Hire an attractive female singer and lyricist just to write lyrics for your more melodic songs and to be your surrogate stage presence.
Foolproof plan!
an0va wrote:chunter wrote:Your performance begins when your ass is in the venue
can't agree with this enough
Absolutely. Your music project or stage name is a brand, and you are making an investment in it every time you represent it in an official capacity, every time you perform. Regardless of your level of talent, being unprofessional isn't acceptable and will close doors, lose you fans, and alienate your audience. No matter how small time your act, or even how unremarkable your music itself might be, a show where everyone leaves the venue with a smile on their face having had a good time will get you booked again and again.
Conversely, I've seen famous and established musicians really fuck up by being rude to bandmates, other musicians, technicians, staff, and audience members. The best example I have is seeing Al Di Meola when I was like 19. He played at the Cactus Café, an established and renowned smaller venue on the University of Texas campus. He had mild and avoidable technical difficulties that he made big issues of, thereby upstaging himself. He brought a dual rectifier half-stack as his main amplifier, way too much amp for the venue, which his sound techs walled off with Lexan acoustic paneling and dropped a mic in front of. He had a dedicated guitar tech literally adjusting his amp in real time as he played. Whenever he would get the slightest hint of feedback, he would roll his eyes and stare daggers into the guitar tech from center stage. At one point, a song ended after he had used the distortion channel, and he sat there staring at the tech instead of, you know, turning off the distortion to kill the feedback. At one point he dropped out of a song just to yell at the guitar tech about the minutiae of the amp, and he let the rhythm section maintain a pattern around him for the minute and a half he was offstage. After all of this, he commented into the microphone on stage that the venue was "smaller than his bathroom." Seriously unprofessional.
After the show, I ran into the guitar tech and shook his hand. I told him he'd done an amazing job working with the unfavorable circumstances, and that I was sorry that the musician had been rude to him during the performance. He said, totally unphased, "Ah, that's just Al."
The lessons here are simple, but very important ones:
Plan Ahead
Know Before You Go
Work With What You Have
No One Likes a Primadonna
Don't Rely on Others to Solve Your Problems
Blaming Others for Your Problems Doesn't Garner Respect
Being an Artist is not a Free Pass to Disrespect Others
Seriously, though, I don't know why I was surprised that this guy's a tool:
EDIT: A much more recent example of an unprofessional professional musician losing a lot of respect is the Danzig Fiasco at Fun Fun Fun Fest 2011. Virtually all of Austin now permanently knows Danzig as the guy who wouldn't play over French Onion Soup.
Last edited by Telerophon (Aug 26, 2012 12:13 pm)