attitude

[David Gans <david@trufun.com>]

My wife is a schoolteacher.  Talk about a profession that is 
undervalued in this society!  (But she's got a great health plan, 
which means we're not on the streets as a result of her bout with 
lymphoma five years ago.  She won, by the way.)

Every one of us in this bidness watches in horror as profoundly 
unworthy artists prosper while genius and innovation go begging. 
There is no justice, and it's damn hard to get any.  I don't see much 
point in raging about it.

Just yesterday, I put myself into a funk after hearing I was turned 
down for a gig at a festival that I was sure I'd be perfect for.  And 
the promoter is someone I thought was favorably inclined toward me 
and my music. I grumbled to my booking agent briefly ("...reminded 
that if you want a friend in the music business, get a dog.  And hope 
he plays the banjo.') and then went back to work.

I make music that doesn't fall neatly into any category.  I write 
songs that don't all sound like this or that, and I intersperse them 
in performance with loop pieces, composed and improvised.  I'm too 
weird for the singer-songwriter world and not weird enough for the 
avant-garde or whatever you call it.  And on top of that, I'm too 
fucking old to go to folk/bluegrass festivals in remote locations on 
my own dime, sleep in the dirt, and work my way up from the 
campground jams to the mainstage.  Plus: damn hard to schlep an 
Echoplex and pedal board from campfire to campfire.

You deal with it.  You take the gig.  You do the best you can and 
build your fan base the only way it's done: one at a time.  I figure 
if I sell one CD Im ahead of the game, and if I bring home a few 
email addresses for the spam list, that's a win too.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came when I interviewed 
producer Ted Templeman for BAM Magazine.  He described his first 
encounter with Van Halen, at a grubby club in Hollywood: a dozen 
people in the room, but they were belting it out like it was a 
sold-out show at the Forum.

I call it the "you-shoulda-been-there" approach: If there are four 
people in the audience, send 'em all out of there telling their 
friends they missed something great.




-- 

David Gans - david@trufun.com or david@gdhour.com
Truth and Fun, Inc., 484 Lake Park Ave. #102, Oakland CA 94610-2730
Blog:  http://cloudsurfing.gdhour.com
Web site: http://www.dgans.com