Tell me why I have to be a Powerslave

I have been accused in my Metal band of having an ego. Usually it involves bringing a song to the band fully fleshed out, with all the band's parts worked out in my home studio, with vocals and lyrics already written. Often when I have finsihed a song in that way I don't like it being touched. If you so much bend a note I didn't intend so me help me you may feel my wrath.

However that's not the only way the Metal band operates. Very often songs are partially finished and we all finish it out together. One such way this happens is the other guitarist and my singer work together in some demonic Jagger/Richards fashion, then I step in to clean up the arrangement and make sure the tension is in the right place and the hooks are solid.

Tonight we did things a little differently. Today I came over while the song that Jagger/Richards were working on was not only unformed, there was very little written and very little direction. The idea is that this song should be "dark moody and atmospheric." I listened for a while at what was already done. There was lots of work needed. There are only two riffs, no transition, no lyrics, and the Em-C-D progression is not really lending itself to EVIL. I made a few suggestions about trying for relative minors of the C and D in key places and was explained that it was too dissonant and not evil. OK. I backed off. I then heard a cool vocal melody rhythm that would have worked over the Em-C-D that would have had a cool syncopation with the riff. Our guitar player told me that I always try to write on the beat while our singer doesn't like this. Not only does our singer not enjoy singing off beat, he enjoys singing legatto, he wasn't even saying anything.

At this point I go to the couch, pop open a fresh beer, and start watching Law and Order SVU on mute. I listen, I contemplate, and after about 45 minutes of being in the same place I ask if I can step in again and show some ideas. The singer and I come up with a wonderful chorus with a cool rhythmic hook that modulates between Em and Bm. This is when I realize that although I was invited to come over, my artistic input was not actually welcomed. Reagardless of the quality of the music being made, our new chorus was definitely "darker" than the original. Even in pure music terms. Our guitar hero put his head in his hands and started complaining that he has a vision and that we are killing the vision. Although he has no lyrics for the song yet he has an idea of what the words will be about, and our chorus which is instrumental only at this point does not fit his lyrical themes. Every time I strum the guitar I'm told I'm killing our guitar hero's concentration and that this is going nowhere.

Is there a moral to the story besides me venting my frustration with the evening? Collaboration can take you down a mixed road. It may not be the most social that I often come in with complete songs with other people's parts already planned out. I could potentially be missing out on some amazing ideas that collaboration would have produced. However it is done, and finished for better or worse. A tangible product ready to be learned.

If you are asking for collaboration, you need to understand there is a risk that the group dynamic will drastically alter the piece from your original intention. Especially if there is very little to work with but an abstract idea of what the piece "should be." Don't take your writer's block out on your fellow musicians. Personally I prefer a good ego to the alternative any day.

The Miracle Mile

Ok, so I haven't posted in a while.

Between things going on in my life and the world, I was kind of taking a bit of a music breather.

I'm back though. I was listening to Silkworm's album Firewater which is a pretty intense listen. In fact, I definitely forgot how intense that album is. It swept me up and wouldn't let go. If you want to hear some great songs about lonliness, pain, being in an unpopular band, and always being drunk, this is the album for you.

The song that inspired a whole bunch of memories and the idea for this post was Miracle Mile. Its an acoustic song about how bad a tour can get. It is about the challenges that "four dumb hicks from hunger" as they refer to themselves face when you get in the van and tour. In the song their van gets broken into outside the Knitting Factory by a homeless junkie (I think they are referring to the original East Houston location in the song, not the fabulous new Leonard street one) and blows up in Texas after scumbag mechanics do a shitty repair job and take all of their money.

My first serious band owned a van. We had a Chevy Beauville. If you have never seen one of these vehicles it was HUGE. I think it is bigger than my apartment. It was, I believe, a 15 passenger van which we mostly gutted. We could only seat about 6 people in the van, and the rest was empty space for the gear. It was pretty out of control, but it was cheap and this band had a lot of gear. At our fullest we were a six piece band with two drummers and a horn player.
The van was a beast, and a money suck. We kept it parked in Astoria, one of our members moved it every other morning. 30 bucks of gas (in early 2000's gas prices!) wouldn't come close to filling up the tank, and if you kept it under a 1/4 tank it would stall in the middle of the street. Our spedometer didn't work and there was always something new going wrong with it.

We loved it though. It may have been a gas guzzling, take up both sides of the road screaming white death machine, but dammit it was ours. That is until we drove through Weedsport NY (somewhere around Rochester or Syracuse if I remember correctly) and our van died. It was dramatic. There was smoke. A state trooper drove us to the garage and asked us to thank him on our next record. He had a badass shotgun mounted to the front seat. I asked if he would cuff me and drag me out of the car. He wouldn't.

When we got to the mechanics garage in Weedsport, the van had already been towed and two of our members were already there. They told us the van was dead. Real dead. Not coming back except as a zombie van dead. The mechanics crossed themselves (literally, that was pretty funny) and gave our van last rites. We had the choice of either spending 2500 dollars on a brand new engine or leaving the van there. I don't think they even offered us money for the van, just the opportunity to not be charged for them to bring it to the junkyard.

We were in our early 20's and pretty sheltered. We were now broke in the middle of a hick town (albeit an extraordinarily friendly one) forced to make a really hard decision. We also had no idea how we were going to get home if we left our van, our only form of transportation here in Weedsport. We were pretty far from anywhere.

Our decision ended up being to junk the van. We left the poor girl there to be brought to a junkyard and turned into scrap metal. We ended up taking a very long and expensive cab to either the Syracuse or Rochester airport (I think Syracuse) and renting cars to drive back to NYC.

We never bought another vehicle. We figured things out for out of town shows, and we got very lucky when we booked a tour. Some friends of ours were showcasing all over England to get signed (the Strokes, Mercury Rev model of building hype in England and riding it back home to the USA. It worked for this band as well and they got a major label deal out of it) and so they let us borrow their van for a couple of weeks.

Now the Metal band I'm playing in wants to concentrate on outside of NYC shows, but we don't have transport, and the non-drivers outweigh the drivers 3-2. I also have some serious doubts about these guys being able to make it on any sort of long term outing. Most of the band is over 30, and our drummer is in his early 40's. The drummer and I are the only people with any road experience. I can't see our lead guitarist staying in someone's house and sleeping on the floor, or even worse, sleeping in the van to keep watch over the gear. It will be interesting if we decide to tour how it goes down. These guys are a bit past the "roughing it" portion of their lives and it is just not feasible to stay in hotels all the time, or avoid fast food. I just don't see us touring unless we get signed, and I don't see us getting signed unless we tour.

*sigh* that's what its all about I guess.

Thinking about drinking.

Cheers.

R.I.P. Piggy

Piggy is dead. I am sad. I will get very drunk tonight.

Sad Music Month

I was going to write a new post today, then found out Voivod guitarist Piggy has accelerated colon cancer and not very long to live.

Piggy is one of my favorite all time guitarists.

Right after hearing about Bob Moog last week I am very sad and don't want to think about music at the moment.

Fighting fish in the shark pond

I have much sympathy for local promoters. Moreso in New York. The cost of running a club and keeping it open night after night is very high. You have rent, you need a staff of bartenders, sound people, doormen, bookers, all supporting bands that more often than not will not draw. That's not fair. Supporting bands that no matter how good a relationship they have with bookers and promoters will instinctively and emphatically lie about their draw.

I personally always give a range, one that if you stopped to think about it is quite laughable. We have never brought over 100 people to a show. I'll always say our draw can be as high as 100 DEPENDING ON THE DAY OF WEEK AND TIME, but usually averages around 40-50, and can go as low as 20 or 30. Someone better at math than I can figure out the standard deviation on that and laugh.

One way that bookers compensate for this is to ask bands to "pre-sell tickets." This has been on my mind because we were about to do this to get on a bill to support a well known national touring act. When you see your friends are playing on a bill with someone "crazy" there is a decent chance they are participating in a buy.

It works like this. You negotiate the amount of tickets you need to pre-sell before you walk into the club the night of the show, and the ticket price. The price you are often told is negotiable, you can "sell the tickets at any price" but there is, as always, a catch. In order to play or get paid, you need to bring in a certain bottom line dollar value.

As I have mentioned I sympathize with the booker and understand the motivation behind forcing a band to actively work on getting a draw. But the system is not perfect. Let's look at some of the issues.

#1 - "You can't just eat one" Usually on bills where bands are pre-selling tickets you won't see 1, 2, or even 3 support acts. Often there can be as many as 6 or 7 local bands on the bill before the headliner goes on. One club notorious for this will only guarantee an actual set time based on tickets sold, and will make bands compete to have their set closer to the national act. This hurts everyone, mostly the concert goer. This practice came into being because there is enough trouble getting an audience into the venue as it is. With the pre-sell you are subjecting someone to 6 or 7 support acts before the headliner. Often this means with the 15 or 20 dollar ticket price you are not putting the national act on until upwards of 1 or 2 AM on a Tuesday night. There have been many shows I have wanted to go see that I have passed on because it was obvious that the main band would not be on until an ungodly hour. This doesn't help the club's reputation, the national band's reputation or consumer confidence. Lets move on.........

#2 - "THE NATIONAL ACT HATES YOU" You and your friends are the reason the headliner is going on at 2 in the morning, and everyone has left by the time they are going on. Don't even dream of using any of these shows as a networking opportunity. The other local bands feel in competition with you and the headliner resents you.

#3 - "What does this say about the headliner?" If you have 6 or 7 bands all bringing in anywhere from 30 to 40 people a piece, what is the responsiblity of the headlining act? You have produced most of the draw, probably made up of your personal friends, and not fans of the main band. The main band are the ones receiving the guarantee and the lion's share of the money. YOU are not even receiving a fair share of the money you have brought in. Most clubs give you anywhere from 30-50% of your share of the door. On non ticket-buy shows it is often customary to receive 70-80% of your share.

why the hell does anyone participate in this? Sometimes you have to in order to swim in the big pond. Often when you see a band on myspace that you have never heard of who live in Bumblefuck, Wisconsin (pop. 15,000, 7,500 of which play in a local nu-metal band) boasting the really impressive list of established artists they have supported, they participated in a ticket pre-sell to get those slots.

This is why one of the golden rules of rock is: NOONE CARES WHO YOU OPENED FOR.

More fun with bookers coming later.............

Piercing the Veil

One thing I should mention. Comments are disabled. I will also for the most part not be mentioning the actual names of my bands, related venues, etc.

People who know me will not have a very hard time figuring out who I am and I surely am not hiding behind anything. I just think it is best, especially since I want to be honest about venues, promoters, studios, and the many realities of being in local bands to not name names.

Part of that will be to not allow people to respond. I am probably going to set up a gmail account for readers of this blog to write me at. I don't want to be completely closed off, but for this to really serve its purpose I don't want who I am to be completely obvious.

Treehouse of Horrors

Halloween.

It is a no brainer for a metal band, especially one with costumes like mine to want to play shows on Halloween. However this is starting to create more stress than anything else.

So we've been offered a few shows so far. One is all the way on the Upper East Side where noone goes to shows, the other is above a strip club in the Financial District where noone goes to shows.

We are actually debating in the band, what is more rock and roll, the UES or 2 blocks below Ground Zero. We have also pro-actively approached a couple of the Metal friendly clubs in that nice downtown east side sweet spot to see if we can get in on some hot Halloween action.

So easy enough, right? We try to get the best show possible, with some less than ideal gigs as backup so that we know we have some sort of halloween gig as a backup.
If only things could be that simple. Our singer wants to try to play as many Halloween gigs as we can. He thinks we are too perfect for this time of year, almost being the Metal X-mas, that we should take any and all Halloween gigs. This however will probably hurt draw for all the shows. But does that matter? Financial district club will build statues of us in our honor if we draw 15 people. We don't know if we even NEED to draw the UES club. The worst that could happen there is we don't get paid.

The band is currently divided as to whether we continue trying to limit the time between gigs so as not to oversaturate ourselves or if the idea of oversaturation is even relevant at our stage in the game.

Do we take anything we get offered, or really try hard to only play shows that "count"?

Stated Purpose

I am an unsigned musician who lives and works in New York City. I have a corporate day job and two bands. One is a theatrical 80's Metal band while the other is Indie Rock. I love playing in both bands and wouldn't give up either.

I have found while playing in two bands that are in many ways very different, a lot of the issues, dramas and aspirations are the same. We are playing in the same field, although for slightly different teams.

I have found this experience pretty interesting and decided to document, mostly for myself and anyone who may stumble upon this, the experiences of the unsigned musician and the balance between trying to "make it" and to just survive in a very unforgiving city.