A Band of Brothers…if it pays good.

Keeping a band together at any level has to be hard. It’s especially hard at the level I’m at, which is only having 3-8 band gigs to offer a month. A great player, regardless of instrument, requires a living wage. They’ve dedicated their life to a craft, possibly have children, definitely have bills, and could even have a spouse. I attempt to keep at least one of my band members as busy as possible, providing week day gigs at song swaps and open mics, but it often falls short of being enough. Most players I use have to have a day job to go along with their music gigs and so become the weekend warriors with the priority always being the day job, or they have to work for as many bands as possible if they want to go full time. This creates a predicament. Using players who are open to going full-time, or who already have, puts a giant responsibility on the front guy to pay a living wage. If I want my players to stay with me, I think $1000/week would be fair. Yet even if that were possible on a local level to net 5k a week for a band, that’s 20k/month, I imagine if I were to sign with a bigger talent agency and were sent out on the road for 2 months at a time the players I use that have day jobs, wouldn’t be able to go and I’d be back looking for new players again.

For a local/regional player and for the front people as well, we are in a constant struggle of finding gigs and keeping players. If a side-person is even remotely good and doesn’t have a day job, they will last a few months on the scene before being picked up by a charting artist or a touring artist who is under a label and good management. A drummer or bass player can move to the DFW area, play a couple open mics and then be working for a hand full of acts within a month of moving to town. For a lead player, if it’s not electric guitar, the same is true, but might take you a couple weeks, and if you are a shedder, simply because there are so many of you, it will likely take three weeks to a month before you find the work you are looking for. If these numbers seem inaccurate to you, by all means, please shoot me a message detailing your instrument and experience level and I will find you an act to work with in no time.

Here in Fort Worth/Dallas we are in a constant struggle, as front-men and women, due to lack of bass players and drummers. I’ve had to resolve to playing some of my shows without one of these two instruments. I’ve often played shows where every member on stage is at their first show with me at the same time. This can be a nightmare scenario when trying to pull off a quality set of songs, especially when the players have never heard, or didn’t listen to the songs before the show. But, honestly, it doesn’t matter. If a bass player, drummer or lead player fuck up your gig, their name isn’t on it. The side-guy gets all the glory of adding the artist’s name their own ‘resume’ with none of the responsibility to put on a quality show. If you are a bass player, you can work in this town and play 99 % of the notes wrong. You might just play 3 to 4 shows with each act you work with, but you will survive and it will take years for anyone to become the wiser. On top of that, if any of the front-people you worked for, and whose set you totally butchered because you refused to learn the songs, talk shit about you, they will be the ones to suffer the wrath of the masses. After all the face and name of a band is easy to change and no one notices the accompaniment remains the same.

Take a look at some of the most popular bands over the last 10 years here in DFW. They all have basically the same bass, drums, and accompaniment. If you look back at the previous decades, the same thing holds true. Many of the side-people here in this region are highly sought after and have been called up to bigger bands with great consistency for the last 50 years. We are rich in the tradition of live music.

They say Fort Worth is a drinking town with a music problem. I love that. Despite all these factors mention above, as a front-person, there are endless solo acoustic gigs out there to keep one busy. The down side is the budgets on those gigs are never enough to bring even a lead player along. Those gigs are just enough to help the act survive., but can help an artist keep their bills paid, maintain momentum and provide the much needed stage time which is the only real way to gain experience. When there is a gig that pays a couple hundred over the norm, that extra money is a much needed shot in the arm to an almost dying dream. When an act makes just enough to survive and pay their band members, the band/act/dream itself never gets any love. The money needed to boost social media posts, buy merch, invest in better speakers, cables, mics and instruments and pay for all the logistical expenses embedded in even a local show is never amassed. The act dies due to being starved for funds, and the side-people, at times like parasites, move on to the next unsuspecting host.

What I’m saying here is this: if you pay your band first, your band will die. You have to pay yourself first, and on top of that, you have to actually give your band, itself, a cut of the winnings. So if you’re running a four person band, the payout should be divided into five. Even if you, as the front person, aren’t going to spend 5th cut on gear or re-invest it in the band, it is my opinion you are still entitled to it. Your name is on the bill, you found the gig, put the band together, picked the songs and are responsible for the show whether it’s good or not. That kind of pressure is worth every penny of double pay when compared to a member who can show up 30 minutes before downbeat, plug in their instrument, grab a free drink and be ready to play 2 minutes before show time on songs they only learned sporadically and progressively as gigs come along.

I get this is where contracts come into play. Where a manager would take the responsibility of dealing with the band and venue off the soldiers of the front person, but a manager isn’t possible for most bands when starting out, and it remains an allusive duende I’m still seeking to this day, 5 years after performing my first full band show.

Bottom line, DFW is super blessed to have problems like this. Too many gigs to play and not enough musicians, In all my travels the scenario is reversed with 100s of musicians competing for the 10 gigs available. But ironically, the same story above holds true for the accompanying players. The good ones rise to the top and make a living out of playing with the best acts. You’ll see the same rhythm section in over half of the most popular bands in any city with an inkling of a scene. These side-people develop the closest relationship with the staff and venue, know more about the scene than anyone and can, in general, make or break an act aspiring to find an opening for themselves. Hire the right (popular) players, and your band will be an instant success, try to establish yourself without dipping into the side-guy-barrel of seasoned vets and you run the risk of pissing a drummer or bass player off.

It only takes one look at the Instagram and Facebook pages of drummers and bassist to understand how little they care who they are playing with, or for that matter, what song they are playing. A lot of these guys set up their cameras and film themselves playing and then post a video of it. More often than not, there is not a single mention of the name on the marquee, nor a single appearance of the person singing, or for that matter, any other member of the band on stage at that time. These players build a name for themselves just a fiercely as the acts they are working for. For a new frontperson, it is almost more important who is in your band than what kind of music you’re going to make.

My first band shows were in the winter and spring of 2016. I had spent the little money I had saved up and bought an RV in 2015, subleased my mother-in-law-suit-backyard-apt to my buddy and left for Colorado and California to write songs and trim weed. I had been working at The Basement bar, J&J’s Blues bar and Fred’s as a sound guy along with playing my sporadic songwriter gigs, when in a string of events, mostly dealing with too much alcohol and drugs, left me jobless and barely gigging at all. The death of Todd Osborn and then a couple years later his father, Joe Osborn started a chain of events that would lead me to losing 3 or my 4 nights/wk running sound.

I spent the $3k I had saved from selling a little pot around the Fairmount. With that kind of money, I bought a 1983 Chevy Jayco with only 60K miles on it, that now in retrospect, seems like a godsend. It ran great and so me, my first cat Dexter, and my $400 set out to Colorado. I basically moved into the RV and hoped my funds would get me out to California where, come September I could do some trimming and make $200 per pound. I drove that RV up to the top of Pike’s Peak, getting ran off the road by by the other cars as my little engine struggled to pull the motor home up the steep incline. I stayed up there for a week in one of the glamping spots. I skinny dipped in the ice cold lake at the top of the moutain. It was amazing.

At first, I tried to keep Dexter on a leash and fashioned a makeshift ‘run’ with some twine that encircled the camp. After watching him for a few minutes I quickly realized there was more danger of him being tangled and strangled than him running off. We had long spent hours together in the garden back home. While I tending my plants, he went around and monitored everything, occasionally roughing up a bug for fun and evening killing a bird or two if given the chance. If cats were totally personified, I’d bet they’d be corporate board members. I let Dexter off his lease and he took to it right away. For the rest of the trip, like a chicken come home to roost, Dexter would return to the RV, no matter where we were, and in the morning, he was at the door waiting for me to throw it open so he could start his daily adventures.

I adopted Dexter The First when he was already 2 years old. He had lived in a house with a few other animals, and although he still had a delightful personality, he didn’t like to cuddle. The best thing about this RV trip was the cool temps of the mountains and the fresh fall air forced Dexter to cuddle up right on my chest to sleep. Something I’m sure we both delighted in for awhile.

I eventually made it to California and did my trim work for a few weeks. I made it to the farm with $0, and left with $2200 and an extra pound of some Chemdog. It took me nearly 12 hours to do a pound of bud and I would break every four hours, Dexter would come out of the woods to hang out while I sipped tea and smoked finger hash, and then I would go right to sleep around 10p. In my down time leading up to trimming and after the job was over, I wrote 15 or 20 songs, 11 of which went on my first attempt at recording an album. When I got home to Fort Worth, I realized my credit was pretty ok and I got a CC with $3000 limit on it and went to work recording what is now known as Songs Worth Singing. I spared no expense and maxed out the credit card in no time. The album was a local success. It featured many of the ‘who’s who’ of Fort Worth and afforded me my frist big show with an actual big crowd.

The hype I was getting for the album was unbelievable to me. I was sure my first attempt would utterly fail, but everyone kept pushing me to believe otherwise. I needed a band though. Up to that point I had not ever even hired anyone. So I reached out to Johnny and Tone , the guys I had sort of jammed with on Saturdays at The Basement when Johnny would call me up to the stage while I was running sound. Tone heard my song “Jackpot” and exclaimed, “That’s a hit!'“ we’ve recorded it once and are still waiting for it to trend. Through those guys we got Danny, and for drums it was Trey, and Mark and Tommy shared the bass duties. Through Tommy we picked up Abel on Accordion as well.

Without a single rehearsal, we met up at The Grotto and MASS and Lola’s for my first band shows. Tone , wise enough to know I couldn’t afford him, canceled last minute on these so we reached out to Glenn , who also played on the album, to fill in. I was pretty nervous for the whole thing as once the band gets going, its so fucking loud I can not hear myself sing in the monitors. Aside from being loud, with out a single practice, everyone was just guessing. Instruments like accordion, keys and bass, all guessing the root note at the same time made for a dissonant hell I had not known until I began playing music. Each player on stage was capable, and by all means of the word ‘decent to good’, but without actually listening to the tunes and knowing what to play, it was chaos. I had penciled out set lists featuring only original tunes and had spent hours master-minding the transitions between songs and procuring the delicate balance between slow and fast/happy and sad only to have it fall to pieces like grains of sand through my clasped hands. I think I suffered my first panic attacks right there on stage. On occasion some of my guys, who didn’t even use drugs, could be seen ducking behind their instrument or nearest object to pop a lorazepam they’d pulled from their emergency stash, usually reserved for visiting with in laws or going on family outings during the holidays.

There is unfortunately no way for an inexperienced musician, such as I was, to communicate with professionals, such as my band were. It’s impossible. It’s like trying to talk to someone in a language you don’t understand while overusing and misusing the three or four words and concepts you know to communicate the entirety of duties to job you are performing together. Because I lacked not only ability, but knowledge, each of my players would attempt to steer the ship for me, and in turn, against one another. There truly can be only one cook in the kitchen, one captain to a ship. So I resolved to playing I-IV-V blues progressions for the remainder of the first two years with a band. At least we would all play the same root note together. And it really allowed all the players the chance to solo. My shows back then consisted of each player soloing over the full progression of the entire song, verse and chorus, just like my vocals would. It was a contagious blend of the jazz format, bluegrass tempo, and blues chord progressions with country lyrics and melodies. People liked it and for a while, the terrible act was enough to push me onward. Of course, any bad playing or really any bad notions of the early days of Joe Savage Band rest squarely and solely with me. No one remembers who was on stage with me, only that it sucked so bad.

It was my fault for not having enough experience, and so when the guys hit me up for money outside after a show, I didn’t really know what to do. I hadn’t been paid yet. We’d just stepped off stage, but some of the guys were ready to go, some of them needed money right then to pay their tabs, and some were used to playing in bigger band with a better budget. When I told them the best I could do was $50 each, it was like I had stabbed them to death in front of their children. They wanted the standard $100/person, but I wasn’t getting that. For my six piece band, the $200 we had cleared at the door didn’t come close.

Right then I knew it wasn’t sustainable to run a band with professional players, or to have a band larger than four pieces. I’d have to choose my favorite out of the lead instruments, and that was definitely going to be electric guitar, and we’d have to only take gigs with guaranteed money. We’d also need to rehearse a time or two. But how to make all this work. I’d just paid $100 to play a show, and a show that did exponentially more than $100 worth the damage to my brand and name. Don’t get me wrong, all the bad is my fault, but to my credit, I was blind. I had no idea how the sound got from the instrument to the speakers when I moved home just three years earlier. I didn’t know what a pick-up was, I had no gear, I didn’t own a microphone, and saying I was green would be the understatement of the year.

I’m so very grateful for my first band and for all my bands. I didn’t deserve the caliber of players I started with, but it’s made me better and I still hold each of these people dear to me even if we don’t play much together anymore. We played a few more shows like this, and a CD release show at Lola’s as well, before making those drastic changes and eventually cutting the band down to a three piece without drums. On a standard gig this brought the bass and lead players pay up to $150 a show and allowed me to continue to make $200. We played 2-3 shows a week in Dallas and Fort worth over the course of the next three years until in 2018, 3 years after Leon signed his million dollar contract with Colombia records, I could barely keep a band together for the few remaining shows I had. My spark had fizzled. There were too many other great recordings out there and my off key ‘pitchy’ singing on my first records quickly made it’s way around the taste maker circles, and over the course of the next few years, every player who had played with me had rotated in and out of the band with such frequency it still makes my head spin. Some went on the road with huge national names and others with up and coming regional acts. As I’ve grown to be able to communicate more, my sets have evolved to be more complicated and include much of the original material I had wanted from the past. The main thing today is respecting the lives of the band members I do have and understanding that if the music ain’t fun to play or the gig doesn’t bring them joy, they won’t do it.

I also have to be weary of taking grown men out on the road with me for less than $500/week and lets get real, that’s not enough for anyone, much less to maintain the support of the wives and children who are back at home. I can’t wait for the day that I can send my guys home with $1000 each for the week of work, and for a time I can give large bonuses. Another thing I don’t envy about road bands is keeping your guys sober and intact while they are with you on a run of shows, and having to turn a blind eye to the cheating men, some who only play music to escape the home lives they’ve created for themselves. It’s hard to be apart of someone else’s drug use or infidelity. I can speak from experience as having shown up to gigs too fucked up or gotten too drunk before we go on, not only embarrassing myself, but my band members as well.

It also costs a lot for places to sleep on the road. You can budget a minimum of $100/night to sleep the entire band. Of course there are ways around this like sleeping in the van, sneaking extra people into a hotel, couch surfing and the like, but, none of that is comfortable or sustainable for grown ass people for more than a night or two. Even with a $100/night budge, you’ll still be sleeping slumber-party-stlye. If you want everyone to have their own private room, better budget more like $100 per person per night. I personally don’t like sleeping anywhere but my own bed, even for just one night. So if I’m going to do it, I need to be paid well. I try to do the same for the people working for me.

The catch here about taking care of your band is that they can leave at anytime. A good band leader knows this and doesn’t hold it against the player as long as they give the right amount of notice and don’t leave anyone in a lurch, standard practice in any industry. So this is why you must pay your band a cut of the profits each night. If you divide it evenly each show, or even lose money each show, then your gear suffers without the funds to repair or buy anew. The wear and tear on the band vehicles and sound equipment must be reinforced with constant updating and refurbishing over the years. This costs money. If you’re paying your band a cut of each show, when a player leaves, they leave without taking with them too much of what the band has earned and you can continue to grow without them.

With better gear and more funds invested in the band, you can attract better players who come with better personalities and less problems, who’ve also figured out haw to deal with the work/life/music balance they are seeking. Pro players never accept a gig they can’t do or a gig they think they will turn down if something better comes along. As a front-man, I know there are certain players I cannot hire if the gig pays $100/man. I also know there are players I can hire for less than that, and there are players, the type I love the most, that will play any show as long as you’re the first to ask them. And no matter the pay, they will keep their commitment, even months out. I will add this type of player does require trust that you are playing them the maximum amount you can for each gig, and if they find out you are cheating them, will never work with you again.

All of these factors of running a band don’t begin to touch on the ins and outs of rehearsal, song choice, performance or even too much to do with the music, but they are just as important and indispensable from the show as anything else. With prices for bands being the same, or less, than they were in the 70s, it makes running a band more difficult than ever, but the rewards and possibilities of making it are real and attainable. If we can all persevere, front man or side guy, the sky is the limit. If you’re playing in DFW, or even Texas at large, you’re a part of a scene rich with talent and the possibilities are truly endless as to what can happen for you and to you. Just take a look around and witness the large amount of local talent rising to the top of the national and international scenes. I mean, for years you could waltz into The White Elephant Saloon to see a show and Cody Jinks would be working the bar. You could go to eat at Mexican Inn and see Leon Bridges bussing tables. These are just two acts that have made it out over the last few years, and if you pay close attention to their bands, they have changed a lot. Once they got the finances to put the bad they really desired together, they did, and with the right amount of success, you can have any band you want. So keep on playing with whoever you can until something sticks, and remember to always try to give a little more to each member as time goes on, but always take a cut for the band itself.