My First Paid Gig

I spent last weekend in Allentown, PA with an astounding number of my wife's relatives. It was her grandmother's ninetieth birthday, and all seven of her kids, and forty-odd grand- and great-grandkids, plus spouses, step-children, etc. got together in one place to mark the occasion. There were like sixty of us staying at the Holiday Inn Express in town. I got to flex a decade's worth of mid-budget chain hotel survival tips: refill your water at the cooler in the fitness center! Put the little omelet thingy from the breakfast bar between two pieces of toast for a quick and easy breakfast sandwich!

That's right- ten years dogging it in a van, and I learned exactly two things.

I think the had the van days on my mind because, at the informal welcome gathering on Friday (a mere sixty people in attendance!), some third cousin's husband or something (who was a dead ringer for Six Feet Under-era Peter Krause) heard I was in a band and wanted to pick my brain about the whole deal.

The impromptu interview at a family function is an occupational hazard. As a learned reflex, I can tend to shrink away from these types of conversations, particularly if I get the sense that the other person just wants lurid details about four-day tantric ketamine orgies or whatever people with day jobs think being on tour is like. There's an episode of The Sopranos where Tony's neighbor, who's a dentist or an orthodontist or something, invites him to go golfing. Tony is eager to ingratiate himself with a few representatives of Polite Society, but then the neighbor and his corncob friends spend the all eighteen holes asking Tony stupid questions like does he know John Gotti. "Used, you know, for somebody else's amusement, like a fucking dancing bear," Tony tells his therapist.

Third Cousin By Marriage Peter Krause was asking me the rote interview questions: how did you get started? What's your favorite place to play? Worst experience you've had out on the road? But it was all innocuous and felt very much in earnest. There are people out there who just want to gawk, but there are also people who are genuinely curious about a sector of the human experience that, to them, is largely alien and inaccessible. This was definitely the latter. It's a big world out there. People want to know stuff.

At one point, he asked me how long I've been getting paid to play music. I started to give him something boring about how I used to deliver sandwiches for a neighborhood deli in the early days, and when I quit that job that was when I knew blah blah blah. But then I remembered a better answer.

. . .

I learned a lot in school band. I had the same teacher throughout all middle and high school, a guy named Bill Brown. Mr. Brown was the kind of player George and I refer to as a "cat," meaning a true-blue working musician. One of the guys in the trenches. The offensive linemen of the music world. Playing nightclubs and picking up studio work and teaching and hustling. Nothing overly glamorous. Any town with any kind of music scene has at least a hundred cats who could blow you out of the water. You will learn few of their names.

It's hard to overstate how much of an impact Mr. Brown had on me as a student, a musician, and a person. He had the accumulated idiosyncratic wisdom of a lifetime of gigging, and a ton of "Brown-isms" into which he packaged his knowledge: "You gotta know how to listen. I mean really listen." "Integrity is being your word." "Get your ten minutes in." (Meaning: practice every day, even if it's just for a little bit.) "Make your mistakes with confidence." "Play it like you're fat and fifty."

And my personal favorite: "If you mess up, guess what? It's not the end of the world. The sun'll come up tomorrow, birds'll still be singing. It's not the end of the world." That's the one that really sets you free.

Sometimes, we would come in for rehearsal, and we'd take our instruments out of their cases, and put them together, and sit down in our seats, and open our sheet music, and play the first five notes of a song, and Mr. Brown would stop us and start talking about the things we needed to be doing better as a band. Sometimes, he would just talk in circles until class was over and we wouldn't even get to play anything.

I imagine it must have been a frustrating job. At the bigger public schools throughout the state, performing arts classes were all electives that you had to audition for. My older brother went to a high school like that. I remember at his graduation, when they called out every student's name to come up and get their diplomas, they had two people reading off names in tandem so they could get through it faster. It still took over an hour.

Mr. Brown taught at a small school. All students were required to participate in one of three musical ensembles: jazz band, choir, or strings. For some of the kids, this was just another class they had to take in order to graduate. They would show up for jazz band with all the enthusiasm of Marshawn Lynch at a press conference. The big schools with the auditions could always field jazz orchestras that were just the right size for the music and full of talented students who really wanted to be there. Mr Brown got what he got and had to make lemonade.

I don't think it was too hard for Mr. Brown to tell which kids were really into it. He convinced a few of us to form a jazz combo- a smaller ensemble focused more on improvisation, learning and playing tunes the way cats do. In high school, we would get together and practice once a week an hour before the start of the school day. I remember being in my car before the sun came up in the winter, rubbing my hands together for warmth at stoplights on the drive over.

One time, the jazz combo played at the Greenwood Cultural Center with local legend Earl Clark- a cat among cats. I don't remember the exact year or occasion. The Monday after that, Mr. Brown asked the combo to hang back after jazz band rehearsal let out. He brought us into his office and explained that Greenwood had paid a bit of money for the gig. Not a lot, like $75-100. He said, "I'm not supposed to do this, so don't go running your mouths. But I wanted you guys to see what it feels like to get paid to play music." Divvied up, I think it was twelve dollars apiece. It felt like a sack of doubloons in my pocket.

I think most teachers see themselves as preparing students for The Future in a broad sense, but I don't think that my French teacher, for example, expected us all to become interpreters and diplomats. I'm trying to remember which math teacher I had- maybe Mr. Spencer, in eighth grade?- who used to lampshade the whole "when am I ever going to use this in the real world?" question snotty teens love to ask during pre-algebra lectures:

"Okay, so, someday, you might find yourself lost in the woods, with nothing but a measuring tape and a protractor, and you're trying to figure out how far away that river is off in the distance. So you climb a tree to get a better view, and that's where our friend Pythagoras comes in handy..."

Mr. Brown, on the other hand. Well. One time my friend Michael (not Girardot), who played bass, said he was late for rehearsal because he had been working on a history paper or something like that, and Mr. Brown said: "History?" Mr. Brown was taken aback. "When you're up on stage in the club and there's smoke blowing and all those fat ladies up front, you're gonna forget all about history." Come to think of it, Mr. Brown's vision of our futures invariably revolved around our careers in music. He always maintained pretense that we were all going to turn pro. I wasn't the only one in that jazz band who did: there was Neal, Barron, Andy, probably a few more.

He would tell us to come back and visit him after we made it big. "Come bring me a CD." (remember: early 2000s) One time I was hanging around when an older kid, maybe college-aged, dropped in. He had a CD with him. Mr Brown popped it in the stereo in his office and listened intently. Really listening- like he always talked about. I think that was the happiest I ever saw him.

I never got the chance. A year or two after I graduated high school, Mr. Brown was let go, and he moved somewhere out of state soon after that. He died in 2008. I found out when I was on spring break and got really quiet for the rest of the week. That wasn't a great year.

Anyway, I told Peter Krause a very short version of the above- basically just the one paragraph about the twelve dollars- and he said "cool" and moved on to another question.

. . .

My wife and I were hanging at a Mexican restaurant on St. Patrick's Day (pro move, honestly- can't wait to see what the local Irish pub is like on Cinco de Mayo) and she was looking at something on her phone that caught my eye. It was the beginning of Lyft's weepy spam email headed "We're Leaving Minneapolis." As anyone who read my last post might be able to guess, this kind of late Silicon Valley-era faceplant story is catnip to me. I was already aware that Lyft and Uber were pulling out of Minneapolis after the city council ruled that they have to pay their drivers at rates equivalent to the city's minimum wage. (Imagine! An Orwellian nightmare in which "minimum" actually means "you are not allowed to go beneath this number!") But I didn't realize just how shamelessly chickenshit they're being about it:

Uber also laid it on thick: "We are disappointed the Council chose to ignore the data and kick Uber out of the Twin Cities, putting 10,000 people out of work and leaving many stranded." I'm curious what "data" they're referring to. Is it the reports that 2023 was a record-shattering year in which Uber turned its first-ever profit? Or perhaps the obscene amount of money they are injecting into a political action committee in the state where they're headquartered?

If you can't afford to pay the labor force at the heart of your business model enough to make ends meet, then maybe- just maybe- you're running a shit business? The "modern" taxi industry as we recognize it is older than any living human today. For nearly 130 years, cab companies have been able to drive customers around metropolitan areas, charge a (don't say "fair fare" don't say "fair fare" don't say "fair fare") reasonable price, and pay their drivers a living wage. The big-brained mind-geniuses of Silicon Valley found a way to make it untenable after fifteen short years. Really taking the "move fast and break things" ethos to heart.

Get it? Because they're cars? And cars go fast.

I should own up to the fact that back when these apps were a novelty I was more than eager to tapdance on the grave of our local taxi monopoly. I absolutely default to rideshares whenever it's expedient. Before you pop out of a well to remind me that I participate in society, try calling United Cab on the phone and getting them to send a car to your location. It's impossible. Speaking of impossible, it turns out that living in the Global North in the twenty-first century involves no small amount of ethical compromise! You are surrounded by systems and services that cause harm, and just because you interact with them as a matter of course doesn't mean you can't also recognize that they are in desperate need of reform!

. . .

There's a State Farm commercial where Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounces "neighbor" funny because of his accent and then the director tries to correct him. I didn't really notice it when it first aired during the Super Bowl, but now it's one of the five commercials that pops up on my buddy Dan's Hulu account* and I've really come to resent it. They ran ads for their Super Bowl ad in the weeks leading up to the big game, and it turned out all they had was a bit they stole from a thirty-year-old Simpsons episode:

*: The other four, in case you were wondering, are Liberty Mutual, Vabysmo, Tremfya (have pharmaceutical names always been so uncanny?), and Other Things You Can Watch On Hulu.