Ascending from chaos, living two lives, and making scale advantageous

When I look at the people around me in the Minneapolis music community, it seems everyone has one thing in common- a life of chaos. Bands, venues, production companies, radio stations, sound and light techs, and fervent fans all run on schedules closer to that of snowplow drivers and donut makers than "normal" professionals. Long nights and long drives, the challenge of keeping information organized and schedules straight amidst a flurry of data consumes me. If there is one thing I learned quickly in managing a band, it is to write down all things, no matter how easy to remember or fresh in your mind they seem. This life proceeds at such a rapid rate that by the time you've blinked twice your focus has drifted, or more often been diverted, by something else. Booking, finances, promo, relations, tour planning, the list goes on and on of things I am responsible for planning, executing, and reconciling. In the midst of all this is the point of the whole project, the one thing that you are doing all this stuff to promulgate, there is the music.

Listening to shows the band has played recently has become cathartic... relaxing, and vindicating for me. Above all else, the music must be there. The music must be developed, nurtured, and put up and then... it must be humbled, taken down, and reconciled in terms of growth. We finally end up with; "it's improving". And upon some reflection, from where I sit, that is really all that matters. Because in the end, some people like the music, some do not. What is important? Growth, perspective, and setting the right goals. The real question is "are you prepared to take the next step in this process"? To be prepared to press forward, a manager must be ready and willing to ascend above the chaos that is- this life. Be organized, efficient, polite, and thoughtful. Prioritize activities and ideas, work harder, work smarter, and try above all else to keep the main goal in mind- support the development of art from inside these musicians and provide occasion for it to emerge like a wellspring of positive creative energy into the crowd... affect them...T-shirt and sticker sales will follow. Sweating small stuff in this business will undoubtedly result in a heart attack by about age twenty-nine.

One of the main reasons my life is characterized by chaos, my consciousness riddled with little worries that stick like needles in my gray matter, is that I lead a double life. Not unlike Superman in that he is actually two quite different people, one rather normal and one not normal at all, but unlike Superman in that I do not catch and divert meteors in our atmosphere, am not from another planet (as far as you know), and I am not susceptible to kryptonite. I am a student. I've been saying that for some time now and it has become almost a mantra of identity. I AM A STUDENT. For three, oh precious three more weeks I can bask in the gentle comfort of student life in all it's surreal splendor. When I am a student, I am taking, processing, and printing pictures as well as making sculpture in bronze and steel. Thinking about how to apply abstract concepts in art to the climate of the twenty-first century, like music, has a tendency to consume me. I like spending long nights working in the studio on campus, late at night after everyone has cleared out and the building is quiet, peaceful, conducive to getting good work done. But what I do is not of consequence. In any art, I am far more interested in process than product. Sure, the product may be the object you end up with, but what is really fascinating in the process that you used to formulate and produce it. Same with music, I am more interested in seeing and hearing progression in kgb than hearing flawless sets. I know they could go out and play the same sets and have them down so tight they could play them blindfolded. But, as we all know, nobody wants to become a weekly regular of a band that plays the same sets over time. Even if the sets are close to each other in terms of content, make the presentation different by encouraging the band to explore uncharted waters onstage in songs they have been playing recently, bring in new instruments and use them as vehicles to go someplace they haven't been before. Or, simply rework songs by changing how they are played in terms of energy...change up the time...do anything you can to encourage the band to do new things. A lot of people say that fans don't notice screw-ups, that they only notice the magical moments, and that they cannot tell the difference between how a song was played two weeks ago to how they just heard it played. Phish is a good contemporary example of a band that did not believe the 'fans don't notice' rhetoric and turned out to be right. Even in our tiny project, with its one hundred person crowds, people come up to me and say things like, "that was a good version of _____...I didn't expect them to (fill in the blank)". I digress...I must learn to notice these tangents before they happen, now I can't escape it.

Oh yeah, the double-lives thing. We all lead double lives in and out of music because, let's face it, small music projects do not pay bills... at least not yet. The bitch of it is that the people on the music side of your life, often times, only want to talk about the band- the people on the non-music side of your life do not want to hear any more of your venting about anything related to music, and the last thing they want to talk about is kgb...outside of, "how's the band doing?" "Oh, we're doing well, thanks." That's it. This is fine, you know, for this dualism to exist. So many people do it that it becomes a way of life...Kinko's manager by day, musician by night. The key is getting your project afloat to the point where it can support you, or finding a way to work in music outside of the band itself. That way, music is your life but you don't have to embrace the dualism. You just work on two different projects, combining the two to make your ideal life tangible.