
music right?
I must have been the most naive idiot on the planet.
Actually, I don't think I was. "Selling out" was so culturally ingrained as
a negative, I never chased anything, not when I was young. Or I did, but it
was passively. I totally bought into the bullshit that if you just do your
thing, and do it well, good things, a fan base, a chance to put out your
records, etc. would come to you. It was part of the American dream. Work
hard and your riches will come. But you have to work hare in the right way.
As hard as I worked (or thought I worked), as savvy I was about how the
business was arranged. I didn't do things right. I shouldn't have been so
hesitant to chase the money. Because it does take money. It takes money to
get four guys from LA to Phoenix to Tucson to Las Cruces to Albuquerque,
etc., etc. on up to the tip of Maine and beyond. I should have been making
my own records and giving them, hundreds, thousands of them to radio, press,
anyone that would take one. I knew that was what I wanted to do when I was
twelve. But I didn't think I had the money to do it then. And no one was
giving me any recording or touring budgets. But I didn't work hard enough to
chase it.
Not only that but my naivety lasted so, so long. Just before the Crooked
Bar, I was doing a residency at the Kibitz Room. People I'd never seen would
come in. Not many. Maybe ten. A guy came in off the street, a hip young
looking guy, asking who I was when I sipped a glass of water between songs.
"Those are the best songs I've heard, maybe ever," he said. He was a little
over the top in his enthusiasm, but appeared genuine. I thanked him
embarrassedly. "Are you signed?" He said. "No." I said, almost proud that I
could still be "discovered" by a lover of great music. I gave him a flyer
for the next show. It was the kind of exchange that makes you not mind that
there are only 10 people in the room and that you just do this as something
to do the way most people watch "Friends" at night. These people show up,
say something nice. You think you're finally connecting with people. You
never hear from them again.
I must be one of those loser artist types.
While fringe music artists are revered on this and other lists, it's
different in the world we're faced with every day. The way most of society
thinks of a 35 year old man who is not well into a respectable career and
still drives an 18 year old car, is not as an artist but, frankly, as a
loser. Especially in my lovely hometown of L.A. I have these fantasies where
I quit my job, break up with my girlfriend, move out of our house and get on
the road, man. The road. Free wide open spaces. Chicks in hotel rooms.
People buying me drinks. Building a fan base town by town. You know, working
it, the way Pearl Jam and Aimee Mann, Moby and Kelley Clarkson did. No major
labels, no fawning press at their post-punk no-sell-out methods, no movie
soundtracks, no commercials no insta-star TV shows, just the hard work and
the road. Why I could lose $6,000 quicker than Michael Carpenter can. Do I
have $6,000 to lose? No. But I can work temp jobs when I get back home. Go
back to making' ten bucks an hour every once in a while. I can live in a
trailer in San Fernando. Maybe I could move back home.
I must be crazy.
Because I still want to finish recording the record I started. I still want
to gather my demos and send them to Jay Dravenstadt, one guy who wrote with
a very nice request to hear them because he'd heard something he liked
before and wanted to hear more (I apologize Jay, I know it's been FOREVER
since I promised I'd send them, but it's been hard to face them lately, but
I'm getting back into it). I want to do this. And I will. Even if only a few
people like it.
But man I hope someone likes it passionately. Because too many shows with no
one at them. And living with the knowledge that the world isn't waiting with
baited breath for my record. Knowing that at 36 and as far as music goes -
at least at the level where one can do a small tour and not lose money he
doesn't have, let alone taking time off from work that he can't afford -
he's over the hill. Even the indie folks are looking for the next new young
thing. I know. I was talking to a singer about joining his band as a bass
player. He's a singer songwriter I respect. But when I met his manager, he
took one look at me before I even played a note and said it wouldn't work
out. The band was a black jeans t shirts and skull caps. They had tatoos and
facial hair. Now sound-wise it was a fit, but I had more style than these
guys and clearly they were threatened. :>) It was clear I was just too old,
lacking piercings and tattoos and therefore too out of it.
I should have gotten my ass out on the road when I was twenty and worked it
town by town. It was possible then. The world was different. Music mattered.
It was not yet the commodity it is today. MTV was only beginning to ruin
radio by making it about looks and fashion (thought truth be told, I love
fashion). And I, being young, didn't have a clue as to what it took to
survive in the world. Money mattered not. Four dollars in your pocket for a
burrito somewhere was two dollars more than enough. Now it barely buys the
coffee I need just to wake up. It ain't going to keep a roof over my head.
It won't allow me to eat halfway healthy. It won't allow me to enjoy many
nights out. Certainly no one's going to want to date a 36 year old loser
with no home and an eighteen year old car and parents who don't respect him,
no health insurance, etc.,etc., etc., etc., but he writes good songs and has
a good voice.
So I'll keep my day job. I'll work at my other great artistic love where I'm
still considered young with potential. And I'll get a pang every time I hear
Pete Yorn, or Elliot Smith or the Doves on the Radio.
I might still try to put out a record in the fall, or early next year. I
have no support. No fan base. No prospects. What indie label is even going
to want to pick it up without the potential of me becoming a surprise star
they can sell to a larger label? I imagine the record will be ignored. But
I'll do it. I'll spend some money on it. I'll make it sound as good as I
can, and hopefully someone somewhere will appreciate it. Because I want to
do it. I wrote the songs. I want to hear it. And as a musician is how
everyone knew me and how I defined my very existence for over twenty years,
well past the age most people had grown up.
But I can't count on anyone liking it.
And the next time I play a show to an empty room, chances are I will cry.
Because just thinking about the possibility makes me sad. I think about my
whole history and relation to music, being obsessed, singing and playing
instruments for so long, being assured over and over of having talent
(which, as a human I can't help but doubt, then, at every turn, and now) and
then am faced with the empty room, all the people driving by, not stopping
in because they don't know my name, or don't see a young, beautiful and sexy
face, didn't hear my song all over the radio. I'll know they'd rather go
home instead to watch "American Idol," or "Friends." Maybe they've got their
own disappointments they push out of their mind with other activities. I
haven't been playing a lot of shows lately. I've been concentrating on other
things. This, of course, isn't helping my "career", but it's almost self
preservation. Because if I find myself in that position again, playing for
the bartender, if I'm faced that head on with my utter and total failure, no
sign that I even reached out to that one person who searches out great
music, it might just break my break my heart, and the rest of me, for good.
cp
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