When Will Bands Stop Telling Lies About the Economics of Being in a Band? OK, How About Today?
I would KILL to be able to play with Dillinger Escape Plan this December like we had planned. But facing the facts about making music is a journey long overdue.
Trigger Warning: to those who hate when I write about music (sorry, Jerry from Massachusetts), you might want to skip this week.
Mark Piszko and the Magitones. You ever heard of them? The best polka music had to offer in 1977 and Piszko, the accordion player, singer and lyricist, was sitting in front of me in what they may still call “homeroom” in high school.
They had just put out a 45, or what today we’d call a seven-inch, and then a later album called Face the Music. It was exotic because not only did I only know one other teenage band guy (James Seetoo, RIP, from the first Asian punk rock group Nekron 99, who sat right behind me) but I didn’t know any other 17 year olds who had vans. Or who toured on the weekends.
“Gimme one,” I said one day after their first release had come out. I wanted to support the home team.
“No.”
“Why not?!?” Piszko had told me about crying on his way to learning the apparently very difficult to learn accordion. He was also the one who was most singularly effective in getting me to move over from just weightlifting to bodybuilding. So not especially prone to being bullied easily.
“You got to PAY.”
See it had never dawned on me, whose first ideas of what it meant to make music were framed by my stepfather’s interviews with everyone from Curtis Mayfield and Chaka Khan to Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, that PAY had anything to do with it. Making music was enough and if you were lucky enough to have a record out, what would you need the money for?
But that record was self-funded, sold at their shows in the largely Polish communities up and down the East Coast, and when it wasn’t paying down on their debt was putting gas in the van to get to those shows.
Two years later I would understand. Whipping Boy had planned an American tour. We were planning on doing it in the car of the only band member who had one, Steve Ballinger. It was a sky blue Pinto station wagon. His father, great man that he was, took mercy on us and lent us his pick up truck with a shell over the back cab.
Equipment had to be jammed in there and two people would have to sit facing each other with their knees bent. For the record, no one in the band was less than 6 feet tall, and Steve, himself, was 6’6”.
Oh. There was also no way to communicate with the driver and the person sitting shotgun if you were in the back so it was some Count of Monte Cristo shit sitting in the back. Meaning, you had to hold it if you needed to piss at least until the gas ran out and a gas station was needed.
This was all covered in my memoir though, A Walk Across Dirty Water & Straight Into Murderer’s Row. What wasn’t covered, what’s never covered is how a guy who was eating dead grass and relish to stay alive managed to do any of this.
And that’s really when and where the collective lies began to get told. Who knows who told who what first, but when we crossed paths with Minor Threat we figured out quickly that there were levels to this game.
Specifically their van seemed like a Rolls Royce to us. A loft in the back, a sound system, plush carpet, storage spaces for gear. We were way too embarrassed at our reduce circumstance to ask how they had done it but we healthily assumed it was from the proceeds of the shows that they were playing.
Since that tour had our proceeds never breaking $500, even though the van we would come to later buy only cost $300, the remaining $200 only seems like “profit” if you don’t count the gas we were spending to get there. As well as absenting out all of the money already spent on equipment.
But we were not in school during the summer and as summer jobs went it paid as well as anything else.
The fucking media though. There was this raft of a certain type of commercial back then pitched to people about 10 years older than us, at the very least. Probably about 20 years older, and the story line went thusly: guys sitting around, feeling past it and finally concluding that they should “get the band back together, maaaannn…”
To the amusement of wives and children these well-past it types would go to the garage, make some noise, break early to drink and complain about aches and pains.
We used to call them “quitters” and realized that the antidote to this was never stopping. Sure, we started to get married, have kids, get real jobs, but still there was the music, our interest in said music, and since everyone else seemed to be doing the same, the community of those interested in the same.
Some people golfed, I clearly remember reasoning, so this is like our golf. And we’d fund it the way you would any hobby since the payoff was not in actual cash but usually measured out in fun and sometimes/maybe exotic locales.
This was the prevailing wisdom, even when some of those offspring were going to college. This was actually all that we knew and all that I knew how to do until the implosion of the band formerly appreciated as Oxbow in 2024.
Sure, it made sense to take on a “little” debt. The music mattered too much, was too important to us to let a ledger make decisions about deathless art that would long outlive us. And we could always make it back at the next round of shows, next record.
But then the corporation dissolved in a swelter of confusion and in an offhand accounting, mostly because it stings to think about too deeply, the band is no more and we’re collectively about, modest figuring, $75,000 in the hole. Thirty-six years of planning on tomorrows and then: nothing.
The light was at the end of the tunnel. Mr. Bungle shows paid well, so would the Metallica show we got dropped from. And then there’s the still-unreleased and not likely to ever be released now Follow Me Now in Merry Measure. All of these would have helped in the mass delusion that any of this shit pays.
Something that’s easy to believe until you consider life at the low end. We all know lots of people who make their living in music but we don’t know many who can only make their living through music. Unless there’s some undisclosed source of other income.
Apropos last week’s substack I am not complaining. I’m just noting.
Because with BUNUEL we’re thinking to change all of that. The Dillinger Escape Plan show with BUNUEL at the Regency in San Francisco in December would have been the anchor of a short West Coast tour. But now flying four people from Europe to do it, the numbers were sucking. Even with the tour agent willing to lower his fee. Even with borrowed equipment, and a borrowed van. The loss was still measured out at around $2000.
In the world of Oxbow accounting that is what’s called “an acceptable risk”. In BUNUEL land where we’re all living on fixed incomes now, that was just crazy.
So in December? Well, in December an Easyjet flight to Basel for $93 will see my other deal, Mangene, supporting the Young Gods. Hotel buy out. No money lost. February 6th, in Denmark with Mangene again, also within budget.
BUNUEL shows in February and June and July, also within budget. Records still full price. Substack for free (if you’re too broke to pay). Because if it doesn’t make dollars/euros/yen, it doesn’t make sense/cents/pfennigs.
“Man, I’d like to buy one of your records,” said a guy at our merch table once, angling for a deal.
“Well, if things are so bad for you that it’s between our records and a sandwich, our suggestion? Go for the sandwich.”
He looked at me kind of strangely, bought the record and wandered off.
Me? I took his money and bought a sandwich! See how that works?
Also, apropos a book show a few days ago in Berlin, a friend advocated for a friend of hers. Please put her on the list I heard. Please. She’s young and money is TIGHT. So on the list she went. After she got in I watched her buy a few beers, and then a gin and tonic all while merrily chatting with me.
“Say,” I led in. “The guest list worked out well for you tonight, yeah?”
“Oh yeah, yeah, thanks for that.”
“You got a lot of drinks there too, eh?”
“Yeah,” she continued happily. “You want me to get you one?”
“And yet,” I said like she had said nothing, “you didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket.”
She paused, finally getting it.
“Ok,” she said sheepishly. “I’m sorry. Next time I’ll ‘act’ more poor.” She laughed and I waved it off.
Paying the rich and robbing the poor.
Sigh.
My new high-minded budgetarily sensible way of thinking/being might be a little harder than I thought. Oh, did I mention that the promoter of said show also still owes me $192?
G-ddamn it! Chuck Berry and Wilson Pickett had it right. Guns and cash up front.
OK. Will remember that…for next time.
Listen/Hear: there are ONLY a limited number of vinyl records available, 500 to be exact. There are THIRTY left. And every record is different and many will get a free t-shirt with their purchase. This is the non-hardcore record by a formerly hardcore band. Remixed by Joe Chiccarelli. Originally produced by Klaus Flouride. Get it NOW.
ORDER HERE: https://tinyurl.com/dysillusion
And the reviews have started to come in…
“It’s a dangerous thing, remixing your own work for, while your sensibilities may have changed as an artist, somewhere out there, there’s a fan who would preserve you in aspic if they could. Nevertheless, with the original long out of print, the chance to revisit Whipping Boy’s Muru Muru (here remixed and reborn as Dysillusion) is not something to miss.” — Sonic Abuse
“Robinson and Ballinger, working with producer / sound engineer Joe Chiccarelli (White Stripes, Steve Wynn, Oxbow), have brought an entire album back to life. It’s not an easy listen. It’s punk, it’s goth, it’s post-both. It’s experimental and melodic. It’s electric and dangerous.” — The Big Takeover
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
Still, you can live in Espana and escape from the demented idiocy that is taking place in our birth country ATM. I figure that's kinda winning, even if the numbers don't total up to it? Imma stuck here in in SE MI on the hamster-wheel of never-ending work to eat stuff... but I get it. I know a LOT of musical-types that are still scratching out a meager existence and funding life-stuff with other gigs. It ain't easy being creative, for real. <3
The pain of being human vs. being a corporation is that you are more likely to subsidize your benefactors.