One year ago today: July 6, 2013, pub still art.
Five years ago today: July 6, 2009, apprenticeship sucks.
Ten years ago today: July 6, 2004, star trails.
MORNING
Here’s the red scooter to prove a point. I know I listed how classic cars had to be 25 years old, but here you go. That is a Florida plate on a right-hand drive Figaro car only 23 years old. I don’t know the rule book, but to those who say it is impossible, this ain’t photoshopped. And if I’m lying, then I issue the same challenge as I did to my brother so often: if I lie all the time, explain to the class how come I only do so when there is a completely jealous azzhole like you in the room. Oooo, he hated that question.
As for the bass, the band is again choosing music that used to be my specialty. Early to mid-eighties rock. That’s when country began to enter my repertoire. Meanwhile, rock is my turf and they are often getting customized bass lines I wrote thirty years ago. Fun to play, but no money in it. No future, either, because the advent of the Internet soon brought on a new era: stereotype rock. (However, I prefer NOT to play this stale material.)
Call the day a success. Any newer material shunts older stuff off the lists and I’m okay if it only does that. The singer tends to change the words when the song has a gender, which I find amateurish. I sing the lyrics the way the song goes because that is what the audience knows. It’s self-centered to think the band worries if a female vocalist sings “and then I saw her face”. So what? Only once, I had a jerkface tell me I sang a “chick” song and that’s what I told him. “So what?”
For those of you okay with the banks monitoring your spending habits, a friend of mine went to put ten bucks in gas in her car. She swiped her card and the pump stopped at $7.00. That’s all she had left on the card and the gas pump knew it before she did. She had to drive here to borrow more gas money to get home. It’s a good thing I had the cash to lend as she was ready to spend the night. Uh-uh. Maybe twenty years ago, Sally. That’s my incentive to buy a two-bedroom. Which, so you’ll know, have dried up with no listings on the market. The recent slight uptick (in the housing market) means everybody is clinging on for a better price—and there are no owner financing deals to be found. They want hard money.
NOON
I reviewed my reviews. These are the items I publish on-line to see if there is any real money to be made at it. So far, no. All sites have a quantity over quality payment system that ensures those who publish the most are paid most. As with most of the Internet, there is zero quality control, giving a huge incentive for idiots to swamp the lists with shoddy material. Right now, top ratings are based on a tally of hits, which feeds on itself. Many sites have a feedback box on how useful you found the article, but they don’t seem to be working. The same asinine material still comes back from searches made years later.
Expenses. Face it, fellow musicians, there is a cap on efficiency and it appears to be around the 35% mark unless you sell out. Selling out was once eulogized as “getting a record contract”, but the Internet kind of put that aside. I’m saying that no matter how well you plan and organize, there seems to be a limit that emerges, and it is 37% of your income. When your expenses run at that rate, you are at the peak of where you stand in the music profession. My expenses, which have climbed to 51.7% show that although I’m “making more”, I’m really making less.
This is why I know that forming a country-style duo is the best financial move in this town. I know from both experience and accurate records that my effective income triples in that situation. The reason it triples is that it departs from the formula in the last paragraph. When I have a house gig, I don’t need to store or transport equipment. My expenses drop to 8%, mostly gas to and from. Gear lasts a long time when it is pampered. The only difficulty with a house gig is if you don’t continually refresh your song list, it bores the audience, and worse, bores the staff. But I’ve had house gigs that last so long, I pulled the pin because it bored me. Figure that one out, Glen.
No progress on the camper pod, too bad, as it was a grand day outdoors. So you’ll know, I’m investigating the possibility of a wind generator to top off the batteries. Every rookie electrician will tell you a motor is a magnet, and turning the motor will generate electricity. But how much? This is where I’m not getting much help. Do I turn the motor forward or backward to get the right electricity out? How fast, or is there a limit. If I turn it faster, is there more voltage or more current?
For that matter, when I turn a twelve volt motor backwards, to I get twelve volts back out. Does the wind speed have to be regulated? Can there be too much wind? How fast do I travel to optimize the output. Ah, now you see what I mean about how shallow all the Internet experts really are. I’m going to connect the squirrel cage from the old air conditioner to a motor this week and find out once and for all.
NIGHT
How’s the celestial study going? Consider it a good brain workout that tests your patience without being asked. I’ve got the arithmetic okay for what I belief the various authors are saying is suffifienct, but these guys won’t commit to a solid set of instructions. Nobody is saying, “Do this, do that”. Yet the way they write, that is the only thing that will do much good. Worse, celestial navigation is a maddening subject, just when you have something knocked into place, like LHA (local hour angle), trying even one example shows you’ve just unpeeled a single layer.
There is one page in one of the books that is nearing a personal record for me. I’ve read it 22 times. You will need at least three texts by different authors to figure out your own consensus of what in sam hill these guys are talking about. I’ve developed a general idea of how it works but now I’m finding I have to drill down much deeper than any individual author. It took a month of reading ambiguous instructions to finally figure out I need two books only, possibly three.
One book is the Nautical Almanac for the current year. The other a set of “sight reduction tables”, for 30° to 45° (I think—most authors led me to believe I had to buy the whole set. Jerks. Anyway, if it turns out I need a third book, it will just be another set of these reduction tables. The simplest navigation method turns out to be sight reduction, where all the complicated but formulaic match is done for you. All you need is a reading and a time, and then go look up the answers in the tables. This means there are other, more complicated methods. Yeah, well for now, they can keep them.
Author's note: just my luck to get into navigation the same year most marine houses quit stocking the sight reduction tables. The preponderance of GPS has make them a no-seller. Too bad when the Chinese accidentally crash into the satellites while on a peaceful training mission.
ADDENDUM
More music, but this time the direction of the band, not the songs. We are not getting any better, but the level at which we play is top-notch. We have kind of peaked, but except for our lack of a sound man, it is an A-Room sound. Ready to take on the road. Alas, the band is tied to this area and cannot travel, but yes, we are more than good enough to do concert openings. I would place the caliber at around the same as the early J. Giles band, or say, Bachman Turner Overdrive—when those bands tried to play live, I mean. Their studio work was quite different.
I’ve got a nagging incentive that says this band should either record something or join the union. We are spinning our tires, practicing more than playing. A lot of sunk time and money. I’m tempted to take my birthday budget (I still have bucks left over from JZ’2 no-show in the Keys) and hire the band myself to play the Czech club. Did I tell you I poked my head in the door last month? They still have that Reggae-Calypso-Caribbean band with the bongo player. The crowd ignores them, but once again, the crowd leaves the hiring up to the committee. And a committees is fearful creature of habit.
Let me just say, I’m willing to put forward $300 to break the band out of this rut. They are relying on word of mouth and that is and old wife’s tale. Bar managers, if they found a band, aren’t likely to tell the competition. And the ancient crowd we play to isn’t tweeting each other how great we are. Nope, we need exposure at the right places. And I’m thinking on it. The band seems to have no mechanism to go out and get the bookings other than mailings and demo disks. If those worked, we’d have something by now, wouldn’t we?
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