I missed an appointment. Three busses in a row did not show up on the one day this year I was counting on the bus. And I’m not into motorcycle travel in the monsoon. It’s also cold, some kind of front moving in for the weekend. The big news today is I’m returning to my unlimited minutes plan, since I told you how my usage cascaded the minute I began dating again. Gee, do you suppose that is only coincidence?Ray-B was on the phone and we covered the basics. Music, real estate, and silver. What else is there to be much concerned about? We had both noticed the enticing prices inland, say Sebring and Hee Haw, but these are not places you want to be in mid-summer. And don’t be thinking Okeechobee has any panoramic views of the lake. From that town, you need a car to get to the water.
Music again, and it is really a tale of the long slow decline to nothing in this area. The market is overloaded with old men playing twenty and thirty year old guitar songs. The audiences are bored, there is no variety, nobody packs any house any more. I’ve been saying for years the money is in the hotel lounges, where tourists can stay late without worrying about a DUI. Nobody will listen—because the hotels won’t pay for rock and roll wannabees.
They want entertainment, and that spells the brand of feel-good pseudo-country classics I’ve got on my list. My top producers (tip jar) are “Folsom Prison Blues”, “Oh, Lonesome Me”, “Spiders & Snakes”, “Pirate Looks At 40”, and “That’s What I Like About You”. And I am the only entertainer in this county that does these numbers. These generate 80% of my tips, and I’ll match my tips to any backing-track guitar player in this town. For that matter, I challenge any of them to as well to an IQ test.
As for the real estate, I wonder how much longer the market can be propped up. People ask me when the market will implode, I say it already has if they would only let capitalism run free. But everybody is terrified what will happen to the now-useless middle class if the equity in their homes drops them into a poverty-stricken retirement. Hey, they borrowed for the houses, let them borrow for retirement. Can’t do that? Consider it the missing link in their educations.
This is a cloudy area for a lot of people who feel if you don’t have a fancy house with a mortgage, you aren’t playing by the rules. Yeah, those rules also mean a lifetime tied to monthly payments and every last asset listed on some government file that will be turned over to any credit agency without a warrant, often with no questions asked. Those who live by the rule book forget it was somebody else wrote the rules. Myself, I’d rather live in a trailer court and do as I bloody well please. Makes sense to me, since my chances of a big score are actually far better than somebody chained to an alarm clock.
Silver prices are bouncing around. People ask me if the economy will collapse. I say it has already done so, but for the artificial manipulation of credit and money. The entire middle class has been hoodwinked but no politician dares chance the final plunge on his watch. A third of the people out there owe more on their houses than they are worth. That alone should have collapsed the entire housing market in the first ninety days. Yet years later, we still get the bogus ads and claims of recovery. Hold on to your sinking house, make another year’s payments. The market will come back. Honest.
Ray-B has also noticed the emergence of the sucker ads along the coast. Unrealistically low prices, until you find out about the hidden fees. These are not just the flowery ads for decrepit houses in bad neighborhoods, but upscale subdivisions trying to unload “equity positions” on the public. Read you ads closely. Any agency that does not quote a full, complete, and revealing price, is crooked. Damn crooked.
There was a wake for Wanda at the club tonight, but I did not attend. Ostensibly, it was the rain but I choose to stay away from any chance of bickering. From what I hear, there a several vultures at work since there is no logical heir to the Karaoke throne. I’m not stating that is their motives, but even the hint of such squabbling is enough to keep me on my own side of town.
ADDENDUM
Finally. I was able to play bass again for a few hours but I’m not out of the weeds yet. I still have to hold it funny. This week’s discovery is a set of Blues tunes that are adaptable to my bass-only style. True, none are the popular standards, but let’s not quibble. I like innovation. Yet each development in the past twenty years has taken me that one step further from finding a decent guitarist. That’s meaning one who does what they are told to the very best of their ability, but doesn’t think that makes them immortal. If obedience sounds harsh, recall that is what guitarists expect of the rest of the band. When they stoop to allow your input, it is only insofar as it does not interfere with their glorious, illustrious routines.
I no longer think a band is going to happen for me in Florida. The times I’ve had successful groups before were when I formed them all from the ground up--and the members had no "experience" to cause trouble. (Insert dating older women joke here.) While I’m not a taskmaster, there has to be someone in undisputed control, and in my last group, the only gear that did not belong to me was the lead guitar. We played regularly as long as I was in charge. The group collapsed fast when the guitar player started throwing his weight around—and my singer was his wife’s best friend.
Did I ever tell you about that crowd of jokers? They started complaining how I took 12% off the top for management. I told them the other agents took 15%. Idiots never realize how important management is until they try it themselves. I fired the lot of them one Monday and they promptly told the hotel [where we played] that they would take over the gig. The bartender said they had some dopey looking faces when they showed up Tuesday evening and every scrap of my gear was gone off the stage.
I’m sure I told you about this. Wednesday, I get a call from Guitar Center would I give a reference for them to rent a PA system? No way, I heard they were recently unemployed. The bartender tells how they showed up later with home stereo speakers in a shopping cart. Wait, there’s more. At the end of their first week, they did a Blues Brothers. Their bar tab was more than their pay. About a month later, the singer called to brag they now “had their own PA” and wanted to know when I was going to use my Cadillac to deliver it and set it up for them like I “did before”.
Bands do not evolve. After the first viable gig, they take the path of least resistance. Once a full set is learned, there will be years where nothing happens. As members eventually quit, the newcomers are expected to learn old sets. May I point out my groups break this formula. New material is constantly replacing the old, as long as I’m calling the shots.
But that is re-invention, it is not evolution. It took my own brother eight years to clue in on the connection between music and women. Evolution implies you could have locked him in a shed for that time and a fully-fledged band would have emerged. Nonsense, he horned in on my band well-knowing from experience once he made enough of an asshole of himself, I would just leave.
So, I have no doubt that band still exists in some form. But not one thing would have changed since I left. They’ll play more music, but it won’t be the focused music that got us on stage when I was 13 years old. They’ll get the odd gig, but in the style I they learned from me in the 60s. They’ll do everything by consensus and the band will stagnate. Fun without profit, same as every other band that thinks like a democracy.
Nor can I explain why I think things will or would be be any different up in Boca Raton.
