Are We Entitled to Make a Living Doing What We Love To Do?

The movie 20 Feet From Stardom – and if you haven’t seen it, you should – has sparked many conversations with my musical brethren, most of whom point to two scenes that they found particularly poignant, both involving the amazing vocalist Merry Clayton.  Never heard of her?  Don’t worry about it.  You have, in fact, heard her. 

The first aforementioned scene shows Clayton and Mick Jagger listening to the isolated vocal track of Clayton’s performance on The Rolling Stones’ song, “Gimme Shelter.”  It’s one of those performances that summons emotions in me that I’m unable to put into words.  Hearing the track, coupled with watching the singers respond to it, gave me chills and brought me to tears.  Just thinking about it gives me the chills.  Not too shabby for a song I’ve probably heard a couple hundred times.

The second scene has Clayton recalling how her attempts at stardom in the 70s resulted in three albums that sold poorly.  She says, her voice cracking, “I felt like if I just gave my heart to what I was doing, I would automatically be a star.”

No one could blame her or countless others for this belief.  After all, we hear it all the time: Follow your dream.  Do what you love.  Cinderella sang about it.  So did Aerosmith and a thousand other bands.  Hell, even I’ve written about it. Graduation speeches promote it.  Websites are devoted to it.  An industry of inspiring posters capitalizes on it.  It’s what parents want for their children.  It’s what children want for themselves when they become adults.  And I think there’s a kernel of good advice in that sentiment.  Do what you love to do.

And yet…

Are we entitled to make a living at it?  What a luxury it is to even be asking the question! In the history of humankind, how long has this idea of doing what one loves to do for a living been given even the slightest consideration?  For me, it brings to mind centuries of apprentices toiling in atrocious working conditions, slaves enduring worse, millennia of farmers laboring over the land, generations of immigrants, past and present, suffering through the most strenuous jobs for the littlest of pay.

I wonder how many people historically have had the luxury of saying, “I want to do this for a living.”  How many people living today can devote a realistic thought to the notion?  The starving worry about food, the terrorized worry about safety, and the poor worry about making a better living. 

So the fact that some of us are able to entertain the notion of doing what we love to do is already a blessing of blessings.  Let’s start there.  But should we be able to make a living doing what we love to do?  Well, that all depends, doesn’t it?  I could get into an analysis I suppose of capitalism, supply, demand, education, market saturation, etc., but what it all comes down is that sometimes jobs are in demand, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes there’s never demand for what you love to do. 

Our grandparents, especially those who were the first in their family to go to college, probably didn’t give this a second thought, and majored in what was going to guarantee them a job. Right now, it seems like nursing is a good profession to go into.  I have a niece pursuing this as I write, and her prospects look good.  In a decade, who knows?  Engineering looks very promising at present.  Architecture, not so much. Then again, I know an architect in Milwaukee who is living her dream.  You just never know.  The entertainment industry, of course, is even more fickle.  Some musicians can make a decent living at it.  Others become superstars.  Others still can barely get by.  It isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is.  In 20 Feet from Stardom, singer/songwriter Stings says, “It’s not about fairness.  It’s not really about talent.  It’s circumstances.  It’s luck.  It’s destiny.  I don’t know what it is.”

And shouldn’t this be the case?  After all, if I could make a living watching baseball on TV, I would do it in a heartbeat.  I know people who love to fish.  Does that mean they should be earning a living at it?  I know people who love nothing more than to play a round of golf.  Does that mean they should get paid for it?

For me, I think the answer is this: do what you love.  Pursue it.  Immerse yourself in it.  And if you’re able to, do it for a living.  But either way, don’t stop.  I stopped playing music and writing fiction for a while back in ’94 and ’95, and then again in the early 2000s.  You know what?  I found myself out of sorts.  Unfulfilled.  Unpleasant at times.  Well, duh.  I wasn’t doing what I loved to do.  Now I make a little supplemental family income and I get to write fiction and play with fabulous musicians and create good – sometimes great – music.  It isn’t superstardom, but so what?

I have musician friends, some of whom play or sing for a living, and it isn’t easy.  I’m sure they had thoughts of stardom when they were air-guitaring in front of the mirror in 1985, but despite the difficulties, they’ve chosen to keep doing what they can to earn a living playing music.  Other people I know had thoughts of stardom but decided to go into teaching or engineering or accounting.  But they haven’t stopped playing.

I wish Merry Clayton had made it big.  I wish lots of people had made it big.  But there’s no reason they should have, just like there’s no reason I should be paid to watch baseball.  That’s life.  I have two daughters who in a year’s time will be majoring in fields of study that guarantee them nothing except a degree in four years.  What happens beyond that is anyone’s guess.  But I hope in twenty years, both of them are still pursuing their love, whether it’s during the week from 8 to 5, or on evenings and weekends.  Either way, they will be successes in my book. 

And you know what?  Merry Clayton is a star in my book, too.  To hell with superstardom.

Rock Star For a Day

A serendipitous twist propelled my bandmates and me into a realm of temporary rock stardom last week while at the same time a good-natured musician named Izzy was relegated to the role of story-teller.

Many months ago, Izzy gave Paula Lorenzo-Tackett, director of Cache Creek Casino Resort in Brooks, California a business card for his band, 2^nd Time Around.  There are countless bands called 2^nd Time Around, or in my band’s case, “Second Time Around,” and lo and behold, after searching on-line for a while, Ms. Lorenzo-Tackett happened upon the website of a band from Barringon, Illinois, liked the promotional video, and decided to ask them to perform at the sixth anniversary celebration of her restaurant, the Road Trip Bar and Grill of Capay, California.

My bandmates and I didn’t quite understand the request.  We are a very good classic-rock band, to be sure, but performing around the Chicago area these past several years has taught us nothing if not a healthy dose of humility.  There are many, many good bands out there, and we know that our performances can always be improved, our transitions and endings made tighter, our stage-presence refined, and we know that there are countless amazing performers within the California border.  So it was with a degree of skepticism that we accepted the invitation to fly out to the West Coast, all the while wondering if it was too good to be true.

It wasn’t.  For two days we were treated like royalty, as Ms. Lorenzo-Tackett flew with us on a chartered jet to Sacramento, accompanied us on a stretch limo to her restaurant and casino, and then treated us to a state-of-the-art stage, lights and sound system, not to mention a wonderful stay at the beautiful Cache Creek Casino Resort.  The Entertainment Technical Manager at the casino, James Taylor, told me stories about his time working with Amy Grant and Blackfoot, and how when he got the call to work at Cache Creek he couldn’t turn it down because it was evident that the ownership believed in doing things the right way.  Strolling along the runways on the theater’s perimeter, I glanced at the photos of other performers who have graced the stage at Cache Creek – Ringo Star, Melissa Etheridge, Jay Leno, Smokey Robinson, etc. – and it was clear that doing things the right way had led to some wonderful performances.  And here we were, a cover band from Chicago, getting to play in front of 475 people in a spectacularly-decorated room with several audio and video experts working diligently to coax as good a performance out of us as possible.

For three sets, we performed our hearts out, hoping we would do right by the folks at Cache Creek, and ultimately, we think we did.  We had a blast, the crowd danced and yelled for more, and Paula and her husband Jerry gave us high praise.  Whether or not we were deserving of it, we didn’t know.  We just knew we had given it our all.

The leaders of Second Time Around, Johnny and Angie Fridono, are believers in karma.  Treat people right, and you’ll be treated right.  I’ve only been in the band for the past year, so I feel like I got to ride the coattails of decades of Johnny and Angie treating people right.  Who knew when I responded to a “keyboardist wanted” ad last year that it would lead to such an incredible journey?

At the show’s end, there was Izzy, clapping his hands in front of the stage.  I introduced myself, and he said, “I’m in a band called 2^nd Time Around too, and I’m the reason you’re here!”  He told me the story, and I wondered if he was going to be bitter about seeing a different band perform where his band had hoped to play.  But Izzy said graciously, “You guys are TEN TIMES better than we are.”  Izzy seems like another guy who treats people right, and I hope that karma catches up to him sometime and offers him the gig of a lifetime.

The Movie Boyhood: See it

The monumental achievement of Richard Linklater’s latest movie, Boyhood – in which he follows the fictional lives of a family for a dozen years – might be easy to overlook without first comparing to other art forms to put things into perspective.  Imagine asking a musical artist to record one song in one month out of the year for twelve years with the intention of making a seamless 12-song album.  The Beatles couldn’t have done it.  Led Zeppelin would have failed at this endeavor.  Michael Jackson?  Forget about it.  What about asking an author to write a chapter in one month out of the year for 12 years to create a tight, page-turning novel?  A near impossible endeavor.

Artists evolve.  Their interests change.  Their skills change.  Technology changes.  Artists immerse themselves in a project often at times to the detriment of everything else going on in their lives, and if they’re lucky, their myopic pursuits result in a near-perfect piece of art.  That Linklater was able to achieve the latter despite taking twelve years to do it is nothing short of remarkable.

In Boyhood, starring Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, twelve years pass before our eyes, as the characters evolve and age in mostly very ordinary ways.  Richard Linklater began filming in 2002 and wrapped up finally in 2013, all the while directing a number of other movies, including the second and third installments of the “Before” trilogy, which – like Boyhood – are also a study of time and the ordinariness of life. 

As the film progressed, I – far too accustomed to the typical movie experience – waited for tragedy to strike: a rape, a car crash, a stupid drunken accident.  And though the movie isn’t absent drama, it does illuminate what I wrote about just a week ago: that normal everyday lives are interesting in and of themselves.  Linklater sets up a few scenes where something awful could have occurred, only to proceed without fanfare.  I believe this was done on purpose, as it shows just how tenuous our lives are, as we take risk after risk after risk on a daily basis, only to find that most of the time, we escape unharmed. We manage to survive in spite of our carelessness.

At two hours and 45 minutes, the movie for me was about twenty minutes too long, and Arquette’s character’s inability to recognize a man’s shortcomings grew tiresome, but those are minor quibbles.  More important was an observation my daughter made about the main character, Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane.  She said that Mason was a walking cliché for the emo subculture, whereby every cynical, morose viewpoint is spouted as unique and interesting in spite of it being taken straight out of the emo handbook.  Here’s a summary from http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Emo

Emo is a type of subculture…loosely rooted around punk rock with its own distinct style of music, fashion, argot and other trappings in a desperate, though ultimately hopeless attempt to pronounce their uniqueness. As a rule of thumb, a person described as "emo" will often be from a comfortable, middle-class background with liberal parents. All of this is irrelevant to an emo who will consider themselves misunderstood and repressed regardless of reality…They all suffer from severe narcissism, leading them to believe that they alone know what pain is, and that no one understands them…on the plus side, emos have made great strides in the fields of photography.

Well, damn.  My daughter was spot-on!  The character of Mason is in fact a walking cliché.  But guess what?  So are a lot of the people we meet every day.  Sure, I think it would have been more exciting if Mason had been an outgoing guy who was into sports or drama or music, but Linklater needed to let the film evolve as the actors evolved, and my guess is that the fictional Mason wasn’t too far removed from the real-life Coltrane since the script was written over the 12 year-period and very much tailored to the actors involved.

That this film came to fruition is a minor miracle.  So many things could have gone wrong: actors could have died or decided they didn’t want to finish the project.  A major life event in any of the actors’ lives could have put the project on hold.  What would have happened had it turned out that the girl or boy couldn’t act?  Somehow Linklater keeps it all together, and manages to allow time to elapse before our eyes without editing flourishes; sometimes a new scene begins and only upon seeing an older Mason do we realize that a year has passed.  Linklater similarly avoids sentimentality (except for one completely unnecessary scene in a restaurant).  I imagine that in the hands of another filmmaker, Boyhood would have succumbed to the token flashback near the film’s end, whereby Arquette recalls the early lives of the children she’s sending off into adulthood.  Yes, I would have bought this type of flashback hook, line and sinker – I love that kind of crap – but I give Linklater credit for refusing the low-hanging fruit.

See the movie.