This poster goes a long way to showing what I mean. I’ll point out a few things that would never have got past even a half-decent band manager. First of all, the hours. Obviously convenient for the band, but nobody bothered to check with the crowd. By 11:00 there are maybe two regulars at the bar, drinking on their tabs.Or a three piece group. A band manager would have counted the chairs and said, “Hey, this place will never support more than a duo.” There is no stage and no room for a three-piece unless they set up on the dance floor, blocking one of the dartboards. There are other things wrong on other levels. The band name is hopelessly unoriginal and gives a totally wrong impression of the music they present. Very little of it was suitable for the venue and although they might argue the point, a look in the tip jar says I’m right about that.
Also, if you are going to print up advertising on a computer, at least learn your damn spelling, grammar and maybe a smattering of typesetting while you are at it. At any rate, they never came back a second time and that is also due to rotten band management at a level that can never improve. To this day, I still hear off-color comments about that whole episode. Example, I’ll sometimes get asked if I have gone over and bailed them out with my bass playing. Nope, they took their $9 and ran.
Speaking of the money part, to date I make roughly half and half pay and tips. And I do it with a 17.9% expense to gross income ratio. Now that is efficiency. Put another way, I am 36 times better at management than the manager of my last band thought he was. Hell, he still hasn’t figured out it was me that fired him.
I had to get over to Walmart for more bicycle parts, and who should I run into? I’ll tell you in a moment. First, I had to get those parts, as I missed work today. I can easily bike the two miles to work, but I cannot walk it even in the shade. (Few can, I’ve shown you pictures of the deserted Florida summer streets.) My decision was the bike takes priority and I confess to doing only minimum maintenance for nearly a year. Take the example of the brake lines. With caliper brakes, it is possible to twist the handlebars completely around 360 degrees. If you do, it strains the cables. I am constantly putting that bike in and out of the car without always checking for this situation. Now I pay for the maintenance indirectly by losing a day’s pay.
Pete the Rock, that’s who I met. He was chatting up some gal at the Panera and did not recognize me at first. Remember that cold night he waited for me and I thought he finally gave up and rented a motel? He says he slept on the front porch. Pete says a friend of his needs a place for the short term, some guy in the army. I often see these ads about army types wanting a room, which I take to mean the army does not pay enough for them to rent much. Check back later on this one. The gal just mentioned was very good looking. Seems ones like that never need a room, sigh.
Pete reports that he still has not got a settlement on his disability claim, which he once told Wallace and I dated back to 1997. He is getting SSI (white man’s welfare) so the potential is they have to pay him the difference between his settlement amount and SSI, and in twelve years, that could easily run into $100,000. I think I’ll mention it to my lawyer. I dislike the way the US and Canada seem to have billions of dollars for welfare cases but nothing for disability insurance. There is a huge difference between can’t work and won’t work.
Pete also filled me in on a lot of the ways the system works with disability. It is hardly a perfect system, but that does not explain why it is so difficult to find out information about the actual operations. Pete has been to several court appearances over his claim and says the whole thing is over in five minutes. How do you figure that? He says the judge has no time for prolonged arguments and after all, it is not like the judge is spending his own money. I found all of that most interesting simply because there seems to be no other way to find out this information. Personally, I think the records of all people on welfare or disability should be publicly posted. I’d have no problem with that.
Then Eric across the way. Y’day I saw that his newspapers are piling up. At noon, a guy knocked on my door to say he was a friend of Eric (from over at the casino) and was concerned. We went over and pounded on all the windows. Good news, Eric has been taking naps in the summer heat. I advised him to remember to take in his newspapers. Yes, had I suspected an emergency, I would have broken in first and called 911 after.
[Author's note 2015-08-18: in the end, Pete the Rock disappeared. It turned out all his stories about big money were just that. To me it typifies the type of stray that Wallace used to befriend. Details will be posted on the day it happened, but basically, I talked to Pete's brother. And Eric cam to an even sadder end.]
This tune Eddie wants, “After The Gold Rush” is a strange thing if you ask me. It’s catchy but the lyrics sound druggy to me. It as no bass line although Eddie says there is a version that does. Then again, in the three weeks since last practice, Eddie has not downloaded, printed, memorized or learned anything, so I wrote a new bass line for that song. It is a winner. You know that feeling when you hear a new piece of music for the first time and you just know it is a hit. Like the first time you heard “Long Train Running”. That’s the sound of what I wrote. It eclipses the bass line I wrote for “Jambalaya” as my most original.
I had enough extra time to do one of those ever-interesting travel cost studies. I flipped open the AAA Tourbook to some random cow-town you never heard of. Burlington, Iowa, population 26,800. No known attractions, 512 hotel/motel rooms, one for every 52 residents, the average daily rate is $109. That makes Burlington the rough accommodation equivalent of a good-sized Miami apartment block. I’m looking at average published rates, as most of us don’t have William Shatner hiding in our furnace vents.
That means without any discounts, renting a room in nowhere, Iowa, will set you back at the rate of $3,270 per month. And you wonder why I don’t listen when the hotel industry squawks about slow times. The gear themselves for it by not offering a decent price for someone who just wants to crash overnight and be on his way. The few bad apples and rock bands would quickly get blacklisted. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ve ever swam in a motel pool. But I’ve had to pay for it.
I don’t know much about the financial mechanics of the hotel trade, but I do know spending at the rate of $3,270 per month for a room is your quick route to poverty. While I’m certain their accountants could justify why they cannot possibly get by for a penny less, we are all too familiar with specials rates and deals to believe those claims.
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