King Biscuit Time Magazine - Road Kill Column
Friday May 26th, 2006 @ 9:08 PM
Filed under: Everything, Publications
It’s a Long Climb Up a Five Foot Stage.
I wonder how many bands are in America? My guess is about one hundred and forty thousand, or fifty bands for every hundred thousand people. The town where I grew up in Wyoming, only had about twenty thousand people, but it always had at least ten bands going at the same time. Often there were more than ten, seldom less. The ratio if applied to the United States population of 280 million gets my 140 grand estimate. That’s a lot of bands. If one includes garage bands who are afraid or unable to play in public, another 140 grand could be added.
All these bands want to play festivals. Think of a dog lurking in the corner at a Thanksgiving Dinner. The dog will study each bite as it travels from plate to fork to the mouth of a diner who made the mistake of tossing the animal a tidbit. At times the dog will shift anxiously from foot to foot as it sits, drool falls from its mouth, and now and then a pleading little whine or moan is emitted.
The dog’s focus is complete. You can try distracting the dog with an offer to scratch its ears, pet its tummy, or throw a Frisbee. Nothing works. Sex with a pink-ribboned, pedicured, poodle has no appeal. The dog’s head goes slowly back and forth following the flight of the fork.
It is with this same laser-focused-lust that musicians eye the invitations from the country’s leading music festivals. At smaller festivals as few as half-a-dozen bands provide the entire line-up, at large festivals as many as forty or fifty bands are hired. Either way, about 139,950 plus bands are left out of any given festival. Most of them think they are as good or better than the bands who were invited.
Bands fall into two broad categories. Those whom the festivals’ want, and those who want the festivals. The former is a small and elite group. The latter is like a mammoth kennel of yapping and wagging dogs willing to roll over, sit up, or chase a stick to land a spot on the big stage.
Confining the rest of this piece to Blues festivals only, realize they all want the icons of the genre like B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Johnny-come-lately-Lang. If they are unavailable or unaffordable, there is a standard wish-list. I don’t have to write it out for you, just look at the line-ups of festivals all over the country and you will see the same names cropping up with the ubiquity of a pro-wrestling cavalcade. It’s almost as though they all live together in back of the stage on mean street.
Getting to mean street is no easy task. To begin with each band faces the almost spermicidal struggle through all the other bands to the metaphorical blues egg. This can take years. It can take decades. The main glut of wiggling and striving bands falls by the wayside early on. Bobby Rush told me it took nineteen years of struggling before he got his first real payday in music. In his autobiography, B.B. King tells of decades of perseverance and hardship. As few as twenty years ago I was watching B.B. King in Lake Tahoe where I lived at the time, at Harrah’s Casino, playing three shows a night as a lounge act. The cover was a measly two-drink minimum. He was in his mid-fifties.
Why do bands want to play festivals so badly? I’ll give you four reasons, the last of which is disproportionately motivating: the money, the time, the reputation, and the audience.
Our band has a rule of thumb that is more accurate than a barometer on a Coast Guard vessel: the longer you play the less you get paid and the shorter you play, the more you get paid.
Clubs that can’t afford to pay bands, keep them playing all night to extract every dime out of those who will stay around as long as the music is playing. These gigs seem longer than a marriage to a nagging wife. Like as not the TVs are tuned into some ESPN channel and pool tables are going and the few drunks who notice the band are requesting Lynard Skynard. At the end of the night the owner tries to make us feel guilty by dumping out the quarters from a pool table to help make our meager wage.
By contrast, a band can book a whole tour around festival wages. We are onstage for one glorious hour or so, and thousands of people are out front and actually paying attention. The maxim is that one experience like that makes up for ten bar gigs. Now some bar gigs are better than others, but none match the exhilaration of a good festival.
Once a musician experiences the thrill of hanging ten on a five-foot-high stage with hundreds of hands reaching up to him, and looking out at several thousand eye-balls gleaming with the glint of admiration, it becomes a drug that must be repeated, again and again. A band will walk barefoot on coals to get there.
I have owned a nightclub and a Roadhouse and I have organized and booked festivals. I was always amazed at the amount of band promo kits I received in these ventures. Most of them went into the garbage unopened. I know it sounds heartless, but I couldn’t even fit the bands that I knew made me money into my schedule like they deserved. And there were so many bands! After awhile I begin to hate them. They all said they were the greatest thing since talking movies and they turned out more boring than a visit from in-laws. I soon didn’t believe the hype or anything else they said.
New bands keep trying. They are Salmon swimming upstream, leaping up waterfalls, and slipping through the fishermen, and moving ever onward as their fellows fall by the way. A few find their way to the big stage every year. Seldom do they realize that sometimes their great victory has an executioner’s ax hanging overhead during the performance. They gleefully dance about like mice on a snake’s head, unaware that they may be swallowed whole and never heard from again. While festivals offer great rewards, and can help vault a newcomer into stardom, they can also serve as a ritual for sacrificing virgins on the altar before the masses.
Big festivals are salted with industry VIPs and it is a small world after all, as the song goes. Writers, agents, labels, magazines, and other festival executives mingle in their circles and compare notes. If a band didn’t create a buzz, then they could be out of biz. Its back to another decade of cheap bar gigs or off to “get a haircut and get a real job.”
So when you see these performers come in off Mean Street and onto the stage, realize most of them have paid some incredible dues to get there and they aren’t going to give up their spot come hell or high water. Unless the performer is young Johnny Lang, in whose throat God installed a high torque ratchet instead of vocal chords, the bands you hear and watch have employed the perseverance of a badger latching his teeth on your leather boot.
Festivals need to make money. No one is going to throw a party of that size out of his wallet. Not for long anyway. Famous musicians draw people and their money to the festival. Festival directors know this only too well. Getting famous enough to be on the Festival wish list can be one of the hardest games to play and extremely competitive. Few festivals can afford to hire top drawing entertainers across the board so they have to take some chances on the lesser known and unknowns.
But besides drawing a crowd, the festival director must make that crowd happy with what they hear. They’ve all been burned by bands who got stage fright and huddled together like sheep, nervously lighting cigarettes and turning their backs to the audience, trying to decide what song to play and how to start it.
Some bands are more fun than a tickling Uncle in their hometown bar, but a stage as big as a baseball infield in front of a few thousand strange faces turns them into pants wetters. Blues audiences want their heroes to be bold, brave, and badass, like Luther Allison was. They can sense lack of confidence like a dogpack smells fear.
Another dread the festival director has with an unknown band is that they do come off bold and brave and then deliver cheese like a Wisconsin Milk Maid to the embarrassment of everyone. “I didn’t know they were going to bring out a smoke machine and stilt shoes…”
That’s why setting foot on the stage of a Big Time Festival is an accomplishment in itself. Counting the garage guys who really don’t believe they have a chance, there are approximately a quarter of a million bands wishing they were there instead of whoever is, hoping the new guy fails like a drug addict with a urine sample, so they can move up in the ranks.
So, while you are watching the bands, conjure up some sympathy for the new guys, and some admiration for the old salts, because you are seeing a survival of the toughest, not just the talented. As Stevie Ray Vaughn says at the end of Cold Shot: “Never make your move too soon.”-Carl Gustafson
Byline: Carl Gustafson is the front man for Blinddog Smokin’, one of the most traveled road bands in America. He is also the author of the internet column Tales Told Well.
Posted by Carl