[atlantaprog] Re: Speechless Fri gig recap & reminder of Decatur gig THIS SAT, June 24th!

I'd love to know where you find them! ;-)

Look at some of my earliest posts about Eyedrum. They keep turning up there.

We're long past the punk anti-prog backlash now. I remember when I was a kid, discovering cool things in old big band records, not mention classical (thanks to groups like ELP holding my hand into the world of classical).

I think lots of rock'n'roll purists hate ELP for just that reason! 

A different generation of R&R purists, perhaps?

I think the newest generation is finding the same kinds of things in prog we found in big band jazz & classical.

OTOH, to make that kind of association is to concede that prog is Old Music <tm>. I don't know if that has to be the case with prog, especially in this so-called "post-modern" era where "old is the new new". 

I don't know id it's "old music" so much as "music from another time"

After all, *it beats working'*, right?

Well, does it? There's always the ole "stuck in the office" cliche when someone is referring to a musician's "day job". But are those really the only jobs that suck?
A good friend of mine's Dad in Nashville was a pedal-steel virtuoso. He could make it sing, and playing it was his passion. His "day job" however was playing pedal steel in the road bands for Tom T Hall and Bobby Bare back in the 70s. On the road weeks on end, playing pedal steel every night. When he wasn't on the road, he made money playing pedal steel in Nashville show bands. Like most other Nashvillians, he wrote songs. Eventually he had a couple of songs picked up as album cuts by some country starts, and even had a small scale hit (the theme song to the short-lived resurrection of the "Maverick" TV show in the late 70s). These minor successes proved to be lucrative enough where he could quit his pedal steel "day job", and he did. He sold his steel guitar and hasn't touched one since. Playing it as a day job killed his love of playing. It wasn't fun, or artistically rewarding. It was drudgery.

I vowed to myself at that point that I would never let playing music become drudgery. I would follow my vision and play what rewarded me artistically, and if people liked it, so much the better. But I wouldn't do the working cover band thing, or beat down the doors trying to find session work or ad jingles. If it wasn't fun and rewarding on some level, it wasn't worth doing.

So I'm not making a living with my music, but I doing the music I like. And I'm making my living in a not-too-unpleasant way which allows me a degree of freedom TO play music.

Frankly I grow weary of hearing musicians wistfully speaking of the compromises they feel they have to make to be "commercial" - if you truly love music, then play the music you love.


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