In praise of bad gigs
Every working musician has a professional low point. Although the nature of the “lowness” is relative (one person’s low necessarily differs from another’s), most musicians can point to a time or a job or a gig that was the least fulfilling in a career of ups and downs.
This is me (right) playing the least enjoyable gigs of my life.
It makes me sad to look at this photo. Not because it was a bad gig (remember “lowness” is a relative concept), but because my shame prevented me from enjoying it more.
Fact: Each gig I played for this company made me feel like a cartoon (funny, because I was a toy soldier at Disney World just a few years earlier and thought then that dressing up and making people happy was way fun).
Fact: For most of these gigs, I caught a ride out to Long Island, changed into tights on the street (some days discretion wasn’t an option), stood on a pedestal and played corny fanfares.
Fact: I stopped working for this company when I showed up for a gig, only to be told that the event was a sweet-16 party that was filming for the MTV show “My Super Sweet 16”. I did not want my MTV debut to be in blue tights.
Fact: Many attendees at these events (usually weddings) seemed to genuinely get a kick out of having corny fanfares played by men in tights.
I was a shame-forward human while playing these jobs. I remember hoping that no one would ever recognize me (not that I had many friends that would be at Italian weddings in Massapequa).
But what was really going on? What about this work was so distasteful to me? I was a human making noises on a trumpet that made other humans feel things. What else did I think I was hoping to do as a musician? If I wasn’t aspiring to do that, what on Earth was I aspiring to, and why?
The unflattering answer is that I was aspiring to a fancy version of that. I wanted tuxedos and Mahler, or indie rock bands and famous people. Anything that appeared less fancy felt beneath me. Even though I didn’t play well enough at the time to be considered for much fancy work, it was somehow important to my self-concept that I identify as someone who felt above blue-collar music work.
Ugh. Insufferable bullshit. Looking down on someone else’s music-making is not a virtue. It’s petty, and unlikely to bring anything resembling lasting happiness.
Within a life in the arts, there should be many occasions to create things and moments that help people feel more like people. With many occasions, comes variability. Some meaningful moments will be big, others small. They will look, and sound, and feel, and smell differently (I don’t think the owner of that company washed the tights as often as he said he did). It’s easy to get distracted by the surface features of such moments, which will, statistically speaking, be quite different from one another. This trap (paired with my unwavering, unfounded arrogance) robbed me of potential meaning and happiness.
The happiest musicians I know focus instead on the invariable elements of meaningful music-making. They are drawn to the structure, and the simple, beautiful commonality of all meaningful musical experiences: making music that helps someone (even if that someone is the performer) feel more human.
Next time you’re at a bad gig, make someone, even if it’s just you, feel more human with your music.
