datamusicata

I just did something that I don’t believe I have ever done before.   I saved the Saturday night of the tour because I knew I was going to do it at a club where I always do extremely well.    

While I contacted them first, I never heard back from them as I put the tour together, but I kept moving forward in faith, knowing that it was going to work out.     It didn’t.   I waited so long to hear from them that I ended up not having a gig on the Saturday night of a week long tour of the Midwest.

Now here’s the truly stupid part.   That was to have been my anchor gig.  An anchor gig is a gig where you know you are going to do really well financially.   An anchor gig will pay for the entire tour and all the other gigs you get will just be profit.

Whenever you are putting together a tour, you need to have at least one gig that is guaranteed; one gig that will make the whole thing financially viable.    If you are planning a tour of substantial duration, then you need to have at least one anchor gig in each region you are going to.

This would be the first gig you book.   A gig where you either have a guarantee or you know that you are going to make substantial money, for instance, a house concert series that has its own constituency can be a good place to start.

After you have that one in place, then start trying to fill in the blanks and you try to put them as close together as you can.    Every day that you are on the road, it costs you money and the object is to not only do a great show and have a great time, but to bring home more money than you left with.     

Going out and coming back with less money than you left with simply means that you are going broke; an ugly thing for a musician.    A performing musician must perform or else one becomes rusty.   No amount of practice will take the place of being on stage, in the spotlight.    And the less work you get, the worse you will be.    And if you have to take other work to make money, then your art is going to suffer.   That’s all there is to that.

In this flagging economy, with the news giving us the worst case scenario over and over again, it is easy to feel anxiety and you won’t be the only one.    Every club owner and every audient is also feeling it, so the crowds are going to be smaller and the club owners more choosy in their acts.   This translates into clubs wanting to only book people that they know will bring in enough people to pay the club’s bills for the night or more nights hopefully.

When you couple that with the fact that the energy prices have doubled in the past six months, you have a recipe for a recession.   Many musicians don’t vote and don’t think that politics really affects them, but the regime of the past seven years has created the situation that we are in now.    They had no energy policy that they were willing to share with congress or the American people, even when a legal demand for that information was directed by congress.    And that policy seems to have been whatever the oil companies want.

So what are we touring musicians to do at this point?    One would be to find gigs closer to home.   Two would be to find alternative ways to ply your musical trade, creating performing spaces where there were none before.    Three would be to look at what you do and see if there is some other way you could do music and still make a living.   Four would be to not forget that all important anchor gig when putting a tour together and five would be to vote.