Musician
I remember the day I came home to tell my parents that I wanted to be a professional musician. I was about 15 and I was playing electric bass in my high school jazz band. We had a gig at the local senior center which was pretty cool because we got to butcher some standard 40’s swing tunes instead of Spanish class, so as far as I was concerned it was pretty much a win-win.
This dance ended up being different. Don’t get me wrong, we still sounded pretty bad, but that didn’t seem to matter. What started out as an elephant burial ground for old folks turned into a room of living people…dancing, tapping their feet, clapping along with the music (sort of) and smiling ear to ear. It was almost as if we had brought them back to life. It was an awesome feeling!
I ran home and called my Mom who was still at work and broke the news. “Mom, I want to go to school to become a professional musician!” Surprisingly the response was very supportive!
We immediately started looking at different colleges and within a year and a half I was attending my first year at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. There was a bit of an adjustment when I first stepped foot into Berklee. At home I was the big fish in the small pond. At Berklee, I was just another bass player with stars in my eyes…and an “OK” one at that.
I tried to follow suit and lock myself in the practice rooms for hours upon hours like most of my fellow classmates, but to be honest after an hour or two I just couldn’t take it. It’s not that I didn’t like practicing, I just didn’t like the idea that I was missing out on all of the opportunities going on outside of the practice room. The odds of getting discovered in a tiny room on the 8th floor of the dorm rooms seemed pretty small.
I instead made it a point to get out there and meet as many people as I could. I had my own business cards, which few people at school had at the time. I posted flyers on the bulletin boards for a bass player for hire…my fee was $0 dollars per hour with a mandatory time and a half after 4 hours. I would walk the halls of the studios every day hoping someone would ask me what I was doing there. I spent half as much time practicing as others but twice as much time networking…and it was beginning to pay off. While others were busy knocking down their competitors, my best friend Kevin was another bass player who helped me get my foot in more doors than I had feet. I ended up spending most of my school career playing in the studio, which was right where I wanted to be.
I worked really hard for the next 3-½ years and graduated with honors one semester early. I remember sitting down having that “what the hell do I do now” conversation with myself as I was gearing up to leave. I needed money…but I also needed a vacation. Simple enough:
No Money + Vacation = Cruise Ship Gig!
I had done plenty of studio work so I had a really good demo. I sent it out with my resume, business cards and an aggressive letter seeking out a gig and within a few weeks I was being shipped out to Florida to start my first official gig as a professional musician on Norwegian Cruise Lines.
I would love to say that I showed up and blew the place away but the fact is that I was barely holding on by the skin of my teeth. The band was playing one song after another that I didn’t know almost as if they were trying to throw me off. Everyday for the first month or two every gig felt like I was falling down the stairs trying to grab something that could stop me. Then a funny thing happened. I got it. One day, I walked onto the stage and it wasn’t hard anymore. Not only that, but my ear had become so sharp I could pretty much play any song you threw at me with or without music. Something I never could have learned in the practice room by myself.
After the cruise ship gig I did what every 20-year-old college graduate dreams of doing and moved back in with Mom. Unfortunately the world had not yet beaten a path to my door as I had hoped, so I needed to take matters into my own hands. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and started drawing until I had come up with a cool logo for myself.
I headed out to the local print shop and had my business cards, letterhead and tape covers all printed up with my contact info and logo. I had headshots taken by my Mom. I went out and got a book on html and created my own crummy website. Don’t forget, this was 1995…you’ll see that all of this stuff is SO much easier nowadays!
Once I had everything in place, my next step was to start sending letters and resumes to anyone and everyone that had an address. Through this initial attempt I was able to score gigs with several wedding bands and a few schools to teach private lessons. I was starting to make some money. In fact, in no time I was making a pretty decent living…but that wasn’t enough. My dream was to work on Broadway.
Once I had some income coming in I hit the pavement again, only this time to stop by every theater on Broadway to steal a Playbill and then to the bus station for a phone book. I put together a new letter, beefed up my resume and began to send it out. I followed each letter up with a phone call and e-mail. I was relentless. If you worked on Broadway, you knew who I was…perhaps not by face or sound, but definitely by logo and name! By the time all was said and done I had surprisingly received only one restraining order…but more importantly, one gig! It wasn’t a Broadway gig but it was a bass player on Broadway that needed a sub for some other terrible gig he didn’t want to do. It was a start.
Not everyone that I wanted to speak to was so willing to talk to me, so eventually I had to take matters into my own hands once again. I wrote to several music magazines pitching a story that I claimed to be working on about Broadway Musicians. Bass Player Magazine picked up the idea and away I went. I reached out to every bass player that had ever worked on Broadway as well as all of the musical directors. As a bass player looking for a gig it was as if I were a leper…as a writer for Bass Player Magazine I could not get them to leave ME alone! For the next 2 weeks I was able to sit down in the pit of any show I wanted. I could watch the show and speak to all of the players. Ask questions like how they got the gig. See if they had any good advice for someone wanting to start out. Low and behold I had all of my answers. I wrote the article in a few days and sent it off and got to work on my Broadway career.
Within about 6 months I had become friends with one of the players for a major Broadway show. I hounded him endlessly until he agreed to give me a shot and in January 1996 I played on a Broadway stage in New York for the first time with the Tony Award winning show “RENT.” It was a game changer.
Throughout the years to come I continued to have a lot of incredible wins as a musician…I recorded with Grammy Award winning artists, I performed on Broadway with a Tony Award winning show, I wrote instructional books for Mel Bay Publications, I had a full schedule of students, I traveled all over the world, I wrote for some of the top musician magazines on the shelf, I was endorsed by top musical instrument companies, I performed at the NAAM show in California, I interviewed some of the greatest players to pick up the instrument and much more.
I also had a lot of let downs…blown auditions, missed opportunities and evil stares on the gig. I even played a gig once where the band asked for my business card at the end of the night and later found out it was because they wanted to make sure they never hired me again. More on that story another time.
At the end of the day, I have had and continue to have a very fortunate and successful life as a musician!
