December 09, 2007
No Country For Old Men
Over the years I've watched many an old, or even middle aged man ride off from many, many successful years touring. Dicko, Perk, Mason and Morrison to name a few. These days I reckon I'm in that group. With few exceptions touring life has no place for old men. Either the road eats them up or of their own volition indicates they leave the road. If nothing else for the sake of their own sanity. Some though, present company included, stay past their expiration dates then wonder why what used to be so fulfilling has turned into a wasteland devoid of any enjoyment. Gotta love what you do but when you don't it's no different than being some cubicle rat in an office, counting the minutes until your release from the prison of conformity and Dilbert like ineptitude. At least Dilbert is funny.
At the front end of the career it's a competitive environment. And that doesn't change as the years rage on. There are always more people than available gigs though there never seem to be enough GOOD people for those gigs. As one gets on in years, like the seasons, things change. What was important at 25 is no longer important at 35 and things like family start to take priority over things like gigs. What do you think is more important? Making sure your TPS reports are properly filled out, or making sure your kids are healthy and happy? Lumdberg might be pissed, but those reports are a distant second, if not further down the list.
When you're a young turk in this biz you don't think about what you're going to do next year. Let alone when you are 40, 50 or 60. I know I didn't start thinking about it until Crazy Uncle Kenny's dot com entered a death spiral and I saw my six figure livelyhood disappering faster than Britney's panties. Forty years old, no college degree, years of experience in the Varsity of touring audio. Outside of touring, that and six bucks would get me a double tall, low fat, half soy, part vanilla, part hazelnut latte. For all intents and purposes in that case you don't have a pot in which to piss, as they say. It really hit home when shortly after the dot com was sold for pennies on the dollar and the operators at the time determined they didn't really need my services. No prob, I thought. While the first dot com bubble burst, it was still a boomtown in comparison to the rest of the world.
I was attending a technology job fair up in Seattle, fresh on the dole of the State of WA just ending a nearly three year run at the dot com, the heart of which I started as a labor of love not quite a decade earlier. Google was advertising a contract position for someone to maintain storage space in either the Chicago or Atlanta data center. Basically, you read a log and swap dead hard drives from clusters. Even though I'd been able to build dot com, build and run the data center infrastructure I wasn't qualified for the job as a contractor swapping drives. I was Red Hat certified, Sun certified and a former MS certified tech with commercial experience on the Internet since the Internet became commercial. No matter. I didn't have a college degree, even though most of the kids applying were in grade school and had no idea what a server was at the time I was starting to build the property. While I had the knowledge and experience to do the task, according to the search kings, I didn't have the most important part. A piece of paper that said that I was able to tolerate four years of school regardless of any real world experience.
That left a mark. And at the same time was a huge wake up call. Had I stayed at Cal Poly Pomona about a quarter century earlier I might have had the paper to get that gig, but I surely wouldn't have gotten the gigs I did, when I did had I stayed in school. As they say, when you find a fork in the road, take it. And I took this one and that was where I was at the time. The next day I confirmed an offer for a tour that would take me through most of that year. One door closes, one door opens. At that point, the dynamics and structure of touring had changed. Controlled more by the bottomline than quality in and of itself the pricing structure for most continued to decline. What was once a US$2500/wk gig plus PD, business class travel and own room in a good hotel was a US$1200/wk gig, light PD, coach travel and sharing a room with some twenty something concerned with getting the most out of the party atmosphere. Or about where I was nearly two decades earlier.
I suppose that's standard economics. Supply and demand. It's OK when you're 20, or 30. Less tolerable when you're 40. How about 50? I'll be there in a few years. At 60? The problem for many of us is we didn't start thinking of exit strategies until well into our careers. You can milk a good twenty years from the road, but can you do thirty? Or fourty? And at what cost? In the mid 90s there was a very popular band that we had a vendor contract with. They were from Austraila and were tearing up the airwaves at that point. The mon guy from OZ was a family man. He'd been on the road for sometime. At one point during the tour he called home. His six year old son answered. "Hi, it's daddy" the mon guy stated. To which the kid replied "Who's daddy?" Within the next couple of days, the mon guy headed home, to my knowledge never to tour again.
My point is to have an exit strategy so at the point you turn 50 you're running the show instead of changing RF mic batteries and shouting "climber 2 check, fourteen, one-four, check" into a french Canadian's face just prior to the show. Even the best laid plans shit the bed. Make sure you have a handle on where you wnat to go and how you want to get there. What you are doing at 30 isn't going to be what you want to be doing at 60.
Posted by Dave at 08:58 PM