I more or less joined the hippie
subculture by the age of seven or so, when my parents thankfully
realized that me and normal public school weren't mixing well, and I
needed to be among my own kind. By a freak coincidence, the New York
City suburb we had moved to several years earlier because they had
“good schools,” happened to actually have a good school in it, a
product of the 1960's cultural renaissance called the Learning
Community.
I consciously recognized my hippie
nature when, you could say, I became a member of the opposition.
Because upon graduating from the sixth grade, there were no more
hippie school options for little David, and I went for the first time
since my abortive attempt at first grade to a non-hippie school, in
this case a public school full of the children of Republican
businessmen, Middlebrook Junior High School, run entirely (or at
least so it seemed) by pasty adult products of the 1950's.
Surrounded for the first time by
children who were clearly not hippies, I realized I had a very
different value system than the vast majority of these little
consumers, and I started feeling very special and very isolated at
the same time. Having grown up in the Learning Community, I thought
that sharing, cooperating, enjoying and discovering were what it was
all about. The positive was emphasized, and little time was spent
dwelling on the negative. So it was only once I was completely
surrounded by it that I understood that the converse of all this was
that competition, hoarding, selfishness, proving that you're better,
“winning” – make people miserable.
I have never adjusted well to
mainstream society. Early in my adult life in the ranks of the
workforce, I was employed as a typist at the age of 23. After being
on the job for a couple months I learned that I was being paid better
than any of the other typists because I was the fastest. The guy who
sat in the cubicle next to me was a working class Republican, which
is conceptually perhaps even more annoying than being a rich
Republican, but nonetheless I liked him because he treated his
coworkers with cordiality and respect, despite the fact that his boss
was a female Democrat and the guy sitting next to him was a
long-haired, pot-smoking, self-proclaimed Maoist at the time (me).
Anyway, when I learned I was being paid more than anyone else ($12 an
hour before taxes) I didn't feel at all good about it, and I wanted
to ask my boss if she'd consider either giving the other typists a
raise or lowering my wage and raising theirs so we were even. But no
one would tell me how much they were being paid. So I felt fairly
unequipped and unsupported in my idea, and never pursued it further.
Nobody in my immediate or extended
family, none of my friends in public school or their parents talked
about such things either. But the value system I learned to embrace
in elementary school told me that how much money someone made didn't
matter, in terms of their value as human beings, as friends, future
spouses, etc.
Of course, if you don't value money
beyond making what you need for you or your family to live a decent
life, and if you're a basically not-very-well-organized hippie
musician type, you may not know how much money you make. Taking me
for example, when I used to make a living as a street musician I
carried around what I called my wallet, which was a bag of coins that
usually weighed about ten kilos. Eventually, in order not to
embarrass my girlfriend at the time, I started going to the bank and
changing the coins into bills, which is what the other street
musicians generally did on a regular basis. If you watched another
street musician in action for a half hour or so you could generally
get the idea of what kind of money they were making, which always
depended on various factors including how good they were, what kind
of material they were doing, where they were playing, and at what
time of day or night they were doing it. At the end of the day all
the street performers would naturally count their earnings, whether
they did that publicly or once they got home. For any of them it
would be very easy to figure out how much you were making per hour on
an average day, but there was only one other street performer in the
Boston area aside from me who didn't mind talking about that.
I don't think it had to do with
musicians not wanting to divulge information that might be helpful to
the competition in terms of figuring out where and when to play what
kind of material. Most of the performers were quite obviously just
playing the kind of music they liked anyway, which was usually not
the familiar pop songs that could have made them the most money. I
think people didn't talk about it because of their training growing
up; if you're not making much money you should be embarrassed, and if
you might be making more than someone else you shouldn't want to risk
making people feel jealous by talking about it, because of course
money is what everybody wants.
The one thing I have found that people
sometimes feel OK about asking, though quietly, in private, and often
in hushed tones, is “do you make a living at this?” It's usually
pretty clear that this would be the first in a series of questions on
the subject, if the person asking felt comfortable with follow-ups,
but they almost never do. This is as far as they can go.
But if for no other reason than mutual
aid and support between fellow musicians and other cultural workers,
and more broadly for the millions of self-employed people out there
(or at least people attempting to be self-employed), having regular,
honest and open discussions of the actual numbers involved with
making a living as a musician would seem very useful.
But I'm still gonna back up a little
bit more and give a little more context for why I think this is the
case. Chiefly, the largely self-imposed mystique of the arts. Maybe
it's not a coincidence that “musician” and “magician” sound
so similar in many languages. One thing most professional or
aspiring professional musicians have learned along the way is that it
benefits them, at least on one level, to maintain an air of mystery
about what they do and how they do it. If people are under the
impression that a) what you do is something that requires innate and
rare talent which other people will never have, and b) even though
you're not really famous yet, you are about to be -- then they're
more likely to talk about you, which is what you want, because then
more people will want to come to your shows so they can say “I was
there back when he was playing for crowds of two dozen people in a
noisy bar.” I know artists who have managed to maintain this
almost-famous mystique for decades without ever getting the major
label deal they were constantly rumored to be on the brink of.
But this air of mystery is a
double-edged sword. By maintaining this almost-famous mystique, the
idea of actually earning money as a cultural worker, having certain
standards for remuneration, joining a union, or otherwise figuring
out how to make a living on the assumption that you will never be
signed by that major label (and if you do you'll probably starve
under their auspices just as well) – all just seems passe and
beneath anyone's attention. So what if the gig at the festival
doesn't pay? There's an audience, and that A&R guy just might be
in it this time. You'll get exposure! (But you won't die of it,
hopefully...)
I played at a festival once where I was
staying in the same cheap motel with most of the other performers.
Many of the bands playing at the festival were ones I had heard of,
what you might call second-tier celebrities. No hits or any of that,
but bands with a solid national and international following, where
many hundreds of people would regularly pay to hear them play a show,
on their good days. So I was somewhat shocked to learn that among
the musicians I interrogated, a consistent pattern emerged: because
of the massive overhead expenses involved with touring as a band,
rather than as a solo artist, none of these bands were making a
living as a band. If anyone in the band was making a living as a
musician, he or she was doing this because he or she had a solo
career. When they tour as a band, the band members all have flexible
day jobs that allow them to tour regularly, make a little bit of
money if they're lucky to do better than break even on the tour, and
then go back to work. The lead singer in the band usually would then
continue to tour as a solo artist, and between touring as a solo
artist and touring with the band, that person would often be making a
living as a musician.
And then what does making a living
mean? Different things to different people. In Portland, Oregon,
where I live, the local musician's union is on a perpetual campaign
to convince local musicians not to play for less than $25 per person
for a gig. A very talented musician friend around here who usually
does a bit better than that at his gigs claims to be making a living
because he's paying his rent and eating, but he only has 17 teeth by
his own count. (Normally you should have 32, give or take a couple.)
Of course, on the flip side of not
wanting to talk about money out of embarrassment of one kind or
another or because you want to maintain your almost-famous mystique,
is not wanting to talk about money because you really just don't care
about it as long as you're eating three meals a day and sleeping in a
room with a roof and four walls on a fairly regular basis.
Early on in my musical career I was
fairly deeply exposed to two very different models of how to go about
attempting to be a full-time performer. I played backup for two
brilliant artists on different tours around the US. One artist's
mantra was “I'll drive eight hours for a $25 gig.” The other's
was, “you need to make about $500 for most of your gigs or you
won't be able to make a decent living.” I tried out both
strategies over the years since then and found that the latter
strategy, though ridiculously practical and way less sexy, is the one
that works.
My method of trying out these
strategies, however, was pretty much haphazard, because I never kept
track of anything. I mainly gravitated towards the “try to get
$500 to do a gig” methodology because, to my surprise, I found that
wherever you go, you'll get better-organized and better-attended gigs
if you ask for more money, and that includes among the Left. Since I
had also discovered that although I had no interest in getting rich,
having a certain amount of money was very useful for eating and such,
it didn't seem like rocket science to take the risk of certain fringe
elements of the anarchist scene calling me a sell-out, to start
asking for more money to do gigs. (Which in itself requires having a
following or making connections with student groups, unions, and
other organizations with budgets, but that's another story for
another blog post. Or you can just buy or borrow my booklet, Sing
for Your Supper, for more on that subject.)
But until very recently I never truly
understood the sense of my friend's $500 figure, or, to put it
another way, I never understood fully why contractors like traveling
musicians need to get paid so much more than your average hourly
worker in order just to make ends meet. I can thank my wife, Reiko,
for further developing this understanding, because several years ago
she took on the unenviable task of sorting through the receipts and
invoices that I now try to remember to save, and filing our taxes for
us, with the help of the nice accountants whose office is a few
blocks from our apartment.
Half of the accountants down the street
have pink hair and are themselves musicians. I heard about them
years ago from a message one of them sent to me on MySpace. I guess
they noticed I was local, and figured I might need my taxes done, and
some of them specialize in doing taxes for musicians. Having not
paid taxes since the last time I had a normal job, circa 1990 or so,
I would normally have ignored such a message. But Reiko was moving
in with me from Japan, we were getting married, and in order for her
to get her papers to stay in the US we had to start filing taxes (and
even five years' worth of back taxes).
I just brought our 2012 tax filings –
a stack of papers several inches tall that Reiko neatly divided into
folders – to Anne the accountant this afternoon. The impression I
get from her is that the vast majority of self-employed musicians
don't file taxes – since, she said, any time musicians file taxes
with her it's because they're doing something that requires them to
have a record of having filed and paid taxes, such as their spouse is
getting a Green Card or they're buying a house. So self-employed
people who aren't marrying a foreign national or buying something
really expensive often don't have much of a paper trail of any kind
and basically don't need to file, so they don't.
(For those reading this who aren't from
the US, a clarification: the only reason most people file taxes in
the US if they're not self-employed is because they basically have
to, since their employer has been taking lots of money out of their
payroll all year, and if they file they get a little of it back. In
other countries people file taxes so they can take advantage of
government services. It generally doesn't work that way here – the
government only takes from us so it can buy bombs, it doesn't offer
services in return like in civilized countries. It wouldn't even
occur to most people in the US who are filing taxes to think that
way, unless they're approaching retirement age and will soon quality
for their Social Security pittance.)
I asked Anne how many of her musician
clients make a living entirely as performing artists. The answer
took me by surprise. None.
When I had a kid seven years ago I
decided to stop touring all the time, and to just tour as much as I
needed to to make a living, spending the rest of the time at home
with my family. Since we started collecting receipts, filing taxes
and otherwise keeping track of things in a way that I have never
bothered doing previously, the numbers are no longer something I need
to wildly guess at, and it's all a bit more distressing than I
thought.
I learned that for every two dollars I
make touring, on average over the course of the year, I spend
approximately one dollar on traveling expenses – and that's despite
the fact that I'm only staying in hotels about 5% of the time I'm on
tour. Maybe I eat too expensively, but if you want to stay healthy
on the road long-term you can't live on gas station hot dogs or fast
food, and you don't have time to cook for yourself. In 2012 I toured
a bit less than I did in 2011 – I was away from home a total of 202
days (some of it with my family, most without). During the course of
those 202 days I did 120 gigs. Practically speaking, when you take
into account travel days and the fact that it's hard to do many good
gigs on a Monday or Tuesday, that's about how many shows you can
realistically do in 202 days of touring.
If the average gig among those 120 gigs
paid $500, that would be $60,000 total, so half of that would be
$30,000, which is what I would then have for paying rent, feeding,
clothing and healthcare for my family, and everything else – car
insurance, the car loan, taxes... But when the average gig comes out
to more like $350, as was the case in 2012, then I basically earned a
total of $20,000, which, after rent is paid, comes out to just over
$200 a week for the three of us to cover all our expenses. And we
spend quite a bit more than that on an average week (partially thanks
to my very expensive, aging teeth), thus the $10,000 or so in credit
card debt.
So basically unless we're going to
forgo dentistry, live on cat food, or some other popular American
cost-cutting measure, if I'm to make a living as a musician I have
three basic choices: a) spend 202 (or so) days on the road, do 120
gigs, and get paid an average of $500 per gig, b) tour more than that
and get paid less on average per gig, or c) tour less and get paid
more. Given that option B would result in absentee fatherhood and
the sure death of any normal relationship, and option C starts
becoming financially unrealistic unless you have a bigger following
than me, it seems like option A is the only way to go.
So if you find yourself touring
incessantly and working your ass off but you just can't make ends
meet, (like most musicians), consider the possibility that this is
because you're not making $500 per gig on average, and there are only
365 days in a year, or you don't eat enough cat food. And the next
time you're thinking of organizing a benefit concert and asking a
touring musician to play at it for free, think about that!
