A friend gave me the unfortunate concept of “Career Killers” a while back. A gig SO defeating, SO viciously deleterious to your morale and self-esteem that it makes you throw in the towel. It makes you finally realize that your dreams are stupid, you’re not good enough to make it, the audience isn’t there, the venues that WILL book you treat you like shit, and generally speaking it’s time to go onto other things.
Don’t worry… that’s not what happened Thursday night… but there were definitely a couple of whiffs of it.
However, it DID hammer home a couple of items :
1) always have a sound system with you. No matter where you are, something can go wrong and you might need it.
2) always play your best, because you never know WHO’S going to be at the gig
3) know ahead of time what you’re willing to spend on food, so that when you go in really, really wanting to have the Mexican Jambalaya, knowing that the venue doesn’t provide a “musician menu” or discount, and then suddenly there IS a musician menu, but the venue insists that since you’re just a guest of the artist who booked the gig (and since it was a showcase, ALL the musicians were guests of the artist who booked the gig) YOU can’t order off the musician menu that they hand your table, but you had planned to pay full price for the Mexican Jambalaya from the get-go, so you don’t get really riled or feel like you want to get into a fight with the server, because actually the Mexican Jambalaya, which isn’t on the musician menu anywho, really IS that good – and actually, this time, it’s even BETTER because you had the time to eat it while it was still warm…
4) Hang out with your friends afterwards in the parking lot because THAT’S what is REALLY good some nights… and take a damned selfie, because I forgot to, and that’s really what I want to remember from Thursday night : me and Rowan and Gwen just hanging out in a cold-ass parking lot in Silver Spring till the venue’s lights go out.
Yeah. Every gig has something to teach. Every gig has a bright side. Some gigs are brighter than others and take a little more looking though.
