I Peaked in 6th

Too much pot has clouded my mind the last few days. The Rustic Run with Fast Cash down to Houston for two nights and then over to San Antonio for two more always leads me to smoking endless amounts of weed while waiting for the gigs to start, or during travel. One of my joys in life is a nice spliff or 7 and a good audio book and miles of open road to consume.

I’ve been working through All You Need to Know About the Music Business 10th ed. that I started on the way home from San Antonio on Sunday. It’s a 20 hour audio file for only one $15 in-app-credit. Living in Granbury, it takes me about an hour each way to any gig I play. So a book like this can last me at least a week and sometimes two. I get in my Hyundai Santa Fe, sit there in front of my house, roll my spliff, select the book I wanna listen to and place the phone in the holder suctioned to the windshield below my stickers for the toll way and gate to my community. Sometimes I’m happy to be single and with few friends, as it’s painful every time I leave and watch Dexter watching me while I pull off. His eyes focus on the tires, my eyes calling to his. If he’s far enough back on the porch, I roll down my window and, “Bye baby Dexter! My kitty-boi. I’ll see you soon.” His expression suggests he doesn’t care, but I know he does.

As it gets cooler in the wee small hours, Dexter comes inside and cuddles up next to me. He jumps on the bed and if I’m sleeping on my side or stomach, he meows and paws me until I turn over and assume the position he likes most. I roll over on my back, straighten out the covers and he paws my chest for a moment before spinning 180 degrees and plopping down by my side. His tail, of course waving in my face and his head down by my waist. He’ll roll around and use his paws and body to reposition my hand so that it covers his eyes. Once he’s comfortable, he snuggles in close. It’s the cutest shit and warms my heart. If I don’t stay still and go back to sleep with him, he gets pissed, jumps up and heads back outside. He’s the best.

I’m drinking an organic coffee from Mexico this morning. I bought it from the little shop inside the H-E-B up off hwy 377. It’s decent enough. The cool air coming in through the screen door gets me dressed right away and I’m at my computer rolling up a spliff, sipping my black coffee, and doing emails and booking stuff. It’s been hectic of late. It’s a godsend to have at least one reliable player and it’s more than an act of congress to get a few reliable and dedicated players. When it comes to the grand scheme of things, especially when building a slow-grass-roots-following, not delivering on a gig is a death sentence. At my level, working as a band for between $500 and $1500 dollars a night, there’s no room for error. Some touring bands doing opening sets for national acts with some major heat, don’t make that. My name doesn’t yet draw a crowd, but I’ve garnered a reputation for putting together a good band and doing a decent to good show. I’m prime pickings for venues with a built in crowd who need quality music that keeps the butts in the seats. The food, the atmosphere and the drinks bring in those butts. There’s nothing worse than clearing a restaurant full of people who came to eat but couldn’t bare the music.

A place that will pay $500-$1000 every Friday and Saturday are likely pulling in somewhere between 10K and 30K, and honestly with the size of some of these places, they are likely pulling in even more, maybe two or three times that on a good Saturday night. If the numbers are good, no one bats an eye at the high price tag for the band, and if the numbers stay good over a few times of playing there, you can ask for a small raise. Now if you suck it up and can’t blame the low numbers on the weather or a competing event, you can easily drop out of the running for some of these gigs. Another thing that can fuck it up is canceling or not delivering what you promised when booking the gig. A player backing out last minute, even due to sickness or death in the family, can entirely fuck a show up. Adding in a last minute player who doesn’t know the material can either be OK or disastrous. There’s not really a scenario where a player puts out his cigarette, picks up his amp, throws on his cleanest dirty shirt, heads to the venue, plugs in and starts playing all within a few hours span that works out sounding well. Even the best player will get lost on original tunes expecting the changes wrong, or just simply over playing a scale without listening to the chord progression first.

These problems seem to compound if the new player is on Bass. The nature of the instruments grants the tones the final authority on what the chords sound like. The lowest note signifies to our ear what chord it is. At best, an inexperienced bassist who didn’t learn your songs will claim they are playing inversions all night. Even the best bassist, if they over play, can fuck your entire night up. Drummers can go either way and completely control the feel of the music without ever playing a tone. It’s crazy! So for me, having a group of guys who’ve played with me a while is always the way to go. When I book big shows for bigger money, in my head I’m counting on my ‘a team’ to be there. The guys who’ve played with me the most, who know the way I do the covers and who can back me up in a way that’s complimentary to the point of expecting what I do or what I’ll play. It is my name on the bill, and my name on the check. It’s my name on the social media, and my name that gets drug through the mud if the show fails. And if like me, the front guy is a full time musician, even just one bad review with the right person can cost you hundreds of dollars a month and thousands a year in potential income. It takes a long time to build back from a bad show. It is easier if you drink regularly at the venue.

Still, it’s not right to expect any player will take you seriously, to expect that you or your gigs will be the priority on anyone’s mind. As a front man who doesn’t draw, you mostly have to keep your mouth shut. If you don’t, as I haven’t in the past, you run the risk of saying something you regret and offending someone who you’d likely have had as an ally. The overall worst thing about hiring someone you don’t know and someone last minute is there’s a reason they’re available. What I mean by that is this catch-22 of finding good players. Good players are already booked and as a front man you need good players to get booked. So a lot of the players out there that are readily available are probably going through the same stuff you are, personally and financially. There is a big chance that personalities can clash within a gig or two, and maybe even within the first few notes. These small blow-ups can do irreputable damage to your name and your business.

So what’s the answer? It might sound like I’m saying as a front man you have no leverage, no rights, no room to make demands or even call rehearsals without paying. Well, unfortunately, that is exactly what I’m saying. Until you have a hit song and people are showing up to your shows, it doesn’t matter how good of a singer or writer you are, you have very little, to no leverage with any of the people involved in the show you’re playing. So then what to do? I think it’s Ray Wiley Hubbard who says, “The day I keep my gratitude higher than my expectation is a good day.” And that’s the key. Don’t fight it. Every little thing that seems to literally be tearing the carpet from below your feet, is actually a small step and opportunity to let go and flow. As you give up and give in to the river of life and stop fighting the current, opportunities present themselves at every turn. Where you were grappling and attempting to hang on to small root slivers, letting go you find a large log great for floating and taking it easy.

When I started to change my mindset from band oriented to show oriented, things changed. I still don’t always have the band I desire, but by going with the flow, even the bad shows are good. Sometimes I don’t have all the pieces to the band, but realizing they came to hear the singer, I go do the gig anyway, and if I don’t say anything about a missing 5th member or an absent drummer, no one else does either. I’ve even played gigs without a lead player, busting into my best solo every 3rd song and sending shivers of embarrassment down the spines of everyone in ear shot. But it will and does make me better. It makes me a better person, a better musician and a better bandmate. Once we got offered $1600 (after commission) to go play in Cheyenne, WY for a week. The venue put us up in an apartment and so the pay came out to around $500/week per player if we didn’t bring the bassist. So that’s what we did for a two week run. We played the shows with a lead guitar, drums and an acoustic. Nobody, but a few drunken assholes, seemed to mind and it was only the sound guys who would say, “What about the subs, man? I’ve got 6 badass subs under the stage there. How we gonna use them with no bass?”

That’s when you don’t say anything. It’s not being aloof, it’s just not answering in the negative. I might have said, “Well, just boost the lows on the acoustic and I’ll play bass lines,” to which the sound guy most certainly thought, “what a fucking asshole”. If you stay quiet, the ether will tell them that it would be impossible to come play with a fourth member for the amount of money they were offering. What grown adult can say with dignity, “I’ went out of town for 7 days and came home with $400 before expenses.” That’s a death sentence to any family man, and any person who would willingly work for so little has definitely not got their shit together. Barring stringing together 8 weeks in a row and living off Ramen noodles, these runs don’t seem worth it. They were worth it to me and my band at the time because Texas had shut down due to Covid and Wyoming was still open. July 2020.

Overall the best way to get a band is to start it in the 6th grade. The band will keep everyone together and all the problems and difficulties I’ve mentioned will vanish. The love and comradery experienced between friends in middle school is the kind of energy you need to have a successful band. If you don’t have this, then you’ll be a front man like me and, as I’ve said, will be in a perpetual state of hiring until you land a hit song.

6th grade was the height of my popularity. It was the year of all years for me, to be honest. The previous year I had made a perfect score on the TAAS test (an exit level exam) and when we returned to start the year, my picture was plastered all over the halls and classrooms from an article in the Star Telegram about kids who have perfect scores. My mom took me to the photoshoot. She read about it somewhere in the paper (those were the days everyone got a paper at home and read it). That being said, the teachers loved me, the coaches loved me, the students loved me Everyone loved me. I starred in our school productions and was on the student council.

Problem was I rode the bus to school and on the bus I hung out with Clay Ray. He was devilish boy and we had long since caused trouble getting on and off the bus over the years. As a 10 year old, he shaved the finger prints off his hands with a knife and showed us all as we stared in disbelief at the bus stop. We once smashed 100s of plums to the side walks in the apartment complex and were caught and banned from ever walking our way home through there again. He was a bad kid, no supervision and was even encouraged into criminal behavior and mischief at a young age. My mother had to go to work, 45 minutes in the opposite direction from school. The bus and bad kids were the only option for me.

Come 6th grade, Clay was in my homeroom class. We started cutting up and Mrs. Merrill began to see the two sides to my personality. The angel-straight-A-student who wore church clothes to school and was captain of his teams, and this other daemon child that would join Clay in pegging spit ball after spit ball to the drop ceiling above our desks. When the teacher finally noticed the hundreds of balled up pieces of paper glued to the tiles above her desk with spit, she went ballistic. Clay and I were paddled and sent to in school suspension. Since I was in the gifted and talented classes, or what is now known as AP, I changed classes for half the day. Because I was supposed to be in other classes, everyone in the school knew right away I had been banished to ISS (Pronounce ICE…with a cold snake like hiss on the end). No one could believe it, no one but me that is. I had long since been taking the paddle of Mr. Price as he was the principal at my elementary school as well. These teachers had long since labeled me a problem and with the constant interference of my police officer father, making trips to the school to inform the counselors and principals that I was being raised wrong and that my behavior issues were due to the parenting styles of my mother, Mr. Price and a few others knew I was a lost cause.

Yet, I continued to perform. Putting me in ISS was only a way to give me more time to think and talk with the other bad kids in suspension. Since my assignments came to me in a bulk packet containing the entire days work, I would finish everything by 10am. That left only 6 hours to do absolutely nothing. I read A wrinkle In Time, My Side of the Mountain, every book by S.E. Hinton, Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller and anything I could get my hands on. I wasn’t allowed to get up from my seat so I learned to read with my chair pushed slightly out and to an angle, my arm run across the edge of the desk and serving as a pillow to rest my head on. I guessed prison couldn’t be that bad as at least I had seen them laying down in their bunks to read. When I got back to my home room, things were different. Clay and I were separated and given permanent desks facing against opposite walls, each desk surrounded with blinders on its sides. We were not only kept from interacting with each other, but with the entire class and even the teacher. Since Clay and I shared so much time on the bus and after school in the trails and tree forts, we were allied too tightly to give-in to Mrs. Merrill. We found out she bought cigarettes and beer at the grocery store, and boy we did a number with that one. She came at us harder and I remember spending a few more stints of time in the ISS, detrimental to my social standing with the church kids and my peers in the smart classes.

Finally, I cried and cried to my mother and begged her to do something. Even though I had ‘gone-at’ the teacher and even though there was an all out war taking place, neither the teacher or I could admit to such a petty grievance. The code of ethics for a teacher shuns most of what Mrs. Merrill did to us so it was easy to play the part of the good student being innocently tortured by the teacher out of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible No Good, Very Bad Day.

My mother came to my side, and with the help of another teacher, I was moved to the popular class. I didn’t fully realize it until I got to Ms. Ricketts class, but the teachers indeed did divide up the classes in a way that kept the good, smart kids together and isolated the bad or dumb ones. Going to Ms. Ricketts class was like a fresh drink of water after years of handfuls of salt. My friends from church were in there, the smart kids I had grown to know and the student council was in there. Ms. Ricketts even used to pick up some of the students and take them toilet papering or to do other cool outings without their parents. She was the best and coolest teacher ever back then, but I question some of her practices today. I’m still so grateful for her and her love regardless of any popular kid outings. I mean, after all, she included me in Toilet papering Tiffany Dixon’s house, a popular girl from the Rock School,

Now restored rightly back to my throne, I was king again. Everyone loved me. I could ask any girl to “go out with me” and they would say yes, and so started my swimming though girls as if they were water. They all said yes, and I had to break up with them all before I asked another one. All the guys wanted to be me and all the girls wanted to do whatever the 6th grade equivalent to ‘fuck me’ is. I didn’t get anymore swats that year and wasn’t sent back to the principal. I even had to go to Mrs. Merrill’’s class once a day as she taught the gifted Math class. I was content to sit there quietly and take her tongue lashings as they came, confident in my victory of escaping her grasp. She was evil, or at least just hated me and it seemed she had sworn to out me for all my bad behavior and bring me down off my pedestal.

When it came Valentines, we at the student council, with the help of Ms. Ricketts and Mrs. Early, devised a lolli-pop sale. Secret admirers would purchase a sucker prior to Valentine’s day and the candy would be delivered during class on 2/14. When the day came, student council had already been praised for the money they raised, and I can’t remember what we did with it, as I can only remember 30 or 40 of those suckers come to me with sweet little secret admirer notes on them. My desk was covered, and although Ms. Ricketts thought and had promised the delivery wouldn’t interrupt the lessons, she just couldn’t keep teaching as eventually the entire class was staring at me with these curious smiles across their faces, gawking at the mound of lolli-pops mounting up with each minute on top of my desk. Ms. Ricketts stopped the lesson and I gave everyone in class a candy of their own to enjoy and we all took a break until the end of delivery. It was a crazy experience. I love thinking of that.

It was amazing. Here I was, fourth smartest kid in school, in order from Elizabeth Tosh, Larry Sontag and Matthew Quick, on the best local PYA teams, The Hornets, member of the Student Council, could have any girl I wanted, had friends I played with in the trails and went skating with on the weekends, I was a saved and baptized member of the prominent Baptist Church and I made straight As, never making any Bs.

All this would change during 7th grade. Things seemed to get more hectic, the challenges and diversity of life grew exponentially. New priorities in the lives of the students became apparent and harnessing a reputable identity based solely on the things 5th and 6th graders deemed important just didn’t work anymore. Since then it seems the teachers and authority at large gained their control of me, further punishing me with suspensions and paddling. Mr. Hufstedler and Mrs. Baily were not kind to me, and the time I spent in the neighborhood continued to be influenced with ‘bad’ kids like Critter Louge, Clay Ray, Ryan Lutrell, Cole Adams and Matt De Los Santos. All these kids were out on the trails, they had started smoking cigarettes and pushing the limits. It wasn’t until about half way through 7th grade I would find myself arrested for the first time with my mother coming to pick up her 13 year old son from the Azle police department, a place where her ex husband, my father, had been the chief of police in 1989.

So like I was saying, I peaked in 6th grade.