Risky Business

He is getting back next Tuesday. I'm doing my best not to get too terribly excited but it's hard. Unfortunately that is only two days before Thanksgiving so any celebrating will have to be short lived I'm afraid. Then we will both get caught up in our separate families and the obligations that go with them. Even after that I won't be able to see much of him because December 2nd is his audition for the Berkley School of Music. His is applying for their new strings program and will be entirely focused on preparing for the very difficult audition.

I am so nervous for him. It is extremely hard trying to support someone who is doing something that you don't really understand. I want to tell him that he shouldn't worry and that he is most certainly good enough to be excepted but I don't really know that. I know that everyone he meets tells him how amazing he is and I just have to believe them. What happens if he doesn't get in? What should I say? I hate feeling so clueless about something that is so important to him.

He decided to take this step about five months ago. It's funny, I am just finishing school and now he wants to start. Everyone (parents, friends, teachers) gave him hell when he decided not to go to college after high school but he just wanted to play music. Now, after five years of trying to do it himself, he has decided that he has gotten as far a he is able without having a teacher. He needs connections and he needs formal training. He needs this school. There is a lot hanging on this one afternoon, his future and mine. If he gets in then we are both going to pull up roots and move to Boston. I am going to try and get a librarian position and make enough to afford our rent. It will be scary and exciting and wonderful. If he doesn't then we are both going to be adrift in this sea of unemployment. He says if Berkley doesn't come through he wont leave the south. That means I have to try and find a job and a life after college in some small southern town where I will have to get a job substitute teaching and spend my nights listening to his frustration and resentment boil under his skin.
A coworker told me just last night not to " put all my eggs in one basket" but that is what we have done. Life is so damn scary.

Tensions Building

The phone calls that were only coming a couple of times a week are now up to a couple of times a day. This can mean only one thing... he is getting sick of being on the road. I really feel bad for him. It must be tough keeping up the enthusiasim and dedication when you just desperately want to be back home. He missed my sister's wedding and Halloween. Now an old boy friend is coming in to town and having dinner with me and a bunch of my friends and he won't be here to sit and glare at him across the table. None of this can be easy for him but he really doesn't have a choice.
I always thought that women who tie themselves to doctors or cops must be crazy because who in their right minds would want to come second to a profession their whole lives. Now, here I am sitting on my hands and waiting out a tour that seems to be dragging on forever. There is something about passion and dedication that is pretty irresistable. I get it now.
The tour has been going really well. They have made a good bit of money and their cd (at cdbaby) is selling, which is amazing. Now that the tour is half over he is trying to enjoy it but everything sort of falls apart towards the end. The lead singer is getting irritable, the fiddle player doesn't want to practice and my man is just tired of being around strangers all the time. The tour as taken his band mates through towns where their girlfriends, aunts, cousins and friends live. My poor guy has yet to see a familiar face. Its the waiting that kills.

Making Records

Right now the musician is locked up in a cabin in Virginia recording an album with his band, Here's To The Long Haul. He spends hours tucked away working on these recordings himself because they are are staying in a place with Pro-Tools. I find it amazing that technology has become so user friendly that even an album can be created by the band with no outside funding or help whatsoever. In fact they are even able to sell their music online by mailing several copies of their self-made albums to these people in charge of this website (I can't remember the name) that distributes their music for almost no cost.
For my fella and his band mates this is great but it also contributes to one of the biggest problems for musicians trying to make a name for themselves. With everyone capable of producing their own music and distributing it the really talented musicians, the ones that would have been picked out of a crowd by labels back in the good 0l' days, can barely be heard. When some joker with an acoustic guitar and some sappy love songs can make a record in his basement and distribute it without having to prove to anyone that he is worth listening to discovering new talent is next to impossible.
Now it is not so much those on high that decide who will and who wont be a hit as much as the screaming masses. Does this mean it is all reduced to luck or simply appealing to pre-pubescent girls? Think about the last time you heard a really good musician on the radio. Can you remember that far back? Most avid music listeners will tell you that anything worth listening to is almost impossible to find. It is out there. I guess it now has to be about patience and perserverance. These are not two things most twenty-two year olds are gratiously endowed with but he keeps trying and eventually it will all pay off.

The Importance of the Audience

Today in my British Lit class we discussed the move from the romantic period to Modernism. My professor mentioned that one of the biggest changes was a shift from focusing on the audience and finding validation for the work in their response and not giving a shit who read their work and finding validation in their writing as a piece of art. They believed it was important because it expressed something and because it was good. It didn't matter what anyone else thought.

The other day in a different class we read an article about a world famous violinist, Joshua Bell, who spent a day playing in a metro station. It brought up the same question, if no one appreciates it is it still art?

When I was younger and imagined what it would be like to date a musician I thought it would be something like being famous. Because of course all musicians play to stadiums full of people and sell t-shirts and write love songs that are secretly (or not so secretly) about you. Instead I am dating a bluegrass musician. Even if he is as successful as he could possibly be almost no one will have heard of him. He will probably never be played on the radio and there will most likely be no t-shirts and certainly no love songs. Bluegrass is sort of music for musicians in most cases these days. In that respect it is appreciated by someone but not necessarily by a traditional audience. In fact most people (including me sometimes) would find what my boyfriend does pretty boring.

So say he never gets hugely famous and not only are there no crowds but the "good" musicians never hear of him either. Will what he does still have value? They say if you are an artist you create because you can't not create. He would say that what you do has value if it's good but who defines "good". Is it the other musicians, is it the producers, or is it the audience that makes it a viable career?

On The Road Again

He left today. He will begin his fall tour in a week but left early to lay down some bass tracks on a friend's album in Asheville, NC. After Asheville he will drive to Tennessee where the rest of the band plans to meet him so they can all cram into one vehicle and begin their tour of colleges and bars along the east coast. He will be gone until the beginning of December and I miss him already, but this is the life. If you want to be a musician it does you no good to stay at home. 

  The band he is touring with is an environmentally conscious old time/bluegrass group that mostly plays functions protesting mountain top removal. For those of you who don't know, mountain top removal is basically a way of mining without a miners or tunnels and completely destroying the mountain in the process. First the land is clear cut, then explosives are used to turn what was a mountain into an enormous pile of loose dirt. Afterward giant machines come in and scoop away the soil and dig up the rock leaving the now exposed coal ready for harvest. Needless to say, there are a lot of people protesting this process and as a result the band has a lot of places to play. 

He toured with this same band last year and got the opportunity to protest inside some Bank of America buildings as well as spending some time in the swamps of florida attending workshops on environmental protest. It was a really great experience for him and  something that I am incredibly jealous of. He found it less than perfect because there really isn't a great deal of focus on music. They play all the time but for these people it is about the message. For him it is ALL about the music. He wants to make records and play shows with packed houses. It is a great experience traveling with these people but I am pretty sure this will be his last tour with them. 

Last year I received several late night phone calls from him telling me that he just felt out of place. He feels like a fraud when he is with them because of his lack of dedication. I think he is just being too hard on himself. After all, not everyone is meant to save the world with handcuffs and megaphones. Some do it with banjos and there is no shame in that. 

Big Decisions

About a month ago a band, who will remain nameless, put out feelers for a multi-instrumentalists. My boyfriend was contacted and invited to meet one of the band members for a casual audition in Atlanta. All went well and he was later invited to join the band at a music festival where they would be playing. It was incredibly exciting considering the success of this band and there was already talk of him joining them on tour and making some real money. About a week after he returned from playing with them at the festival he got a phone call from the lead vocalist informing him that they wanted to make him a permant fixture in the band. There was a catch though, if he was to join the band he would have to dedicate himself solely to this one project. There could be no moonlighting of any kind. It seemed a bit harsh to me, especially considering that they had yet to give him any sort of guaruntee concerning money.
Now here is the kicker...the band isn't very good. They get plenty of gigs but it is almost solely on account of the lead vocalist's connections. This fall he was already planning on touring with an environmental folk group. He loves to play with them but they don't really make any money. Now he has to choose between playing with a group that has talent and who he enjoys being with or a group that could possible further his career but that would be unrewarding in any other way. As an artist it seems that he should really stay with the group with talent but in today's world, where the word industry is always tacked on to the word music, is he really an artist? Also, to what extent can anyone stick with their principles while trying to succeed in their field?
I don't know the answer's to these questions but they seem to follow us around. In the end he decided to join the talentless band but was then saved from this decision by being replaced by someone who lived closer to the band's home base. Part of me wanted to criticize him but then he did what most of us do. He decided to save principles for easier times.

The Lies They Tell

Constant travel, free room and board, the girls, the lights, the drugs. "Oh, to be a musician!" Right? What people forget to mention when they tell a young boy that he has talent is that the road to stardom is absolutely filled with potholes that you may never pull your way back out of. You may get a free meal at the show but then you spend the next twelve days eating beans and rice breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And before you arrive anywhere in a limo you have to weld the front end of your car back together after your lead vocalist side-swipes it with the van. I'm not making this up, he even spray painted the brackets so they would match the car (very classy). I know all of this from first hand experience because I had the bad luck to fall in love with a young musician.
He plays the guitar, banjo, slide guitar, bass and pretty much anything else with strings as long as you give him a minute to figure out how to hold it. When I first met him he had spiked black hair, skin tight pants and liked to sport a dog collar. He played lead guitar in a punk rock band shouting out lyrics about the government and equal rights. He was pissed off (it's hard being a middle class white kid in the south). These days he has traded in the dog collar for flannel and spends his life in worship of Bela Fleck. A lot has changed except for one thing, it's still all about the music.
His tunnel vision and artistic longing seem terribly romantic but in reality his life is about as romantic as a trip to Walmart. I recently checked out the blog adamthedrummer.blogspot.com. He talks about stealing WiFi from Krystal and crossing his fingers over a job at UPS while anticipating an audition at the Atlanta Instititute of Music. As I said it is not a glamourous life and me and my guy have also spent our fair share of time sitting in fast food parking lots checking our email, hoping and praying for some good news.