An older musician in a world where new music sucks.
The struggles to share the art of music while scratching out an incredibly meager living.
Tonight, I was inspired by a documentary called, "Minimalism".
This documentary gave me a much needed, new perspective on issues I have been living with and dealing with for most of my adult life. These issues have been mostly based on financial struggles and finding peace. I felt compelled to write the following article as a sort of fresh view of what my life has been like for the past twenty-five-plus years as a musician and guitar instructor, in hopes of shedding a little light on how - in life, we sometimes don't always get to walk the path we choose, because every fiber of our being eventually tells us we must walk another. The problem that remains is that most people never figure out a way to follow the path that was meant for them to walk.
I started out as a guitar instructor in 1996.
This decision to start teaching music was mostly based on an opportunity that a good friend and band mate of mine had presented to me; and because the job I had at the local airport, was unable to get its contract renewed for a major international airline. This meant that at the end of the month, I would be unemployed.
Most of my earlier adult life was spent working jobs. I worked in a bakery in Wisconsin for nearly nine years. It was the hardest work I had ever done in my life, but I made considerable money. When my grandmother died in October 1987, something triggered inside me. Having been burned out by working seemingly endless hours and having absolutely no life outside of my job, my grandmother's passing was the catalyst that forced me to take another look at my life to see if maybe, just maybe, it was time for me to change it.
I began taking guitar lessons when I was thirteen-years-old in 1976. I immediately loved the guitar because it gave me a voice. It gave me an identity, which I held onto as tight as I could. I wanted music to be my path. I knew in my teenage years that music would always encompass my life. There was absolutely no question about it. I was one of the lucky ones who figured out that I was good at playing the guitar; and I figured this out at an early age. Short of showing a few of my friends a couple of things on the guitar, so they could play, I never once imagined back then that many years later, I would show hundreds of other people how to play the guitar.
I grew up having to learn how to work hard.
I grew up in a small industrial town on the banks of Lake Michigan, between Milwaukee and Chicago. This Midwestern upbringing dictated that as soon as you were of legal age to work, you found some kind of part time job. I got my first paper route when I was twelve-years-old.
All I ever knew was having to go to work to earn a paycheck. This was what my father did and his father before him. Everyone I knew worked a job. Very few of these people were ever really happy, satisfied or fulfilled by their jobs. They only went to work to pay bills. If you were lucky enough to go to college, it meant that you might get a better paying job where you wore a white collared shirt instead of a blue collared shirt. I never went to college. I was not an academic by any means. I was much more street smart than formally educated.
Every job I ever had, I worked hard. I earned my pay and I made a comfortable living. I was never truly happy with any job I had, because I wasn't making a living doing music. I wasn't following my true path. Over the years there were faint attempts at chasing the rock star lifestyle, but band rehearsals always had to wait until I got home from my job. Every band I had ever been in, everyone had jobs. Nobody I knew was an actual working, struggling musician. We were mostly fake wanna-be's. We were nothing more than weekend warriors. For some of those guys, playing in a band was just an escape to get away from their wives and their lives for a few hours. It was all meant to be a break and nothing more. Well, I had always wanted much more.
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When I started teaching guitar lessons at the local music store, I had no idea what to do. After a few weeks I started to get the hang of instructing these beginner instrumentalists, and I was having fun doing it. The only problem that became evident immediately was the significant drop in income. I didn't have a lot, but I had always had money in my pocket. Suddenly, I found myself living on credit cards and moving in with roommates just so I could maintain this illusion of living a life in music.
I wanted to give myself a fair chance at teaching music and playing in bands around town, because I knew that it was my path. After all, I wasn't married, I didn't have any kids and I rented an apartment. I just had to tough it out as long as I could.
In 1999, I ended up filing for bankruptcy. I never in a million years thought that it would come down to me hiring a lawyer and going to a small court downtown to get protection from credit card companies. When I faced the judge, not one credit card company representative had bothered to show up for the meeting. I was given a new chance to start over.
I have always loved being my own boss.
In the early 2000's, things were finally getting better for me. I had more in-house clients, which paid me more than the music store. I was playing in a great rock band, doing paid local gigs and recording in studios, flying out of town to do weekend gigs in other cities and ultimately defeating well over two-hundred other bands and artists, and winning the 2005 Grammy Academy of Music in Miami Beach. Our band had reached the near pinnacle of success - and then it was all over.
Our band never officially broke up, but there really wasn't anything official to be declared. Life had a way of changing priorities for everyone in the band. It was an extremely difficult, bitter-sweet thing to endure. I think a large piece of my heart broke after that. I had such high aspirations and dreams of rock-stardom. Ultimately, it just wasn't meant to be.
I spent the next several years trying to figure out what to do with my life. Should I try to get into another band and maybe give it one more go? I was pushing fifty. How was I going to compete with younger musicians who still had all of the hair? So, I hesitantly and unofficially walked away from playing in bands.
I continued to instruct lessons, but by 2010, it was abundantly clear that something dramatic had changed in the music world. I was getting older, but my students were staying young. The younger they got, the less they understood the rantings and condemnations of an older rock guitar player. The age difference between my younger students and I, was becoming more and more shockingly apparent. I didn't know the music they were listening to and they knew nothing of mine. What was happening to all music? Where did all of the rock bands disappear to? Where are all of the rock guitar gawds?
Then in 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone. Prior to the "smartphone" revolution, the only means for collapse in the music industry had been the internet and file-sharing programs like Napster. Everything changed in the music industry, seemingly overnight. There were no more labels with A&R representatives to coach and manage new bands. The requirement for talent and being able to sing and play your instrument well, had all but disappeared. Facebook and many other social media platforms swept the internet by enabling anyone with a computer or a smartphone, to post garbage online in order to maintain the illusions of an audience.
With no music industry to eliminate talent-less hacks, the garbage of modern "music" continued to metastasized like cancer. There were no more new rock guitar heroes to be found anywhere, because the record label and A&R people no longer existed.
There was no one to go out and find the rock bands and artists who could be conditioned to make millions of dollars for a record label. No rock guitar gawds, no rock music. An entire new generation of kids were born into a world with the worst music that has ever been created - and they didn't even know it.
Here it is 2023, and most people would probably agree with me that today's music sucks.
It is all nothing more than cookie-cutter garbage. Ironically, nowadays, when I ask my younger students what kind of music they would like to learn on their guitar, they want to talk with me about the music I know. They know the names of some of the legendary rock bands and artists, but they don't really know the history of the music because they weren't even born yet. Their parents weren't even born yet.
They didn't grow up listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd or Pink Floyd as they drank a six-pack in their best beat-up friends’ station wagon. They didn't get drunk at parties while listening to Aerosmith or Boston records on their friends' stereo. They didn't fall in love in the back seat of a Chevy while listening to Dream Weaver. They didn't endure the heartache of breaking up to music of Led Zeppelin or the Eagles.
None of that music belongs to them. None of it is the soundtrack to their young lives, but they like it anyway. They like it because they know that none of the music from their generation even comes close to the music that is forty, fifty or even sixty years older than they are.
Musicians have always struggled.
That's why we are called starving artists. We choose this path because it is the air that we breathe. Without it, we would suffocate. The nine-to-five, work-a-day world would probably much rather see us make a real living by working meaningless, tedious, mind-numbing jobs to instill some sort of illusion of stability. Well, I did the job thing all of my life, and there was never anything stable about any of it.
It is just me, so why wouldn't I continue to live the life I am supposed to live as a musician-instructor? I know my path and I walk it everyday. Without people like me, who is going to teach the next generation of wanna-be rock stars the dying art forms of music? We have already faced twenty-plus years of a world without quality music.
Imagine a world without music and art teachers. Imagine a world where human creativity is secondary to artificial intelligence. We're already headed in that direction. Can you imagine a world without human music? Neither can I.
In a perfect world, I could make a comfortable living as a minimalist musician. I have lived sparsely for nearly half of my life. It's all I know. I realistically only make about a third of the income I need to pay my outrageous monthly bills.
Ideally, I could maintain a roster of fifteen to twenty weekly students, and I could charge all of them a hundred bucks an hour. But, that isn't a reality that could exist in today's economy. I continue to live in abject poverty because there is no possible way to maintain financial stability as a private guitar instructor.
Having long since learned how to live with almost nothing, means that I have very little to maintain. I still like being my own boss and creating my own work schedule. It's a freedom and independence I will never again give up. As a self-proclaimed minimalist, I will continue to walk my chosen path because I know that I can - and hopefully somebody will learn something from me in the process.
Wishing you the best on your journey.