In The Beginning

The whole reason I am writing this is to not only serve as a warning to up and coming musicians, but to also drive out some of the demons that have been lurking in my skull for the past few years.  I feel the overwhelming urge to tell my story.  Even if no one reads this and no one cares, I will still get it off my chest and it will be out there in the world for someone to find and hopefully avoid the pitfalls that some of us have fallen into.  

Ever since I was a kid and saw the video for Motley Crue's "Wild Side" and saw Tommy Lee playing his drums upside down in a cage over the audience, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  No one believed I could pull it off.  "Its a one in a million shot."  "You need to think about college." "You need to think about the future."  Those are the usual sayings you hear when you tell your family that you want to play music for a living.  I had thoughts that being a musician was glamorous, with beautiful girls on both arms and more money than I knew what to do with.  The day I signed an actual record contract with a major label (I will change names and omit certain things to protect the not-so-innocent) I thought that reality was closer than I ever imagined.  I thought that as soon as I signed a record contract that Hugh Hefner would call me personally to invite me to the Playboy Mansion and would have a Viper sitting in my driveway when I got home.  Boy was I wrong.

First off, the music company is made up of two different types of people: Musicians and the leeches who make all the money.  Unless your name is Jay-Z or 50 Cent, you're pretty much signing a contract to live a life of poverty.  When you sign a record contract, you are signing away your basic human rights.   You officially become an indentured servant.  They see you as nothing more than a walking pile of money or they don't see you at all.  Most of the time you don't even register as a carbon based life form, much less a human being.  The only reason that musicians are still part of the music industry is because the soulless leeches haven't yet figured out a way to do it without us.

What people don't understand is is that most of the musicians they like, especially rock groups are dirt poor.  Unless you sell millions of albums, you have nothing.  When my band was signed and on the road, we were scraping by on $15 dollars a day per diem, driving across the country in a second hand church van with no a/c half the time, a trailer for our equipment that had a rusty axle and tires that liked to fly off in the middle of the night (we'll get into that later on) playing on third hand equipment held together with duct tape and spit.   At the time, we had a single out on the major label, signed a contract with a smaller label whose owner was the bass player for one of the biggest rock bands in the world at the time (lets call them "Four Floors Up").  We had nothing but that crappy van and ourselves, travelling across the country playing every shit-hole dive bar, singing for our supper, all the while our record company people and our boss sitting on the hill in their castles made of gold bricks telling us how much money we owed them while we were coasting into the next town on fumes eating what was left of the lunchmeat tray we ganked from a bar two nights before.

That is all for today, my tale will continue.....