The being ready is important and the delivering the best you can is even more important.
But you just never know how things will go down on any given night. That’s one of the most interesting and most frustrating things about being a musician, especially when you play kind of esoteric music as a soloist, or in a duo. Me and Jack have been playing together as “a thing” for about eight years now, and I’ve been doing occasional solo shows for about the last four. The most consistent thing I can say is that nothing has been very consistent so far.
Truth be told, most nights lately, there’s not much of a crowd around to hear the Hellbusters. Some nights, though, we draw lots of people in. And we seem to do well in new places like down South, or up in northern California, then come back home and play for four or five or ten people some nights. I never have been able to figure it out. It used to bother me worse, back when we started, this up and down stuff at gigs… and I didn’t understand that playing the music for a crowd wasn’t the goal.
The goal is to do our thing and do it well and to let the rest take care of itself. It doesn’t help the nights be any shorter, when we get asked to play a bar or club and the show starts and there’s not a soul to hear the music except the bartender and the duo playing it… but it does help me stay focused on doing our thing.
Art and commerce, people. Art and commerce. For better or worse, when you see me, I’m thinking about the former, and not the later. Mostly.
Photo credit: ToddMauldin.com, used with permission