Vol. 89 - Get a Job, Kid.

On doing the good work

This past weekend I traveled to Athens, Georgia to play a show with a band I sometimes play the bass guitar with/in/for. We were opening for the Drive-By Truckers at one of their annual Heathens shows at their hometown club, the legendary 40 Watt.

As I do with most bands I play with/in/for these days, I offered up the studio in my basement for rehearsals. After all, it’s got everything a band could need; amps, drums, a PA, and a mini-fridge. Most importantly, at least for me, it’s in my house, which means I don’t have to commute anywhere for rehearsals. Which means I can spend as much time with my kids as possible. It also means that I can shirk my responsibility as a dad for as little time as possible, leading to Emily being more open to me taking the time away from her and our kids to play with/in/for bands (though she’s the most open. She knew who she married. Playing with/in/for bands is something I’m always going to do. Of course, her patience has its limits).

In other words, if we practice at my place, I can be upstairs, helping prepare dinner or doing bathtime or whatever within minutes after unplugging my guitar.

Last week, as we were practicing for the show, my kids came downstairs to watch a song or two. They do this anytime I host a practice downstairs and it reminds me of my own youth, when I would sit at the top of the basement stairs of my family’s home, listening to my dad’s cover band practice for their gigs. They stood in the threshold that separates my little rehearsal studio from the rest of our basement, dancing and looking on curiously, trying to sort out what role everyone in the band played.

After practice, I took my guitarman hat off and put my dadman hat back on. Sitting in our living room as he munched on some pre-dinner snacks, I explained to my son what was happening down in our basement a few hours earlier; that someone in a city far away was paying this band money to come down and play a show for them. I explained that playing the guitar allowed me to experience some of the greatest thrills of my life and took me around the country dozens of times over. I explained that sometimes, people paid me to play the guitar. I explained that one of the guys in the band has been doing just that for four decades now.

“How cool is that?” I asked him. “Some people get to play the guitar for a job.”

Growing up in a blue-collar corner of the Jersey Shore, this concept was as foreign to me as walking on the moon. No one I knew or who knew anyone I knew ever made anything remotely resembling a living by making art. And therefore, it was never framed for me that these pursuits were jobs like any other, jobs that people could just do.

Of course, my parents always instilled in me the idea that I could do anything I wanted in life, including playing in a rock and roll band for a living. In fact, knowing my restless spirit, both always advised against me getting anything resembling a “real” job. (But I hate that term. So let’s call it a “traditional job.”) However, being the son of a middle-class doctor and a middle school teacher, the concept of playing the guitar for a living was little more than abstract.

And for that matter, so was the concept of being a writer, even though my mother did just that for a time, working as a beat reporter for the Gramercy Herald in New York City in the late-1970s. But, as that was a few years before I was born, I only knew my mother as a public school teacher.

Because seeing is believing, especially when you’re a kid. And so it’s important for my kids to see me do this work and to witness how sometimes people pay me to play my guitar, for them to see that it’s not just the rockstars who get to do this for a job; that it’s the regular joes, too.

I don’t care what my kids do with their lives. All I care is that they’re fulfilled. If they want to be guitar players or writers, great. If they want to be lawyers or teachers or follow their grandfather’s footsteps (and my sister’s) into medicine, great. But as long as I’m around, they’ll know that something as ridiculous as making music for a living isn’t anything ridiculous at all.

In fact, it’s a job like any other. A job their old man even does himself, from time to time.