When I dropped out of college the first
time to go to California and be a full-time hippie, I joined a
protest encampment of homeless people because I was, briefly,
homeless, for the first time in my short life, but not the last. I
could have left Indiana, where I was quickly spending my parents'
savings attending a private liberal arts school, and headed east,
back home, but this was out of the question, to my fiercely
independent young mind. I wasn't dropping out of college to go back
home to my parents, I was dropping out of college to really
see the world, the world beyond a private college in a
post-industrial, impoverished town in the midwest. But I quickly
found myself living in a tent in a public park in Berkeley, and
getting arrested for it. My father had convinced me that the fact
that I could touch-type and had some familiarity with word processing
programs was a marketable skill set, and I took his advice and looked
for a job as a typist, which quickly led to a series of jobs, first
working for a doctor who had written a book about a new exercise
regimen, and then working for an Iranian refugee who had been an
active member of the leftwing Iranian Student Association in the
Sixties, and ran a printing business (still does).
I was a college dropout, but many of
our clients at Fariborz's business across from Sproul Plaza and the
University of California were college students. Back then even
college students often didn't know how to type, but had to hand in
typed papers, so they'd come to us for that. I quickly discovered
that what we were doing, beyond typing their papers, was rewriting
them. Not redoing them completely or anything, but just correcting
each sentence so it made sense. The overall paper might still be
gibberish, but at least it was grammatically correct gibberish, with
words spelled in such a way that Mr. Webster might approve.
Within a few years, though, I had
damaged the workings of my wrists from too much typing. I had long
wanted to play music for a living, and had discovered I could make
about as much playing music on the streets as I might stand to make
working in a cafe or doing some other kind of minimal-wage
service-industry job. As a college dropout with a solidly white
collar upbringing, I don't think it ever even occurred to me to look
for a job in a factory or something like that. So I started busking
full-time in the streets and subways in Boston, where I was living
when I lost my ability to type for a living.
I was proud that I made a living as a
street musician. It was a marginal living, though, especially since
I refused to play any songs that anybody might recognize, which are
the sorts of songs I might have made some more money at. 100% of my
daily set list were obscure leftwing songs. Not only had most people
never heard the songs, but most people had never even heard of the
artists who wrote them, either. (That is, I wasn't just doing the
more obscure songs by popular artists, the ones that never became
hits. I was doing obscure songs by obscure artists.)
I shared a room in a two-bedroom
apartment with my girlfriend, and together we had to come up with
half the rent for our one room each month, and each month it was a
struggle. The idea of having health insurance was out of the
question. When I needed dental work, I found a different dentist
each time, and asked them to bill me. Then I proceeded to ignore the
bill. Sometimes I felt guilty for doing that, but usually not too
much, since dentists had what I found to be an outrageous habit of
talking about their last trip overseas, or their membership at the
golf club, while working on my teeth. To my struggling street
musician mind, this sort of talk was all the justification I needed
to not pay the bill, along with the fact that I wasn't making enough
money to do that, eat, and pay rent in the same month. All of my
clothing was old, faded, and mismatched. Grunge music and fashion
was just becoming popular in Seattle, but not in Boston. I embraced
my poverty like a good leftist, but I secretly dreamed of at least
having the option of dressing a bit better.
I still don't play golf, but I travel
more now than any of my dentists, and I wear clothing that isn't
faded, because I like to and can afford it. Still can't afford
health insurance. Unlike most of the kids I grew up with, I don't
own a house, and the idea of buying one, or paying for health
insurance, is a cruel joke. I do pay my dental bills now, just
because I'm older now, and the dentists are sometimes younger than
me, and I just have trouble justifying stiffing them for the bill,
even though they all own their own houses in neighborhoods which I
will never be able to afford to live in, and send their children to
private colleges, like my parents tried to do, which I never will be
able to do. Unless I win the lottery or have a hit song, neither of
which is ever going to happen, since I don't buy lottery tickets and
I'm not on a record label.
The gigs are indoors now, and all over
the world, not on the streets of Boston. And looking at my non-faded
jeans, my smartphone and my full set of teeth covered in bridges and
gold crowns, my happy little trilingual daughter, I guess I'm doing
better than I was when I was busking in the Park Street T Stop for
the commuters. But I'm still living in a small two-bedroom
apartment, this time in Portland, Oregon, where the rents are similar
to what they used to be like in Boston, back when I lived there,
before the new Republican governor got rid of rent control in the
state of Massachusetts. My daughter, Leila, often says she hopes
some day I'll make more money, and we can live in a big house. My
partner and I laugh at her bourgeois fantasies. But they're poignant
for me, as well. The fact is, not only is the idea of living in a
big house out of the question, but the part-time job my partner,
Reiko, got so we might have some savings, has mostly gone to pay down
our spiralling credit card debt, not to save anything.
I joke about needing to get a day job
to my friends, to my email list when begging for people to organize
gigs for me and such. But it's actually not a joke – I just don't
know what else to do for a living. So I just keep on running this
little business, this music business, me, partly because I don't know
what else to do. And I talk about it openly, publicly, too, because
it's in my Jewish blood to talk about money. And I don't say that to
be self-loathing or anti-Semitic or anything like that. I'm glad
that unlike so many of my musician friends who don't have a petit
bourgeois background like me, and are hopelessly unable to make
ends meet as artists, I've been more or less able to manage it. We
petit bourgeois types know that you don't go trying to find
employment from someone else, you create it for yourself. The good
Christian work ethic musician types continually bang their heads
against the wall, always hoping for a record deal that will solve
their problems, and in the meantime hoping that if they just work a
little harder promoting their own gigs at venues that don't pay,
they'll eventually make it, through sheer Calvinist determination.
Of course it never works, except for the lucky few who land the
record deals. But we petit bourgeois look at that model and
see it doesn't work, and so we try to create one that does, or at
least one that might. I don't want to get into the sticky business
of naming names to more fully illustrate this point, but I've noticed
over and over again that it's true. If you're into indy leftwing
music, you might have noticed that a lot of the musicians you like
are of petit bourgeois Jewish lineage. I'm pretty sure this
isn't because the petit beourgeois
Jews are better artists than people from other backgrounds,
and it's definitely not because they come from families with more
money (contrary to popular opinion, in modern America at least, they
usually don't). It's because they're better at running a small
business. (Jews have traditionally had to be good at that, because
they were locked out of other professions in many anti-Semitic
societies in Europe and North America for centuries. This is no
longer the case, but old habits die hard.) A lot of people seem to
think that the modern phenomenon known as the email list is a recent
invention, and don't realize that there was something called a
mailing list, where you put stamps on envelopes and hoped to get
clients or students or gigs out of that procedure. I used to help my
dad stuff envelopes for his mailing list when I was a small child.
But making a living this way is still
very marginal, even for those of us who are making it more or less
work. And I'm writing about it, because I'm not a secretive WASP who
doesn't talk about money, and because I like to write, and maybe some
people like to read this sort of soul-baring blog type stuff. Some.
Not many, really, but what the heck, it's what I do. I write songs,
I write blog entries, I tell stories, and then I hope there's enough
of a way to monetize these activities so I can make some kind of a
living at it. Weird pursuit, really. A day job would make more
sense. You go to work, you get paid. That seems much more
predictable and sensible than this silliness. The mystery is kind of
lessened with the whole “view count” phenomenon. Back when you
sold CDs, you might be humbled by the fact that you only sold two
thousand CDs in a given year, but you could at least imagine that
people might be playing them for their friends and copying them.
Now, with Blogspot and Youtube, and everybody sitting in front of
their own laptops or bent over their own smartphones, the view count
tells you exactly who's not listening or not reading what you put out
there. Usually these blog entries are read by a few hundred people,
and that's it. There are ten thousand people on my email list, but
you can see how many of them are clicking through to the blogs or
Youtube videos. Usually not many. But then at least I have the
sense to tell the folks who do click through and listen to a song or
read a post, that if they want me to keep engaging in these practices
they need to send me money now and then, or organize a gig for me now
and then. I have a friend who runs a news website that gets a hundred
thousand visitors every month, and there's no “donate” button on
it. Even after I told him there should be one. But he's not Jewish.
The proof is in the pudding. (I'm not sure what that means, but it
seemed appropriate to throw that in.)
Approximately once a year I'll put a
song up on Youtube that gets ten or twenty thousand views, and then I
think I'm doing something worthwhile. Probably less than once a year
I'll end up singing at a protest for a similar number of people. But
the rest of the time, the songs I put up get viewed by around 5% of
the number of people who are ostensibly on my email list, and the
gigs are attended by far fewer. I burn out volunteers one after
another all over the world, just so I can do a gig for a few dozen
people. And I have to spend more than half of every year doing that
in order to make ends meet. And then the ends don't quite meet, and
I have to come up with a new way to make some extra money –
exploit my partner's labor, or start up a campaign to get people to
subscribe to me, and of course I can't even think of recording a CD
without begging for money first.
Before I started this subscription
campaign, we were about to hit critical mass. $17,000 in credit card
debt, and I hadn't even bought plane tickets for the next tour yet.
Meltdown was imminent. Then about 2% of the good people on my email
list came through and sent me $50 for their subscriptions, and I was
saved, for the time being at least. Disaster averted. Still back to
$17,000 of credit card debt, which seems to be the magic number. But
the plane tickets are paid for already for another tour, and now I'm
sitting in a plane, en route from Honolulu to Hiroshima.
I don't know if I'm going to be
deported from New Zealand when I get there. I never know if I'm
going to be deported. If I got work permits in this business, there
wouldn't be a business. So I hope for the best, the way I do with
the lack of health insurance. I got banned from Canada for a year
once because of that sort of thing, but so far I've avoided such
problems with any other country. I often ask myself, what's the
point of touring more than half the year if I always seem to have
$17,000 in credit card debt and can't afford health insurance? (Last
week I got an angry email from a guy in Switzerland, accusing me of
charging too much for my gigs, saying had no right to complain when
I don't get enough of them, if I'm going to be trying to make more
than 200 euros to do a gig...) What's the point of spending all this
time writing songs if usually only a few hundred people watch the
video on Youtube? What's the point of writing blog posts that even
fewer people read? Then I have to remind myself, I like to travel, I
like to play music, and I like to write, and that just might have to
do. Especially since I have no idea what else I'd do.
After getting strip-searched at the
Trondheim airport a few months ago, I stopped smoking pot on a daily
basis, and stopped traveling with it (even though they didn't find
the pot I had on me in Trondheim). I rediscovered that when you
don't smoke pot every day, you do this thing called dreaming. But
dreaming, it seems, is really over-rated. Two nights ago I dreamed I
was playing a gig for enlisted servicemen in the US military in a
venue that was laid out in such a way that you couldn't see your
audience, and the sound system was more like some kind of DJ system
that you couldn't plug a guitar into, and the woman who was supposed
to be doing the sound there had no idea what she was doing, and was
more interested in playing her original songs for me so she could
hear what I think of them. This is the kind of dream I have, most
of the time. Sometimes I dream about sex and fun stuff like that,
but mostly I dream about getting busted for drug possession, getting
deported for trying to play a gig without a permit, crashing the
rental car I'm driving in, my daughter getting hit by a car while I'm
away on tour, stuff like that.
And then I think about finding a normal
job, no joke. And then I remember I'm a college dropout with bad
wrists, and I have no idea what else I could possibly do for a
living. And then I thank the Visa Corporation for existing, and
allowing me to have a constant $17,000 credit card debt. And I thank
the immigration authorities in most countries for usually looking the
other way. And I thank Reiko for having a job. And I thank those
120 or so people every year who figure they don't mind organizing
another gig for me. And the few hundred people who watch my latest
Youtube broadside, and the few dozen people who come to my gigs, when
I'm lucky, and the 181 people who averted my imminent financial
meltdown last spring and subscribed to me. And I think, I guess I'll
just keep on having bad dreams at night about the job I do, and
daydreams about day jobs, and not make any drastic changes, at least
until I find myself living in a tent in a park somewhere again.
