Oops! All COVID

The ramblings of a diseased mind on the state of a diseased industry

Last week I teased that I might have another issue of Drumming Upstream ready for this Monday. I realized pretty much immediately that this wasn’t going to happen. Preparing for tour takes time and mental real estate. Add on top of that a new book of tunes to learn for another musical theater gig at the end of the month. I had a lot on my plate even before I hit the road.

Well, if I wanted a smaller dish I got served one with the compliments of Chef Monkey’s Paw. After two great shows with Bellows in Philly and Brooklyn we had a COVID breakout that forced us to cancel our next five shows. At the time of writing it looks like we’ll be back on the road to catch the Southern stretch of the tour, but my instincts for confidant prognostication at this point are thoroughly blunted. Right now I am sitting under a pile of blankets, chugging Emergen-C, and letting the NBA playoffs wash over me.

So while I’d love to talk to you at length about one tune or another, I don’t think anything I’d write right now would be worth reading.

Sorry if that sounds self-pitying. It’s hard not to feel like a sucker in the cosmic game of life after spending two years dodging the virus only to get whacked in the face by a rake two steps out of the door. My only real consolation here is that it was only a matter of time until we felt the effects of COVID directly. After all, a quick glance at my social media feeds provides us with a litany bands canceling shows for the same reason.

A lot of those announcements are followed with pleas from musicians that their audience mask up if they plan to attend their shows. With margins so tight, what with bad streaming payouts and increased gas prices, a handful of cancelled gigs can tank the budget. If fans want their favorite artists to continue making music, the logic goes, the least they can do is wear a mask to keep the math ever so slightly in the artist’s favor. I can empathize with the sentiment, but every time I see a well-intentioned post like this it’s hard not to feel like I’m watching the rock roll down the other side of the hill again. Every year it gets harder to believe that anyone’s mind can be changed about anything by something so by-design fleeting as a social media post. If musicians couldn’t convince fans to stop using cellphones at shows, what chance do we to shift behavior about something so charged with feelings as mask-wearing?

Not to say that you shouldn’t wear masks at our shows of course! All I’m saying is that playing two shows where most of the audience were masked and catching COVID anyway has led me to feel a bit despondent about the whole state of affairs.

Bellows is relatively lucky here. We’ve kept our costs down and our crew tight. No booking agents or managers are on our backs about their cut for the lost shows, and there aren’t any guarantees burning holes in the venues pockets and singeing the edges of our relationships with locals. The downside of this lean arrangement is that all of the shows lost represent hours of work on the part of my band members poured directly down the drain.

It isn’t the pleas for masking wearing themselves that make me sad, its that such desperate asks are necessary in the first place.

I am not the first and won’t be the last person to tell you that the record-release-tour paradigm for musicians is an unreliable way to make a living. There are a number of practical fixes, both within the music industry and in society at large, that could make it more sustainable. Higher streaming payouts, universal healthcare, etc etc. But in the meantime I refuse to just take this bullshit situation lying down. I want to find ways to make this work for artists and audiences alike, ways where the former doesn’t have the shame the latter into common sense safety measures just to break even selling alcohol in clubs across the country. That’s why I write this newsletter. That’s why I record my podcast. I’m trying to crack the code, with your help.

Speaking of my podcast, a few weeks back, before I had COVID, my friend Josh Stanely of the band Psychoid swung by my apartment to talk about his new album Cataclysm Risqué. Josh is also trying to find new ways to release music in the digital age, in his case by dropping one song from the record at a time and building formally challenging music videos straight into the band’s website. I’ve known Josh for years, dating back to our mutual time in the Chicago music scene, so I was thrilled to have him over to talk about his album and catch up on his life since I moved to New York. You can check out the podcast below:

Apologies for the less organized than usual letter. Regular programming will resume with regular brain and lung functionality.