The Songwriter Writes About Death (and Life)
This business kills people, I was dead for two weeks, Row, Row, Row
Note to my readers- I started writing this essay in early June, 2023. Life made itself more interesting and challenging than usual and I drifted away for quite a while. Since I wrote the first line, at least another dozen reasonably successful musicians in their 60’s or younger have died.
This business kills people.
Another musician I didn’t know died this week. He never made it to 60.
The list of musicians not making it anywhere near an ordinary average life span just keeps getting longer.
I’m not going to list them. That’s what search engines are for. You can do your own demoralizing research.
I turned 64 today and I’m outliving a large number of my compatriots. If 60 is the new 30 for everybody else, then 50 is the new 90 for full-time musicians.
Jagger, Richards, Nelson, Plant and many of the pampered older stars might be making it into their golden years, but most of the people out on the road year after year and day after day have approximately the lifespan of very fortunate coal miners.
From the National Institutes of Health- average life expectancy in the coal mines for those starting work at 15 years old was found to be 58.91 y and 49.23 y for surface and underground workers respectively-
Most musicians do a little better.
I am not actually comparing performing in the music business to the actual grind of working in a mine, but if a touring musician doesn’t check out relatively early, then, like a traditional laborer they stumble into old age with a greatest hits collection of painful and debilitating ailments.
Most of the touring musicians that I know who have survived into their 60’s and 70’s have debilitating physical injuries, masked with a combination of stoicism and medications.
A famous-enough Americana songwriter (younger than I) just cancelled another tour due to physical issues. I looked back through his career and found at least half a dozen instances of cancelled tours and altered performance schedules attributed entirely to his physical health or struggles with the medications needed to cope with his physical ailments.
There is nothing easy about playing a musical instrument in performance. When you’re young and flexible this is no worry, but most older guitar players struggle with arthritis and I’ve never met an older drummer who doesn’t have pain in their hands and joints from the sheer amount of pounding.
Hauling and loading equipment, standing on stage with your instrument hanging from your neck and shoulders, riding in one conveyance or another for hours at a time will eventually destroy your back.
The ravages of time don’t spare wind players either, who must carefully maintain their respiratory systems and embouchures.
The playing takes its toll. The practice takes its toll. The living with less money than anybody who works this hard should have to settle for takes its toll.
And for a performing, touring musician who stays in the business at a middle to lower income level for more than 20 years, the travel (the road) does the most damage.
For the purpose of this essay, when I refer to “the road”, I am referring to the whole experience of being a performing musician.
When somebody mentions “the road,” they mean the whole shebang: gigs, travel, food, lodging, health (mental and physical), and money, or lack thereof. And, commonly, separation, loneliness, breakups and divorces.
The road is brutal: Play in Atlanta on Wednesday, go to bed at 2 AM (if you are lucky and can wind down from the show, drive 7 hours to Orlando on Thursday, repeat (9 hour drive) for a show on Friday in New Orleans. Then, New Orleans to Austin (8 hour drive). Add in unpredictable drivers and unpredictable weather and you get where I’m going with this.
That’s just the driving for four days of shows. Imagine continuing that kind of schedule (and feeling relief when the drive is only 4 hours) for a full month. I compare it to taking a family vacation to Disney World every single day.
I copied the following directly from the website of our previously mentioned successful musician.
“(Musician name here) has been dealing with some debilitating back issues that have gotten especially bad over the last couple of years. Driving in cars, vans, tour buses and flying on planes for hours and hours over thousands and thousands of miles starts to take its' toll.
At times the back pain and issues can get so severe that (Musician name here) cannot even stand up much less muster the air or energy to perform.”
Ask anybody and they will tell you that musicians live the dream. That playing music is not like a “real” job.
And it is a dream for many. When I returned, exhausted, from my last tour and told my friend (who is just starting out on this journey) about my fatigue she said “I’d have traded places with you in a heartbeat.”
Two things can be true at the same time.
So this essay isn’t about the buzz, the vibe, the gig, the crowd, the standing ovation, the moment when everything in the world shrinks down to a room full of people and one song.
This is about something else.
This is about the fact that it doesn’t take an addiction or bad luck to shorten a musician’s life.
It only takes being a musician.
It took only a few minutes of searching to find a dozen more examples of musicians who had been laid low by the demands of traveling.
Ailments include back, neck, digestive, (a side effect of traveling without enough time or money), and cardiovascular problems.
The expense and cruelty of the American medical and insurance systems to self-employed musicians means that many musicians ignore multiple minor issues until, in a perfect storm, all of those issues become major at the same time.
And when you stop traveling for the day, you deal with lodging.
Lodging is usually pretty basic at the middle to lower income level. If you’re lucky, it’s a cheap hotel ( and I mean cheap as in “don’t go out of your room after dark” cheap), or if you’re less lucky and really watching your dimes, you’re sleeping on floors, couches, and in homes with little privacy.
If you’re a woman musician, you will often feel preyed upon.
Don’t get me wrong, people can be incredibly generous, and many bend over backwards for even the most selfish and presumptuous musician (some of whom assume that since the lodging is part of the gig, they don’t have to show consideration for their hosts).
I have people I stay with that I love as dear friends and when they read this I hope they make the distinction in their minds between the general situation and their specific situation.
Note- After I wrote a Substack article about preferring not to hang around with a lot of people and talk before a show, a dozen well-meaning audience members at my next tour went out of their way to let me know that I didn’t have to speak with them AT ALL! That wasn’t really the point, but…well, you know. I appreciated the effort!
If I stay with you, it’s because I want to stay with you. But I might get a hotel even when I really like staying with you. I’m a strange bird with odd sleep habits.
After the travel and the lodging comes…
THE GIG
Playing the actual show is the shortest and least difficult part of “the road.” Even at the gig there’s more time spent on other duties than actually playing the show.
First, there’s load-in, which depending on the venue can be as easy as driving into a loading area, having your gear taken to the stage by paid stage hands (thank you Tivoli Vredenburg in Utrecht) or as difficult as hauling everything up three flights of stairs, while dodging drunks, only to end up at a corner spot on a carpet where there is nobody to watch the gear to keep it from being stolen when you go back to the van to get the rest of your gear (fuck you, Student Bar, Osh Kosh, Wisconsin, circa 1987).
Note- I started lifting weights during my touring years with Bell and Shore just to protect my joints and continued strength exercises until today (40 years). There were some shows where I had carried and moved almost 500 pounds before the night was over.
After everything is unloaded and you’ve found a place three blocks away to park the car, you can walk back in the rain to discover that the wiring in the joint is so old and unstable that it makes all of your amps buzz and hum, and has the potential to electrocute the lead singer (see the movie, Almost Famous). Still, you set up (because if you do what any sane person would do and leave, you won’t get paid) and the real work (headache) begins: Sound check.
Sound Check- Where the quality of the show is actually determined.
All the rehearsal in the world can’t save you if the sound in the venue is terrible. There’s a reason why mega-star bands record new parts in the studio to replace live parts for their “live” albums. Arena sound is notoriously fickle. In case you don’t believe me, check out how many acts use backing tracks to ensure that they sound decent in large arenas and football stadiums. Oh, you didn’t know that your favorite act was using a backing track? Try dancing at full tilt while singing. Try it. I dare you.
On the middle to lower income level that most musicians work at, the most nerve-wracking part of a show day is the time spent trying to get the sound system to reflect all your hours of rehearsal and your performance skills. I only have to worry about my voice and guitar ( and my guitar is a direct feed (straight into the sound system, no microphone) that I have carefully designed to be easy for even the least experienced sound person).
But sometimes even a solo soundcheck is hard enough. And a band soundcheck is a whole different experience. Sound checking a larger band can be so stressful that any band with a few extra dollars has their roadies do all the hard set up stuff and only comes out to sound check the last minor adjustments.
The quickest way to start a conversation among musicians who have just met for the first time is to mention a terrible sound check, Sound Person, or sound experience. The worst experience you’ve had will be matched by the worst experience that EVERYBODY has had.
For mid-level touring, most of the venues will have a paid Sound Person. This greatly improves the odds for having a successful show.
In the folk and smaller venue world, the sound person is often a well-meaning hard-working amateur (many times, the club owner) with very little experience. If everything goes well, no problem. But in these situations, small problems very quickly become big problems.
One of my favorite thing about touring with my European bookers at Lucky Dice is that Luciano has a great ear and if all else fails, he can get a decent sound out of almost any room.
Sometimes it isn’t the Sound Person. Sometimes it’s the musician himself. Another reasonably famous Americana musician, who has lost most of his hearing, is notorious for 3 hour sound checks where he ends up with a monitoring system set at such a high volume that the show is marred by feedback and a lack of dynamics on the singer’s part. I have been told that this musician then blames the sound person, the room, the promoter, the guy volunteering at the merch table, and Vladimir Putin for his troubles.
And that guy is why the fastest way to start a conversation with a Sound Man is to mention a horrible touring musician with a bad attitude or a lack of professionalism!
To be fair, when a Sound Person is great, there is nothing better.
They also don’t pay Sound People enough. This creates a vicious circle of despair and hatred.
Finally: The Show
Here are just a few of the things that have happened during my time on stage:
A woman begins screaming “make them stop, it hurts, it hurts.” And then continues to scream throughout the entire first set.
A frat guy stands right next to where I am playing and keeps asking me to play “Friend of the Devil,” a very good song that unfortunately became my generation’s “Wagon Wheel” ( a not very good song). Frat boy does this for an entire set, while I studiously ignore him.
A famous Dobro player and his girlfriend sit right in front of the stage, in a famous venue in Nashville, get drunk, and laugh and talk loudly throughout the show, then leave in an obvious manner halfway through the second set.
A large biker stands up in the middle of our set, yells at another very large biker to turn off the TV, then after a short back and forth, walks over to the TV and cuts the power cable in half, starting a fight. The stage does not have chicken wire.
Every time my female musical partner of the 80’s walks off stage, men act like jackasses. Every time. Looking back over the years, I wonder how she didn’t shoot somebody.
I finish a set, played to two people: my crush and one guy sitting at the bar in the back of the club. When I walk back to the restroom before my next set (the sacred rule: play the show, no matter how many people show up), the guy at the bar turns around and says to me, “you sound great but you need better songs.”
Bell and Shore spent years playing to a wonderful audience at a wonderful coffeehouse in Chicago. In that coffeehouse, the entire right side wall was taken up by Go players smoking and shouting and slamming their stones down. Nothing interrupts the payoff in a touching ballad like the cracking of Go stones hitting the board.
My generation of musicians also suffered at least a dozen years of playing and singing surrounded by dense clouds of cigarette smoke. Try singing 3 shows in 3 nights with no clean air to breathe.
To be fair, sometimes the musician makes things worse. My crush and I were excited to see one of our favorite bluegrass singers come to Chattanooga. The night she came to play was cold, a weekday, and in a venue that doesn’t do a lot of promotion. The audience was small and this irritated the artist who said, “did you all come in one car?” A funny joke, but also a harbinger of things to come, as she phoned-in the show. The tickets weren’t cheap, the band was stoned, and we were grateful that there was only one forced encore.
That’s my pet peeve. If you can’t put your heart into a show for a few people, quit.
See the sacred rule above.
In 1989, Bell and Shore played a show with Townes Van Zandt in New Hampshire on a day when it snowed eight feet of heavy wet snow. A dozen people showed up. We did our usual show at our usual energy level. Townes played for 2 hours and was funny and engaging. That’s how it’s done.
All this to say that the business of being a traveling musician is likely to be a grind, even for somebody who is fit, athletic, and doesn’t take drugs or drink.
If you add drugs and drink to the mix, your body collapses even faster.
Mister “margin of error statistic” Keith Richards doesn’t count. He’s been incredibly wealthy since he was a young man. And, he’s clearly a freak of nature.
Additionally, the stress of trying to keep family relationships viable while never being home, the nightmare of never having quite enough money to relax, and the inevitable car accidents of varying severity, all adds up to a return on investment of being a performing musician that would cause most small businesses to shut their doors.
*I forgot to mention that, when looking at real money adjusted for inflation, smaller and medium venues in the United States generally pay less than they did in 1987.
Pass the hat gigs are everywhere. Busking has become the new Wednesday night show. People play shows where a meager door is divided between three or four performers, or worse, three or four bands.
There is more music than ever and people are paying less than ever to hear it.
People are paying, but they are paying for a different thing.
They are paying just to show that they can get a superstar to play near their swimming pool or at their kids Bar Mitvah.
Jennifer Lopez, Metallica, and other one percenters, can get a million dollars to play a one set birthday show.
People are paying to see the human jukebox that is a tribute band.
A tribute band that pretends to be Led Zeppelin or Fleetwood Mac gets top dollar and fills large clubs and concert halls.
Nothing sums up the frustrated exhaustion I sometimes feel like a band pretending to be another band making a good living while original artists struggle more than ever.
Everybody has to make a living, but c’mon, man!
There have always been cover bands. This is something more insidious. Imagine if somebody got paid to pretend they are Ernest Hemingway and everybody couldn’t wait to buy the pretender’s book? And the pretender’s book literally consisted of chapters of the original book, and the pretender Ernst Heavyway, got paid for that? And everybody was just cool with that?
Shoot me first, please.
But the original performer model, never the easiest row to hoe, is almost dead.
The solo performer model isn’t just on life support, it’s about to give up its organs to keep tribute bands on the road.
Even my booking agents tell me that fewer and fewer people will gamble an evening’s receipts on a solo artist.
Most of the people I know who would consider themselves solo artists add a few extra musicians to even up the odds of being booked.
And we keep dying younger for progressively less real money.
It’s a damn shame.
But I’m not surprised. When people have no problem paying $1,000 for a new phone, and that phone can be loaded with almost infinite amounts of music for less than the price of one sandwich, their understanding is that by paying for the device they are paying for everything the phone provides, including the music.
It’s a damn shame.
Full disclosure: I pay for a couple of music services. I do not use any purely streaming services like Spotify. If I like a record, or want to support a band, I buy that record.
The thing is that nobody gives a damn as long as they get what they want with the least effort possible, and it won’t change, anymore than Football will be made safer or Tennesseans will ever wake up and realize that they’d pay less tax with an income tax than with the current consumption based taxes.
Let’s move on before somebody points out the rare exception to the new economic rules and my brain explodes, adding me to the list of “dead too soon” performing musicians.
I was dead for two weeks.
Three years ago, my father died a little more than three months after being diagnosed with stomach cancer. This means that I have a better (better?) than usual chance of developing stomach cancer.
This also means that I am automatically in line for an endoscopy every few years. Luckily, they no longer even try to do it without some form of anesthesia.
So, after spending a year pretending that I didn’t know I should have the procedure, I signed up, was knocked out and awoke to discover that I had the beginnings of a few old person ailments, a minor digestive issue (easily dealt with by giving up coffee and chocolate), and no sign of anything terminal. I was living my lucky man song, again.
Then…another test related to the whole shebang indicated that I have something called pancreatic enzyme deficiency (PED). “Okay”, I say to myself, “that’s just another thing, like my Pre-Diabetes that I’ve been living with for almost 40 years.”
I don’t even bother to look PED up on the internet.
What does this have to do with songwriting, touring, or music? You’ll see.
Then the Doctor orders a CT scan.
A CT scan very often includes one major worry: finding, or ruling out, cancer.
Well, hell.
My crush, who is generally upbeat about medial tests, starts to look a little tenser than usual and that’s when I caught on that there is more to this than just another “thing” to deal with.
I knew she’d looked something up on the internet.
I look up the possibilities and I learn that one of the most likely causes of PED is Pancreatic Cancer. A late-diagnosis cancer with few really good treatments that almost nobody lives with for very long.
It takes some time to set up the appointment and then the scan takes place on a Friday.
Damn.
That weekend includes the farewell performance of Peers Under Pressure, a set by Acoustic Bowie, and my responsibilities to keep all of that on track.
I wonder during the performance if this will be my last show and I’m heartened by the fact that I can’t think of a better way to end a career.
I also learned that when you are older and starting to feel like you are disappearing a little at a time anyway, anything consequential related to your health makes all the younger people you know look even younger!
My brain stops being my friend. After the show, I keep going through the scenarios, most of them tragic.
In the 5 or 6 days that it takes before I can get the doctor’s office to call me back with the results I decide to spend some more time on the internet.
I’m on legitimate medical sites and I’m getting the dispassionately delivered news that not having enough Pancreatic enzymes is not good.
Now my brain says “you’re dead, man.” Not, “you’re the Dead Man.”
Note- I figured out that I was going to die when I was very, very young (one of the disadvantages of being an early reader). So, this isn’t new information to me…
In the meantime, we are mixing and mastering the new Peers Under Pressure EP, “Funky Troubles,” the kid’s first recordings and a bit of a souvenir of the year that the Kid herself calls “a most amazing year.”
I wonder if this project will be the last act of my life. After the last three years it isn‘t hard to imagine.
Writing it now I can see how dramatic that sounds.
But that was how it felt.
I started thinking about how to get out. How long would it be before I’d have to decide that I wouldn’t be able to decide if I waited any longer, and take my own life?
No point in sugar coating it.
Americans, informed by religion, hate death. It offends them more than anything. Just look at the language surrounding assisted suicide. There is this idea that it’s the coward’s way out.
That’s bullshit.
I know, because he told me, that Pops would have preferred a gentler end. But he was afraid that I couldn’t carry the weight of having helped him to that end.
I carry the weight of not relieving him of his suffering instead. I’d say that’s equal.
I can‘t think of anything more ridiculous than refusing a dying person the right to decide their own exit.
But here we are.
I imagined myself on my patio, with the birds and the cool breezes, and that seemed as good as any other way to say goodbye.
I love being alive. I’ve never woken up a day in my life wishing it was over.
I just want to know that I can decide, if possible, when it does end.
When the nurse from the doctor’s office finally returns my call she has that matter of fact tone that one hears from people who have grown used to saying things like “you’ll have to speak to the doctor,” and “I’m sorry….but.”
So I was surprised when she reads me the report from the CT scan word-for- word.
I don’t have pancreatic cancer.
I do have some other things that might be problematic, including a messed up spine that is only going to get worse ( a surprise to me because I’ve taken good care of myself and worked my way through only minor back pain), and a gallbladder that looks like it’s been kicked by Maradona a few thousand times.
Life is something else when you’re the lucky man, and I’m lucky again.
All that has really happened is that I have a new daily medication regimen and some of the things I loved to do are a very bad, no-good idea.
So I’ll take my drugs like the old person I’m gradually becoming.
I won’t be a runner again, I will stop picking up heavy stuff and carting it around, and I’ll stretch every day (well, I already stretched every day, but now that supposedly means MORE).
There are people who really have it bad, so I’m not complaining.
Because you can be dead for a week and still survive.
Row, Row, Row
I bought a rowing machine. It’s a really nice rowing machine and it’s awesome.
Rowing is hard work and I love hard physical work.
But, like a stationary bike, you aren’t going anywhere.
Man, what a metaphor for the last three years of my performing career, my songwriting, and this Substack.
I haven’t written much lately about songwriting, making think that this whole Substack project might be in need of renaming.
But, at heart, I’ve finally accepted that I am a musician and a songwriter.
I’m not sure what makes a person accept their fate, but chalk it up to working with young musicians, or trying to rebuild my electric guitar chops, or being unable to avoid rushing to record an idea for a song.
Even with the wholesale disaster that was a record release during the pandemic (no fault of the label and everybody who worked so hard on the album), and three full years of cancellations, death, and disappointment, I can’t quit songwriting and playing guitar any more than Michael Corleone could leave the mob.
Most of my adult life I felt like participating in the capital B music business was an unseemly thing. I dreaded the process of becoming known. I didn’t want to jam, or hang out, or, worst of all, campaign for my own career.
And that was in the days before social media, Patreon, Kickstarter, Tik Tok.
I wanted a wider audience for my songs, but I didn’t really want to have a wider audience for me.
These days, that’s all the business seems to be. The Kid tells me that the new band she is in is being told that they shouldn’t record or release music until they’ve built up their TikTok followers and teased them with the “idea” of a record.
Maybe this is the new way. Maybe everybody being seen will be, instead of bands, musicians, singers, known as “creators” or “creatives,” two monikers that make my blood run cold.
I’ve also noticed that people are wearing fewer and fewer clothes…again.
Maybe I should appear shirtless on my next album cover so people can see what it looks like to be 64 after a working life without the benefits of testosterone supplements and plastic surgery.
They can see what it looks like to be lucky enough to be old enough to show the wear and tear of living and to have a modest career based on the work and not the image.
Then I think of exactly how ridiculous that idea is; as ridiculous as if I started making TikTok videos of me dancing to my songs about how people survive the world of work and worry. That idea alone makes my back hurt.
Ridiculous as if I started charging people for access to “special, members-only recordings.”
Ridiculous as if I started playing birthday parties for mega-wealthy crypto scammers and insider trading fascists.
I was born too old and never pliable enough to get on board.
I’m going to keep selling my music if you want it, playing a few shows if you’ll come, and working with these kids who are looking to change the world one song at a time.
That’s my idea of being alive.
Some good things are happening: I guested on my friend Malcolm MacWatt’s beautiful and insightful album “Dark Harvest", Missy Raines’s new album “Highlander” contains her version of my song “I Would be a Blackbird,” Need to Know Records and I have plans to record a long delayed follow-up to the pandemic cursed “Red, White and American Blues,” and even knowing that selling the merits of a solo act is more and more difficult, my agents in Europe and the UK have set up a small tour for May.
I wasn’t sure I’d do any more performing, but I’m still here and performing is part of what I do. What’s the point of writing all these songs if they never ring out?
The tours will be different. I may be sitting part, or most, of every show. My singing range is changing with age.
But I’ve got new songs, new stories.
But, to paraphrase Miles Davis, I can still play the fuck out of my guitar.
And during the closing cover of “Shaking All Over” that I played with the Bass Weasel and the Rhythm Raccoon (as part of the early January weekend of shows at the Mountain Arts Community Center in an unnamed power trio), when the music lights up all around like the Aurora Borealis, and even an old man who can’t get with the program gets to beat the living hell out of a Fender Stratocaster, there’s something happening that just refuses to let anything get in the way of being alive.
Music! With a perfect thing like that, what can you say?
I’ll quote Russell in the movie “Almost Famous” when he answers the question “what do you love about music?”
“To begin with, everything.”
I didn’t know that until now.
I’ll see you soon in places like Cloud Nine, the Sheep Shed, and with Kevin Morris’s Fallen Angel Productions.
I’ll keep my shirt on, for now.
Cheers,
N
PS- If you hung around while I wrote nothing for nine months, and then read ALL of this novella, thank you. I apologize for the long absence.
In fact, if you are paying, you are going above and beyond. And I’ll be converting you to free subscribers soon.
It’s the least I can do.
If you want to support what I do, in my own career and with the kids at the MACC, you can buy my records, CDs and downloads (as gifts if you’d like to spread the word) and donate to the Mountain Arts Community Center at the following link. Please be sure and specify that you’d like the money used for Signal Mountain Doghouse Studios.
I sure do miss you. Grateful to have your CD’s and essays to keep me company. We, in Vermont, salute you and your cohorts Sir. Best to family.
Welcome back. The world is better with you in it. Happy birthday.