PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic When is the last time you have been to a open mic/blues jam?

It's as if you knew me in 1994 when I left the entertainment world and started to work in IT. Honestly. You hit it squarely on the head. When music became a "job", I had a chat with myself and said "If you have to work a job, you may as well work a job that pays a decent, consistent living wage." I gave my band notice the next day that I was leaving the music world and just moved on.

See, music (to me) is fun when you are SO good at what you do that your band is just beating the crap out of the other bands in your area that play similar content. We were a Motown band, and we were so good that when people had a bigger scale event, we were the first call band. Our starting price for weddings was $3000 (in 1992) for a short dinner set and non-stop 100 minutes of dancing music. We were THAT band. THAT was when it was fun.

Then the shifting paradigm that was DJs happened. A DJ would do a wedding for $600-650. We stopped getting those calls for weddings and corporate events, so we had to work more in bars to make a living. I guess you could say that the rest of the racing rats caught up with us. We once did 17 weddings in one summer. The very next year we did 2. So we found ourselves doing things like doing doubleheaders every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We were doing 9 gigs a week, some of them AWFUL, low paying gigs we did JUST to earn some money rather stay home and earn nothing. When you start spending more time loading, driving, unloading, setting up, tearing down, loading, driving home, and unloading (lather rinse repeat) than performing, it's time to start thinking about other, less taxing, lines of work. It became a hard, physical job. I bailed.

That being said, it was my choice to play with a full 14 space rack, 3 keyboards and stereo Yamaha speakers. Had I moved only an acoustic guitar or been a singer who moved nothing I might have continued.

Simply stated, the thing that made it fun (as defined above), the huge success we had for about an 18 month run, ended. Then it was a job. I was 42 and the fun was over. IT paid me more for a straight 40 hour week and exercised a different part of my brain. I went back to college and got another degree in IT (Computer Science) and became a server side technician, worked 17 years in that field and retired at 62.



Very apt description, but open to interpretation. You could also see it quite similar to teenaged boys measuring in the shower after gym class. Kind of like this guy. (This one will be lost on people not in America because it's from MadTV, an American TV show that I don't think was ever worldwide.)



Between the gear flexers, the name droppers and the VST collectors who are conspicuously absent in the user showcase, I don't know what it is anymore. Between that and the end of year glut of last minute uploads from people who want to post for volume of posts and try to win a free copy of the next release... (I have money. I'll buy mine.) That comment may seem quite "pot calling the kettle black" in that I rarely post a song anymore (because I really don't write much these days) but that's my observation. You've been here for a while Ray. You have seen that late-year push for visibility too. I don't post because my skills are GONE and I can't play worth a snap anymore. I can't even explain the push (shove?) I had to give myself to do "By The River" a few months ago. And that only took a half a day to actually program and sing.

Plus factor in how arrogant and smug I am... LOL!!

One thing I should say to qualify my perspective is that when I speak about the jam night heroes I speak about those who ONLY show up at jam night to play the only songs they know but don't belong to a band that actually works in music. People who are in the music business and just go out for fun rather than stay home, well, have at it. This is where the smug arrogance in me says "Music deserves respect. Don't dabble in something so sacred as music. Music to me is as sac red as religion is to others. You either believe or your don't believe. Similar in concept, do music 100% or don't desecrate it. Give music your every breath, your every thought, and your every heartbeat." I myself am now a "dabbler" and it makes me unhappy to be that. One of my best friends is a guy who owns 6 guitars and can only play the intro to Smoke On The Water. I can't tell you how much that irritates me because I see that as a mockery of something I hold in such high esteem, to almost dangerous levels. Like the jam night heroes.

I am also well aware that I am a strange little bird...