It’s A Musician’s Life (2)

It’s glamor, glamour, Glamour when you’re a musician.

Your first taste of reality comes when you first have to set up your equipment for a gig. The janitor makes you wait while he goes for a smoke, before reluctantly showing you where the electrical outlets are,for you to plug in your equipment ,and your request for some light on the dark stage area so you can see what you’re doing while settingup equipment is met with a cold hard PissOff stare.

So there’s this nice exclusive Club we’re playing at,  we’re really doing well, packing in the crowd every weekend, everyone loves us, we’re the best band they’ve had  in ages.

I’m having my meal at a table there before the show, nice quiet table (can’t have us musicians riff-raff sitting to close to themexclusive people, yes?) a plate of noodles and a glass of water (which I have to buy, cos they can’t waste their precious food on the musicians who’re going to be spending the rest of the long night making sure they have a good time) and suddenly this plate of scraps from some other table is placed on my nice quiet table.

And another plate of partly-eaten chicken with snot-stained tissues. And used glasses.

“Hi”, “Nice evening”,says the friendly waiter in the nicely-starched white uniform. “You guys playing tonight, eh? Excellent band, I like your music too”….and he walks off, clears more tables froma far and proceeds to  place all this trash on my table.

When you’re a musician, you don’t exist as a human being. You’re just this thing that does songs and stuff as and when requested. (request=order, you have no right of refusal).

Did I finish that meal?

It’s A Musician’s Life (1)

Hate having to start a post with a numbered title, but this seems like one of those with more parts that will needed to be added at some point anyway….

I guess some/many/most would think of being a musician and performing as a cool thing to do, all that Rock and Roll and bars and girls and debauchery and glamour and stuff.

I dunno. Mostly, for me, I just hope for a trouble-free and hassle-free gig.  You meet a lot of assholes when you’re a musician, even factoring in the fact that most of the population in any given place is assholes, you still meet more than the fair percentage.  So you got to develop this “wall” around you, and just not let the assholes get to you or the music  is gone that day.

There was this place in Penang some years, ago, a spanking brand new hotel facing the sea, and I was in a band auditioning for a contract at their pub. We set up the equipment, are doing a sound check, when the pub Manager asks for me to leave the stage ‘cos he doesn’t want any Indian fellows in any band at his pub, in fact he’d rather not have Indian customers too.  We had 2 guitarists in the band,  and I have a day job (the others were 100% dependant on the band for a living), so the band decided to continue with the audition without me, and so I was out of the band for a couple of months while they played in this Indian-less racist asshole’s pub.

But assholes are not just race-specific. Sometimes they take on a whole great dimension…….There was this other hotel in Penang, and their resident Filipino band’s keyboardist came down with chicken-pox, so they asked me to play with them (they didn’t have a guitarist either, they were just a keyboards-drums-bass-singer) so there I am onstage, and this cuntstomer comes up and asks if I am Filipino, I laugh and say of course no, I am just standing in for a sick Filipino, and he starts abusing me and tells me to get off the stage cos he’s there to see a Filipino band, not some idiotic Malaysian…….and again another happy tale, I have to leave the stage and they play with just the drummer and bassist and an incredulous singer.

And the good folks in the bar endure a few hours of flaky music, not one single person willing to tell off that asshole.

Can’t let these things get to me, though. Smashing someone’s face in would be a really tempting thing, but I guess after the thousandth incident you just sigh and resign yourself to the fact that assholes is everywhere.

*sigh*