Songs for Dollars: The Business Plan of Lunatics.

No use fooling ourselves. Have we been? Has the well run dry? Is the horse dead? We have been licking our wounds for a year without healing them. Put the thing to bed for a while. Sure. And do what, I suppose. What would the music sound like if you stopped long enough to hear it? Yes. There is nothing for me to say. The music wouldn’t sound like anything. Birds chirping. Tires on wet asphalt. Wind in bare branches, wind in leaf piles. Slug on the leaf. 

Well. Yes. We have just been dashing from leak to leak without ever noticing where the ship is steering, and as it turns out, it’s probably running round in circles. Fair enough. Evidently no harbor, anyway. Keep it afloat and drift in circles. Sailing somewhere is dangerous anyway. Yikes. Just another same sad story. An old hulk tub rusted onshore used to go on great expeditions.

Maybe the captain was crazy. Maybe the crew got the fear. Off in search of different treasure. It’s pretty cold out here, if one guy doesn’t pay enough, or the music isn’t interesting enough, or both, then his players are gone. Some guys get taken out by Peterbilts and bring their consciousness back from the brink. One. Finger. At. A. Time. 

Nobody is ever going to hear us play, and think, hey, these guys deserve a break.

I’ll give them $30k to make an album and underwrite a tour. Nah. We have to write 30 hit singles that maybe no one will ever hear, and sell one of them to Norah Jones. The fucking business model is fucked. There’s no way to wrap the mind around it. It’s changing too fast, and there are too many facets. It would take superhuman stamina and focus. Focus. Shit. Are we lazy? I was happy to coast… to show up at rehearsal on time, get in the van, do some driving, hang out in towns and cities. We never went anywhere really special. That boat down the East River and around the Statue of Liberty was pretty legit. Levon Helm at moe.down was good. It’s not like it was boring. Nobody cares about Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Yellow Springs, Ohio.

The old business model is now linked to vice, and we’re at the bottom of the food chain.

Our positions are expendable. You mow some down, a new crop of musicians show up in their place, ready to work for the same or less money. It’s an unnecessary expense, anyway. You can have Pandora Radio, for all anyone cares. Getting distracted.

What to tell Jeremy at the Zin Wine Bar in Plymouth? $300 is only enough for 2 guys? A fucking trio at a clean $100 per man, still isn’t really fair, for 4 hours of work and having to drive. The fuck. We must be doing something wrong. On some random Tuesday, or even Friday night, that would work, for maybe a 2 or 3-hour hit, tops. On New Year’s Eve, that’s kind of rough. Still. $20/hr. I’ve already spent 2 hours fucking with it and we might not even take the gig. How did everything become so confusing? At what point did I not figure out how to do this?

A few half-assed recording projects and some emails do not make a career.

I don’t know what the real truth is. I can play the daylights out of the trumpet from time to time. Anything else is beyond me. My mind is feeble, like a child’s, when it comes to real-world things. I don’t really have a job, right now, or maybe ever. Jesus. To think. What have we imagined this as being. Just driving around from bar to bar. It wasn’t entirely boring. We learned a lot about humans.

There is not much in America that is worth investigating. People are just slogging it out, wherever, everywhere. Some of it is prettier to look at than others. Flint exists… We have been hanging out for 6 years at ground zero of the rust bowl apocalypse. Long Island City, Queens, Cleveland, Detroit, Flint, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago… There is still some money in these places, but not much, and no one is throwing it around carelessly. There are plenty of bars. Utica, NY. Narraganset, RI, Providence. Hartford. Boston. The money in those places is tied up in accounts.

Driving from town to town hustling up cash money is the business plan of lunatics.

I failed at mini-economy in Elementary School. I made 9 Maloni Bucks the whole term. I never had anything to sell. It was a game, anyway, so I just didn’t buy anything. Anyhow, that metaphor only covers so much… the point is I wasn’t adept at making a product, marketing, or selling it, and I’m still not. The industry used to do that, and now they don’t anymore except for the top 40 or whatever. It’s impossible to get a payoff on more investment than that.

Now the artist has to set up that infrastructure on his or her own.

Just like the book says, it’s really true. In the best of all possible worlds, you would have: General manager, tour manager, (and one, another, or both of these would ideally double as equipment manager,) Booking Agent, Promoter/PR agent (who would ideally be an ace creative graphic designer, as well,) and you’d probably have a lawyer around to look over contracts and to generally watch your ass, and a business manager, who specializes in keeping the books, making and overseeing adherence to the budget, managing payroll and taxes, and so forth. Then, you’ll need a sound guy (who might take on the tour & equipment co-management, for instance,) a light guy, a merch guy, and that would probably do it.

At that point you might be able to count on having a guy guy, just a guy who’s around, a yug, somebody’s buddy, and that can be helpful when you need a runner or a doorman, or something. So including yug guy, who’s just the intern, helpful dude, and a 5 piece band, what’ll you have if these people are so specialized that none of them can do more than one job, (every job description is filled by a different person- which in real life might not be the case, but here for the sake of argument.)

Gen. Mgr.

Tour Mgr.

Equip Mgr.

Sound

Lights

Booking

PR

Graphics

Lawyer

Bus. Mgr.

Merch

Extra Yug

Drums

Piano

Bass

Trumpet

Accordion

That’s 17 people and you could probably get some kind of tax break if that was your business. Imagine if you were paying insurance for all those people! You’d have to charge astronomical rates for a performance, and there’s only 5 people on stage! By that time, you’d want to get crazy costumes for the majority of the crew, 12 people, so they can dance around and get some stage time, and add some antics to the fray. Holy shit. There’s just simply no way!

We must do the impossible.

Ideally, you’d have these people working every day, working on their jobs, and keeping the thing going. You’d want everyone into the office by 11 AM in the morning, generally, for the agenda meeting, and then all go off to write or rehearse songs, to book gigs, make posters, balance the books, book the gigs, send the contracts, send the press releases and carry out the advertising campaigns, design stage sets and crazy shit to light up, record, mix, and tweak the band’s live show, maintain all the musical gear and the traveling equipment, settle the logistics for transportation, food and lodging to all engagements, and someone to oversee the whole mess and make sure everybody has what they need to get the job done, and that the jobs are getting done to snuff, and to keep the grand vision in mind, and to look after group morale, and so forth.

Then you’d have to assume all these people have lives and that they might like to work together but not wipe each other’s asses all day. It’s just a gig. So you get 6-8 hours work out of people in a day, including time for just puttering around the office. You’ve got a paid staff of 16 part to full-time workers. You want people to be getting $1,000 per month, take home. That’s after taxes or something. That’s impossible. 16 people agreeing to live on $12,000 per year.

How many shows would you have to do, how many albums would you have to sell, to even move that much money?

12×16 is 192, you’d need $192,000 a year to pay a staff of 16, all equally, and that’s not even including operating costs. Vehicle costs, equipment costs, recording, production costs, etc. You’d need another $50,000 for that. We did it on maybe $2,000. You need the motor coach, the trailer, the lights and sound, the instruments and amplifiers. Say $35k because you already have some of the stuff and you’re getting some used.

You need to be pulling $227,000 or nearly a quarter million dollars a year, just to be living about poverty level, and this is just assuming you can possibly play gigs and record and sell enough merch to make that much money. Play every Friday and every Saturday night of the year. 104 gigs. Play every other Thursday. Another 26 gigs. Add 12 for a monthly. 142 gigs. Those would have to average out to paying about $1,600 per gig, if you don’t include any other revenue sources.

You’d be working close to 40% of the days, which is still less than a baseball player, and less than most people. Five days per week, say 2 weeks off, 250 days a year. 68% of your average worker’s days are spent working.

Now here, I think, is where we start to get into the shit that bothers me.

I’m sure I’m not the only one… how much does it bother the people who spend 68% of their time doing it? Then being taxed anywhere from 10-45% of their income? So while that goes to cool stuff like roads and firetrucks and armies, it still is time in the day, life, career. Holy shit. THE FUCK. And what am I doing? Just sitting here masturbating.

Everyone is getting killed out there. Driving in conversion vans. Roofing. IT. Delivering pizza. It’s a huge circle jerk. Security guards at art museums. Donut counter boys. Shoe stores, selling shoes. The shoes were made in a factory in China and shipped here, a silver stamp that says real Genuine Italian leather, and the stamp is real but the leather is not. The shoes on the feet of a museum docent, a waitress, a secretary. A business executive.

I can’t even fathom what goes on in the minds of people who run businesses.

I don’t want to fathom it. People invest money, people buy and sell the future value of corn, soybeans, pork, oranges, beef, grain, commodities, and bandwidth is a commodity, terabytes are now a commodity, processing power. Precious metals are as much a commodity now as ever, because they are used to build huge engines which work giant fans that cool the tiny microchips aluminum silica silver dioxynitrate things, metals that are inside our phones and computers, metals that are inside satellites, that are inside spinach, metals from inside the earth conduct the electricity made by burning the ore, it really doesn’t have to be this way.

Pulling everything possible out of the earth to run all this machinery to make the shoes that clad the feet of the workers who bring the pizza to the news desk who writes about the police chase of the booze maddened ex-husband, who was divorced because he was laid off from the factory that makes the shoes, because they were outsourced to China, they can make them cheaper.

He can’t support the family working at Arby’s. He is working his way up to full-time manager, he’s the night manager at Arby’s by the highway and he buys shoes to get grease stained by fryer oil. Someone blows through the drive-through, he gives them their sandwiches and their change and they tail it off into the night, back on to the highway.

Something exists in Chicago, they are on their way back after a weekend at the lake house. They work in buildings for companies and no one can really know what they do. They look at blueprints. They make prototypes. They’re looking for a more aerodynamic engineering solution. They put gardens on rooftops. They teach children how to read. They write programs that manage money, time, airplanes, data. They decorate shop windows with the seasonal style. They drive taxicabs, they come down from the building and into the taxicab.

Everyone is linked together, but it isn’t going anywhere, it’s a circle jerk.

It doesn’t have to be that way but we’re not seeing it so we can’t change it. We’re just seeing the ass of the person in front of us. The person behind you sniffs your ass, and you sniff the ass of the person in front of you. All anyone sees are butt cheeks, not a big circle of ass-sniffers.

There are beautiful roses and music covered in dewdrops, but no one is smelling that, because all we see are butt cheeks and all we’ve ever sniffed are asses, anyway. We’re locked into a pattern, our consciousnesses have become too entirely self-referential. Anyone who wants to sniff feet or armpits is executed. Anyone who wants to step out of line and smell a flower or a hay bale or some fresh laundry just falls out of existence. Not even death, just total never-happened-ness. People mourn death, this as if never having existed in the first place.

Truck driver delivers goods. Truck delivers gas for trucks delivering goods. Truck delivers equipment for building the equipment for extracting gas. Truck delivers equipment for building trucks for carrying oranges up from Florida. Oranges are carried to factory and squeezed and put into boxes and trucks carry boxes to store, trucks carry parts to build store, build store, stock shelves with orange juice brought in the trucks.

Who is driving all of these trucks? Someone to maintain the trucks. Someone to regulate their weight and proper use. Someone to staff the Arby’s at the exit, to unload the trucks full of roast beef to serve to the truckers. In the towns the people buy the goods delivered by the trucks, and they make advertising campaigns to sell the goods, they write reviews of the goods.

What the fuck do people do all the time, all day, every day?

There is some whole world that I can’t see. I’m aware of it- I see people go off to work every day. People talk about it all the time. What do you do at work? All I see is the loading and unloading and driving of trucks. That’s what we did… drive our little “truck,” unload, drop off our product, which has a inverse expiry date, it only exists while it exists, from 10PM-midnight, perhaps, generously, it only lasts while it lasts, and when it’s hot it’s hot, and when it’s cold it is the total absence of all heat. A vortex.

Load up our “truck”, drive to another town, unload, drop off the cookies, load up and drive. All the motion makes it feel like you’re doing something. You might be doing something. It’s impossible to tell. If you’re doing something it feels exactly the same as if you’re doing nothing. There’s no way of knowing. You have to have some kind of faith. There is nothing to do, anyway. There’s no one to help but oneself, no one to entertain but oneself.

Not only do we have nothing special to say, but it’s impossible to say anything special.

All has become one great thrum media pinkorange noise. Glowing silence, faraway motors, 2 stroke generators, diesel, trucks trucks trucks downshifting on the highway grind the gears, giants on the hillsides harrumphing, turning over, going back to sleep. My thoughts aren’t worth the 2 cents they’re written on. There is nothing to think about, nothing to explicate, nothing I can do to help anyone but myself.

I need help. I need a job. I don’t need anything at all. I need some desires. I need to use my imagination. I desire to use my imagination. I would like to play the trumpet and have that be of such value that I may have a home and things to eat, and a means of transportation to go to where I play the trumpet. A home with 4 walls, a floor and a roof, water and electricity, a toilet, a toaster, you know, a nice little bungalow, and I would like to pay my monthly bills with money that people have given me in exchange for playing the trumpet.

It is my job in society to hear the song, and to amplify it loud enough for everyone to hear it and to sing along.

When it is the song of the morning, the trumpet player plays it. He plays the sun and the birds, he plays the breakfast, hot coffee and scrambled eggs. The trumpet player plays the sriracha on toast. The trumpet player plays the song of the swimming hole, the lake, the cool water. The trumpet player plays the song of freedom so everyone knows that each crevice and crack is filled with the sound, and everywhere is free. Trees in the forest make a sound the whole time. The song of the Ents. We talk about these things jokingly because we’d be batty if we took it seriously. 

It is probably unacceptable in this day and age to have a job description that vague. I… listen for the song of the trees… and the trucks on the highways… and the giants sleeping inside the hills, I listen for the song of the earth and the sun, I listen for the song of the people, and I transcribe it, and play it for you, and call it my own. It isn’t mine or yours.

My job is to expand my consciousness and be sensitive to the thousand swirling emotions, and tell you about it without words.

My job is to invite beauty into your home and make it comfortable there even as you yell at it and swat it with a rolled-up newspaper. I’m no good at my job. What if my job were ever so clear! A baby is born, herald her. A man has died, a song is the copper coins on his eyelids, a song is the raft on which he floats across the Styx. Play that song. The people are hopeful, a song of thanks and rejoice. The people are scared, a song to make them hopeful. Remind us of all that we have done, can do, will be.

A song for unity, how can one write such songs? It’s not to be written, this is why improvisation. We build a tower to heaven, Babylon gets a new hockey team, the harvest has come in, the winter is freezing, the groundhog sees his shadow. Play a song. The dying light, play a song. Go gently or fight it. It will swallow you either way. Wait to see what is going to happen, play a song. What is going to happen? We wait. There is nowhere to be. We are not needed.

We could fight for justice but no one can get into a war of attrition with a branch of the federal government. Bombs fall onto soldiers from miles away, they can’t see their attackers. Mortar rounds. You just wait and pray. It’s one thing if there’s a guy with a gun, you can hide, or shoot. Mortars just fall from the sky from miles away. People are still fighting over territory and ideology. People have always fought over territory and ideology. Guns and sovereignty.

No one wants to be ruled, wants to be slaves, subservient, controlled.

Everyone wants to lie in warm meadows naked looking at the Aquarid meteor shower, making wishes. Smell the tall grass and make love. Everyone wants a keg of beer and a campfire, everyone wants Ferris wheel rides, everyone wants to watch a ball game. You have to earn these things.

The world will give no one anything, give you nothing, nobody gets nothing for free, Jesus, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Impossible. Take take take. Fill a copier with paper, mop a wood floor, add numbers in columns, find a more efficient way to do things. Things, things, the inefficient world of things. Humans who are tired and confused will screw things up. Humans are tired and confused. We are not at all capable of the great things we once imagined. It will take an endless amount of emails. 

The buddha says to release desire, but the singing bowl lady down the street said if you do your vibrations right you can manifest not only what you need, but what you desire. I don’t know how that is supposed to jive with the dharma though.