My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #20
Let's ignore the present for now. The fact that I've been living in Brooklyn for over a week now and still don't know my roommate's last name. And that a new girl arrived yesterday to build a bed-sized-space in the middle of our small living room as part of said roommate's quest to split the rent molecules into their essential elements.Back to Ms. Fancy and the how she became famous. For a year Ms. Fancy tried to get shows at the fancier Boston/Cambridge venues without much luck. So she played at parties, basements and in back rooms, at galleries and churches. She worked a hodgepodge of different jobs and never had much money. After a year of this, she wasn't that far from where she had started. The press ignored her. Crowds were thin. Gigs were hard to come by. So she rented a venue, paid a well-known band from New York City $1000 bucks to share a bill with her, took out ads in the local arts weekly and basically, became her own DIY promoter. The show sold out and the Boston Phoenix gave her band a glowing write-up. And so it began...But before she got signed to a big label, she borrowed money from everyone she knew to keep her band on the road and in the public eye, racking up around $100,000 in debt. Even with a huge local following and a phone book's worth of praise from critics nationwide, no nameworthy publicist or booker would agree to work with her. She shopped her debut album (which I watched her slave over) for a year and three months without success. Finally, she decided to self-release, hiring a friend to run her new label and covering all the production and publicity costs with borrowed money. Only then, after the resulting radio play helped her land a good deal, was she able to use the money from her advance to pay everyone back.I'm in no way putting these stories out there to suggest that this is what everyone should do, but rather to illustrate that 'succeeding' commercially in the art world takes extraordinary efforts. I meet a lot of musician's aching to be 'discovered,' who are honestly depressed and bitter because they are working heartbreakingly hard to create original music...but no one seems to be listening. I know people who regularly send their homemade cds to all the indie labels we all love, to the address on the website, with gift certificates or bottles of liquor and never hear back. And I want to shake each one until their teeth hurt and tell them these stories, tell them it will never be that easy. I want to say, go into the world and be happy. Take your girlfriend to the movies; kiss her on the mouth under the brooklyn bridge. Find an amazing group of friends and a job that you like and a nice apartment. But if you want THIS? If you want THIS, then know that you are in for a good five years of eating 99 cent pasta, rejection until your soul is rubbed raw, debt and the worry that comes with it, an uncertain future, a road cluttered with potential relationships abandoned to follow some nebulous opportunity. Know that you will have to get up every morning and power the machine you built with your own sweat. And that at the end of the day it might be worth it. Or it might not.
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