I needed to do one last check of my cables. At a gig it was Murphy’s Law that the cable you’d been using for months or years would die. Perhaps it was the energy surrounding the anxiety of the performance or maybe it was… no, it was some strange energy, the kind of meta energetics that Jung wrote of. Something was happening, some vibration on a higher level has a way of intervening, somehow. I always had extra cables and extra power cords. To not have those was an amateur move. A broken guitar, a blown tube in your amp could all be excused but basic cables and cords: Must have.
I had gone through this ritual so many times that it was automatic. But how did I feel to be going through it for the last time? After thirty years of driving long hours with a small cache of gear to make almost no money the prospect of wrapping up this aspect of my life brought me some peace. Sure, there were many good parts, the socializing, the camaraderie, the connections and meeting new people, but all of those things were happening less and less. The crowds were getting older and thinning out. I was driving to most gigs alone. And the money, what of it, there was often wouldn’t pay for the gas to make the drive, to say nothing of lodging or even a pizza or a burger after the show. Playing live was something one did to feed their soul not their family and this was proving to be more and more the case. With this gig, in particular, I was taking a sleeping bag and preparing to sleep in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot and I was happy for it. It’s not a bad deal, but things have definitely changed and not for the better.
When I was young and coming up, you didn’t need more than your friends, a grilled cheese sandwich and an attitude of world domination, which was good because that was about all we had. As we got older, for a time, the musicians’ plight got better, but the law of diminishing returns ultimately kicked in; fewer opportunities, fewer audience members, less money and more hassle. To young folks coming up and the folks behind them and so on, whatever the current state of things is will be better for them than those who’ve been at it a while? Beginner’s Mind? Perhaps. Also, when you’re young things are just different, you have less experience, less of a reference point and perhaps best of all for any nearly impossible things: Less expectations. In fact, my sage advice for anybody from 15 to 50 is to let go of expectations. If I could do that this probably wouldn’t be my last gig, but I can’t seem to do that.
After a final check of my gear, I load everything up, grab my pillow, throw it atop the sleeping bag in my backseat motel. I always do a quick check of my tires, make sure they look good, a pretty pointless gesture unless they’re really flat, in which case a light on my dash will begin beep and illuminate, but old habits die hard and soon I’m pointed north and on my way to the gig.
When I first started driving alone I would put together elaborate playlists and looked forward to hours of uninterrupted listening. For the travelling musician there’s little as satisfying as sitting, talking and bonding with your bandmates about a record or whole discographies, with whomever is driving or riding shotgun calling out the tunes in some semi democratic way; many a fascist band member found themselves on the receiving end of walking papers after a grueling road trip where they imposed their musical will on folks from Grand Forks to Philly. Every band knew this guy and it was almost always a dude. That guy sucks.
It’s hard not to think about that guy, actually there were several, as I drive alone, with little more than the din of a local public radio station playing classical music in the cab at a volume slightly louder than the rubber of the tires moving over the asphalt below. With this being my last gig, I’d never hang awkwardly with frustration bordering on anger ever again. I’d never see his face or listen to him spew bullshit stories to whomever was in earshot ever again. That’s definitely a tick in the pros column.
At the same time, some of the greatest moments of my life and some of my deepest connections happened while driving to or coming from a gig. There was the time that we were driving into Brooklyn just at sunrise and the orange and red brick buildings became alive with a kaleidoscopic flare of early morning light. There was the time when I almost didn’t make a gig on account of getting lost, found the venue by accident and met the woman who would become my wife later that night.There was the seven day trip with one of the best friend’s of my life and after being together for every waking hour for a hundred plus hours we never ran out of new topics to talk about. A year later we did it again and still every conversation was fresh and new. Circumstances changed but I got out of his car and still had things I wanted to talk about. Those moments have been the building blocks of my life, I wouldn’t trade those moments for ten lifetimes. And still I’m going to play my last gig.
I guess I feel like there comes a time when one needs to put away childish things. I wonder, though, if that’s just bullshit I tell myself because my back hurts more, I feel less creative than I used to and more indignant about small audiences and even smaller payouts. I never cared much for sex, drugs or rock and roll, so those don’t factor in so much. When you feel defeated and like you’re at the end of your creative arc, it’s easy to say something has lost its thrill and is without merit. Are those fair assessments? Was there ever that kind of calculus? Some kind of existential cost benefit analysis? I don’t think so. And therefore I don’t think it’s fair, but that reconciliation doesn’t put a spring in my step nor does it put a spark of excitement in my belly. Instead, I think ‘Well shit, I was hoping to watch Antiques Roadshow this weekend…” I think when that’s one’s first thought when it comes to show availability it might be time to mothball your roadcase and begin looking for another hobby; golf or fly fishing might be better suited to my temperament.
There’s just me and another car on the road. It’s mid-afternoon and I’ll arrive at the venue soon. I remember before Mapquest, a little Easter egg for the real oldsters, Google Maps and GPS there was a real satisfaction about having actually found the venue.
Amount of times bandmates and myself showed up at the wrong location: Dozens of times.
As band member you learn a lot about how addresses and addressing works. You also learn how many cities have Lincoln or MLK streets. Manhattan makes it easy with streets going one way and avenues going another, uptown is north and downtown is south; thanks Manhattan for making it easy to get around. Got lost in Akron once for a show that started at midnight in a factory district. Knocking on doors at midnight trying to find an illegal venue; what could go wrong. Fortunately, very little did.
There’s a golden ratio for touring musicians, but actually its not golden, maybe more like rusty iron that sat in a dirt pile for a while and it’s the ‘everything else to performing’ ratio. The average band plays between 1-3 hours at a gig, depending on the gig, to get to that gig, the touring musician drives anywhere from 4 to 12 hours to get to that gig, could be less, could be more, but let’s call it six hours and the touring musician could easily wait three to eight hours to play, for one reason or another. Touring musicians are masters at killing time because there’s always so much time to kill. On average, the typical touring musician will wait and travel up to ten hours for every one hour of performance. But I hear you say, musicians have tour buses to party, drink, fuck and whatever other debauchery you equate with the road. Unfortunately, only the upper echelon have tour buses to while away time, for the rest of us there are diners with endless coffee, parks to sit and read, bookstores, libraries and other places we can congregate like homeless nomads without being hassled for loitering, a very real problem for the touring musician. Pretty glamorous; not. #rockstarlife
I’m pulling up at the fairgrounds where the gig is to take place. I can’t find where I’m supposed to load in so I’ll leave my thousands of dollars worth of gear in a sea of unattended, unsecured vehicles, that on the average are worth slightly more than my guitar, to try and find the load in spot. I’ve always been lucky about leaving my gear in the car but luck runs out. Will I get lucky for one last gig. In the words of one of the great touring bands of the age, Phish, ‘maybe so or maybe not’.
Having parked I begin walking towards the entrance, seeing as there’s no signage for musicians, artists for backline folks… Also, there never is. Bands get top billing and low treatment; like a hobo symbol on a kind home, every musician knows the good ones and every musician shares that info with the next musician, an active telegraph across a guild of fellow travelers.
An elderly lady at the entrance is confounded by my question about where to load in. A county sheriff is on hand and tries answer my questions about load in but he has to call someone who doesn’t seem to be picking up just then. I don’t have a ticket so they won’t let me in. I refuse to buy a ticket on principle as every bit of the income from this gig is accounted for and I’m not paying to get in because somebody didn’t put any signage out. There’s plenty of time, see the previous passage about waiting. I stand there for a while making small talk until a guy with an air of authority and a T-shirt with that says S-T-A-F-F in black letters comes by. I ask him about load in, he apologizes and says that their signage blew down but it’s just around the corner.
‘Just pull back there and load in…”
“Thanks,” I tell him and walk back to my car.
Load in was easy and uneventful. Over the years I’ve learned to carry as little as possible – I call it the one trip rule. One time I was performing in Manhattan, the West village specifically, and we had to load in, several blocks away and stay with the gear once dropped at the venue. There were two of us, leaving us with a problem of mathematics. We took a chance and left stuff unattended, but after that, lesson learned: Get it all in one trip from the car to the venue. Admittedly, this isnt always possible especially for drummers, but keep it in mind, it can help mitigate problems.
I sat for a few minutes on a stage monitor tuning my guitar, letting the wood of the neck adapt to the humidity of the summer afternoon. It wasn’t too humid but giving your wooden instrument time to acclimate to environmental conditions will never hurt and will likely ensure that you’re able to tune to concert pitch and the instrument will stay there. This is a pro tip. Instruments that don’t stay in tune are little more than noise makers. But actually any musician reading this probably already knows this, so maybe it’s not a pro tip and I have an overly enlarged sense of wisdom and experience where the touring musician’s life is concerned. Either way, not for much longer. In a few short hours, this part of my life will be wrapped up. I’m honestly not sure what I’ll do with myself.
Some gigs have elaborate sound checks, some gigs have no sound check at all, today’s gig fell somewhere in the middle. It’s a small stage and we’re a basic quartet with a pretty standard setup so we got through it pretty quickly. With little to do until show time besides wait, I head out into the fair to find something to eat. Perhaps it will be an elephant ear or a sausage on a stick or maybe sausage on a stick fried in a donut. Either way, yum.
The faces at every show are all the same. Some folks know where they’re going in life and otherwise, some do not. Some are drunk and some are working on it. Some are old and some are young and some are somewhere in between. Some dress up, some don’t. One time there was a guy dressed in full Cowboy gear like he was going to or coming from a rodeo or something; hell, he might have been. Another time, there was a guy in a head to toe blue tie-dyed unitard bodysuit. You just never know who or what you’re gonna see at shows. I’ve seen other famous musicians, famous chefs, TV personalities, comedians, etc. They’re people just out doing the shit that people do when they’re not doing the thing that they’re known for doing. Nothing fancy to it, but it’s kind of exciting. There’s nothing like that at this gig. It’s a pretty tame bunch all and all.
I start talking to a guy while I’m waiting in life for my elephant’s ear. He’s an older gentleman and told me that he’s been retired from General Motors for thirty years. We talk about that. He asks where I’m from. I tell him. We talk about the weather. He tells me he’s excited to see the band. I tell him I’m in the band. He asks me questions about being in the band. I answer them. We get on well. We get our elephant ears and talk a bit more. He tells me that he always wanted to play drums. I tell him that they seem like a lot of fun, while thinking that many drummers in my life have gotten on my nerves. Out of a couple hundred drummers I’d played with, two I desired to play with and one I was going to playing with in just a little bit at tonight’s show. We sat for a while longer chatting and then he got up.
‘Break a leg…’ he said.
I told him ‘thanks!’
I sat at the table in a makeshift beer garden for a while, a rare bit of shade in an otherwise open field converted to event space. There were many smells, sights and sounds; I drank them all in. I thought about the gig and the drive and being alone. I thought about the ride home. I thought about how my ankle hurt a bit, an old injury that acted up from time to time and whether it would act up during the show. I thought how I should have cut the grass before I left. I thought about how I hadn’t a good pizza in a while and I thought about how I should have something more to think about it, as I headed into the show, but shows were automatic. Years, decades of practice came together for a show. Things worked on inertia. An object in motion stayed in motion. If you stopped, then you might as well stop for good, because getting back going again would take more than sheer force of will. Somehow, the universe needed to give a bit of an assist to get things off the ground. You go and go and go and keep going until something prevented that forward motion. Contemplating a last gig, at my age, with a steady line-up of gigs on the horizon was something that I would be saying goodbye forever. Even if I got involved again, later, it would be different. Done was done.
Showtime came and showtime went.
We played a great set. The audience was good and full of energy.
We were the ‘kiss good night’, as Walt Disney World refers to their fireworks show: Show’s Over – Get out! And the fair manager was eager for us to pack up, load out and move on. This was not uncommon. So we packed up, loaded out and moved on.
The four of us talked for a bit in the parking lot, but the show was over. Gone were the days of surfing into the next morning on dopamine hits and whatever else we could find. Now, most of us just wanted to spend the night in our own beds, if at all possible. I didn’t like driving at night and as the heat day wore on me, I decided I that I didn’t want to sleep in my car and I wanted a hot shower; that would put me in the red for this show, but so be it.
The rest of the band were eager to get going.
“Is this still gonna be your last show?” One of ‘em asked.
“Yep,” I said.
“Alright, then, let’s talk more next week.”
“Ok,” I said.
And with that, the last gig had concluded.
Had I hoped for more of a send off? Maybe. Maybe not. I hate good-byes so I just wanted to make it as painless as possible and move on.
We got in our respective cars and drove off. They high-tailed it out of town to the highway, I went the opposite way towards my motel.
I got my key and went to my room. I unlocked the door and turned on the light. The pine walls had a cabin-like feel; a common bit of decor in this part of the country. I sat on the edge of the bed, the ringing in my ears quickly being overtaken by the loudness of the still quiet.
I laid back on the bed and let out a sigh.
‘Welp, that’s it then, I guess…’ I said to the empty room.
When I woke up the next morning I didn’t feel any different; no seller’s remorse floating around my psyche. I guess I thought that when someone turns their back on the thing that they’ve done their entire life they might feel different, but I didn’t. Maybe I would in the days to come.
With a cup of weak coffee from the hotel room, I walked towards my car. I set the coffee cup in the cup holder in the dash and started the car. I walked around the car and looked at the tires. I looked at my gear and with a quick visual inspection decided all was good.
The sun was up over the buildings on the horizon. The hot rays of the sun warmed my forehead as I went back to the driver’s side and got in. Putting the car in gear, I looked at the road ahead and took a deep breath in as I accelerated towards the road out of town.
When you start something you never know how it’s going to end. Was this the end?
The lane markings shined with the reflection of the morning sun making the dull asphalt brighten; like seeing an old-friend in a crowd and their sudden recognition comes across their face. I had never known where I was going, why should things be any different now.
