2. MORBIUS, WHAT IS THE EGO?

“CUT!  No, no no!  Les, can’t you get one simple psychological term right?”

The young leading man considers this…and thinks for the first time about going into comedy…”

     No idea what I am talking about?  Well, remember I am indulging my interior sense of  the humor of purposeful obscurity, here.  Lemme just do you the favor to say it would be well worth your while to watch “Forbidden Planet” and find out what that line was supposed to be.

     Meanwhile, of course, no one has to ask what an ego is.  And if you go on the stage, you’ve got one, and to some level you need one.

     In your efforts to get yourself there, however, you cannot afford one.

     The world of coffee houses and folk festivals is an establishment.  You are an outsider.  Can't barge in and expect to be accepted.  Can’t be too important or too impatient or too proud.  Can’t harrumph at them.  It’s their turf.  Play by their rules.  Go audition for free; don’t be mad. 

     If you are hot stuff and nail the audience where they live in the first ten minutes, you are in.  And if what you get is an invitation to play for free again…well, you are a step in the right direction.  Be grateful.  Someone is working with you. 

     Meanwhile, and especially while you are looking for a way in, it is valuable, if not downright essential, to be known as a modest and agreeable person.  Unless you are THAT good.  Or a good-looking chick.  Or a good-looking chick who’s THAT good.

     From my own sketchy observations, these are the people who score easily:  chicks who sing the blues; people who are funny; guitar prodigies; bluegrass bands.   People who can be mooned over and swooned over or who make lively. 

     Otherwise, two categories, one being people who are really good.  The other is those who are really good salespeople.  [Presumably most of these also have something they can sell onstage].

     If you are someone who can sell fur to rabbits, you’re gonna work.  I cannot tell you how to do this, because I ain’t got it.  Have tried sales a few times in my unusually checkered career and thoroughly convinced myself of that.  Personally, while I suppose people can learn to be salesmen, I think they are mostly born to it. 

     If you are not a salesman, then you want to get one to represent you.  Hmm.  Who the heck wants 15% of my paltry income?  The math is that they probably get more than 15% these days, and they should desire and be able to book you for more than a pittance.  This is not my bailiwick.  Nor my basilisk.  Nor my balrog.  No---might be my balrog. Certainly my bathwater.

     Point is, I’m not gonna tell you about agents.  Never successfully found one.  Always wished I had one.  But…ask around, look around the net, read the bottoms of posters.  Call ‘em up and ask what’s what. 

     My expertise?  Well, do as I say.  You got no agent; you are not a whizbang silver-tongued “product representative;” what are you to do?

     Be persistent. 

     If you are “merely” good, have something to say, a decent voice, leave people moved and entertained --- but are not flashy --- then you will not float.  You will have to keep actively swimming. 

     First get your demo stuff together.  Audio of your music, studio or live.  If you can get a good show taped with great audience reaction, that’s the best way to show what you do.  Or video.  Pretty much anyone can do this these days, on their cell phones, or with a 16-track studio that fits in a purse.  And a nice picture, and a bio, and description of your show.  Reviews and testimonials if you have them.  “He was always such a nice boy”  (---Mrs. Whipple, next door)  Hey, take what you can get.  Later in your career you can boast of  “I always play his album before a summit meeting”  (---Hillary).

     Then figure out where you want to play and begin approaching them. 

And keep approaching.

     “Watch what I do and…”

     There was a folk club called the Cherry Tree in Philadelphia, upon a time.  I don’t remember just what I sent them---likely some scratchy but fun live tape from some bar gig with friends in attendance, and bless them for what they may have heard in it.  [The astonishing thing about bar tapes is the level of ambient crowd noise.  If you take your singing seriously it will break your heart to hear the playback.  Akin to painting a sensitive still life on a wall where three other people are working with paint rollers.]

     The Cherry Tree invited me to a slightly paid guest set.  This was like three songs before the opening act, and maybe thirty bucks.  I duly did this and was invited back to an opening act slot for Priscilla Herdman’s show.

     I knocked ‘em out.

     And I got it on tape.

     About three months later I phoned the Cherry Tree again.  Got someone I didn’t know.  She asked me if I could send a tape.  I sighed heavily (possibly out loud), and sent the knock-out tape.  Never heard back; phoned two or three times and never reached her.  Never worked there again.

     Okay, folks, let’s apply hindsight.  First, despite what I’ve said about ego, it would have been good to have valved enough in to create assertiveness.  Thirty years later I’ve got some of that, and know what I should have said was, “Hi, I’m Dennis; I’m not sure I’ve spoken to you before.  Were you handling bookings when I opened there for Priscilla Herdman?”  And, “I’ll be happy to send you a tape of that show; do you think you could also speak to another member of the club who was there?”

     Second…called back two or three times and reached no one and never called back for the next 20 years or however long the club lasted?  Oh, geez, Den, did you really want to sing there or not?

     This one should have been easy.  Persist and I would’ve found a path back to that stage where I was so welcomed.  (Encore; standing ovation).  It’s harder when you are working into the dark, a new unknown place.  Then you must persist harder.

     They are NOT going to call you.  They’ve never heard of you.  They don’t have your number.  And you don’t have an agent.  Nobody gonna do this but YOU. 

     Among other things, I indulged my indignity over this club.  Been telling that story for decades.  When I should have been exercising canniness and cool (which I developed 25 years later),  I was relishing this paradigm of  how unfair and fickle the biz is.  Idjit. 

1. An Introduction of Sorts

MISSION STATEMENT:

     Whatever I can tell you about “being a folksinger.”  Based on what I have experienced and what I have not.  For your interest, instruction, and entertainment, and my garrulousity.  And, like the kid who told the fella to watch him and get off the bus two stops before he did---a lot of “here’s what I did; don’t you!”  (Is that like what the kid told the fella?)

     Glad to answer questions and discourse in more detail by e-mail or the comment thread.

AN INTRODUCTION OF SORTS:

     Lemme tell you ‘way back when…

     Around 1955 an uncle of my mother’s died and left her $50.  My folks took this legacy 130 miles south to Tijuana and came home with a pretty rotten nylon-stringed “Spanish” guitar.  The old man (well…NOW he’s 90) carried this treasure to UCLA where he had just joined the Speech and Hearing faculty, and signed up for a folk guitar class taught by Bess Hawes.  [Bess Lomax Hawes.  Sure, you know her.  One of the authors of “MTA,” a song I have had to sing three brazilian times, often enjoying it.  See, two degrees of separation from me to this famous song.  Three, and I’m connected to Alan Lomax.  Four, and you are.]   I was eight or nine by the time we were having weekly family music nights, featuring “The Poor Potat,” “The Frozen Logger,” and “Gavilan, Gavilan, Gavilan,” which latter Dad translated in the last chorus as “Chicken-a hawk-a chicken-a-hawk-a-chicken-a-hawk…” making life perplexing for a kid with essentially no sense of humor.  Once we were at the movies and an injun looked to me like he really got stabbed.  Troubled, I ran this by Dad for an opinion, and he instantly replied, “We’ll just have to see if he’s in any more movies.”  Sumbitch.      

     Soon I was regaling (?) the school bus with dramatic renderings of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.  At the end of the ‘Fifties there entered into my household and my ensorcelled ears “The Weavers At Carnegie Hall,” and the Kingston Trio’s eponymous first album.  Come ninth grade and Claire Noonan’s birthday party.  Tommy Terry arrives over the fence (that’s right --- only black kid in the school, and Mr. Noonan wasn’t having any) with guitar, and entertains us with current hits off the radio.  See?  First demonstration that these songs could be played by mortals.  Same night after the party went over to Bob Bornstein’s house and didn’t he out with a guitar and sing Kingston Trio songs!

     Over the top, over the edge, all she wrote, coffin nailed.  Week before Thanksgiving that year, 1960---hence, as I write, one-half-century ago come next Monday---got Dad to show me the chords to “Early In The Morning” [KTrio].  June ’61 Bob and I rolled out the act at the class officer election assembly and in a wave of astonishment at this nerd/chrysalis/folksinger evolution the kids voted me president of the junior class.  I never looked back.

     Hell, yes, I did.  “Watch what I did, and DON’T.”

     In fact, we are just gonna skip over all the ways for all the years, I did not dedicate myself fully to the craft  Tales of inertia, depression, resistance from within and without; fear of hard work.  .  Maybe some other time, kids.

     Jump to 1975.  I’m transplanted east on the suggestion that one could, in the hip world of that late date, still make a living as a folksinger if one could Escape From L.A.  So here I am, no gloves, no boots, no long johns, prepared to get by shoveling snow for folks.  So it snows mightily on November 15^th, 1974, and not much again until about April.  Friends are sheltering and feeding me, I’m looking about for gigs.  This is, like, spend two of my four dollars on a bus ticket from Rochester to Buffalo to audition some joint.  Aarrgh.  Let’s not revisit that particular week!

     Pretty quickly it’s plain the venues divide into two categories: bars and coffee houses. 

     The bars were straightforward.  You played an audition.  If the manager liked your show, you could get into the rotation, and make money.  In Buffalo in the ‘70s, these paid $15 to $30.  Yup, I had monthly incomes of $80, and a lot of help from my friends. 

     The coffee house experience was like this.  There was a place in Massachusetts called The Sounding Board.  Respectable coffee house where the circuit stars played to, like, a hundred people.  After several conversations and non-conversations they offered me that I should come over one Saturday night and do an unpaid audition set before Claudia Schmidt’s show. 

     It was a fork in the road.  Claudia Schmidt was a big cheese and sure to raise a packed house of receptive folkies.  Friends, it is CAKE to play to such a house, and I couldn’t draw one myself.  This was as good an opportunity as I could get to put a foot in the pond and splash. 

     And here’s what I did, and LOOK OUT.

     It was a solid 300 miles.  I had a ($20!) bar gig at home in Buffalo that I’d have had to cancel.  I told the Sounding Board that I earned my living on Saturday nights, and couldn’t be expected to travel 600 miles to play for free.   Now, the place was, for a fact, in all my dealings there, a pretty self important venue.  It was my ego against theirs.  Bottom line, I turned the offer down.  And have still never played at the Sounding Board, 35 years later.  Or much of anywhere like it. 

     I went on working at bars, on some principle of working for my living only at music.  And continued to do that for 15 or more years.  For as long, I guess, as you could still survive on bar gig money and manage health insurance through the League of Arts.

     Take the other road…do well that night, make an impression, get hired there, parlay that into getting hired elsewhere…hell, by now I could be divorced from Claudia and two other folk-femmes, drawing my own crowds of 100, getting $800 a show, and living in my car.

                                                                          ***

     No, it’s not that you get one chance.  You can get lots of chances, but if this is what you want to do, you then have to TAKE the chances. 

     We’ll talk about more aspects of this.