Again, I'm a competent picker. I come from a family of musicians, and one of my relatives is a financially successful, nationally known banjo player and a member of the Georgia Country Music Hall of Fame. I started playing banjo myself when I was eleven years old, guitar when I was twelve, and mandolin a few years ago. My singing is passable, and perhaps even pretty good if "bipolar hillbilly" happens to be your cup of tea. Furthermore, friends and family tell me that my songwriting is okay. So far, so good. But then one turns to the business end of the whole affair.
I have played bars, coffeehouses, outdoor festivals, and private parties a lot over the years and have made a little money here and there doing it. Nevertheless, my failures and defeats in the "getting gigs" and "getting paid" departments far outweigh my successes. It is this fact and its attendant temptations that I want to investigate just a bit. (I might also add, for the sake of those suffering from similar afflictions, that this all applies to my life as a writer of poems, novels, and essays as well, only more so.)
The first thing that has to be admitted is that I am not an extroverted, go-getter kind of guy. This fact rooted in a native lack of industry coupled with a strong dose of trans-generational family dysfunction. So let's go ahead and be clear on this - I admit to having had a life-long lazy streak, and I acknowledge that it is partially responsible for my lack of success in the music business. However, I honestly do not believe that my lack of ambition is altogether attributable to laziness. It is also partly due to the fact that I'm just tempermentally unsuited to shove and elbow my way around in the dog-eat-dog world.
In this respect, I'm sort of like a guy in a tiny, dinged up Corolla (word to my brother, Geoff) manuevering down a highway swarming with Hummers. I putter along too slowly in the fast lane, and everybody honks and shakes their fist (or else they laugh and point) as they speed past me. This makes me nervous, so I just pull over. Perhaps I sit in the grass and write a song about how I prefer the backroads of life to the interstates. Unfortunately, nobody hears the song. For one thing, they have their CD players up too loud. For another, they're all still honking, only now it's because they're annoyed that some flake is parked on the shoulder playing a mandolin.
Let me shed the cute metaphor for a second and be candid about what I really mean. Truth be told, I have many times been passed over in favor of musicians with a quarter of my talent. Often these guys had more stage presence. Most every time they knew how to "shuck and jive" better than I do. Usually they had cooler hair cuts. Invariably they were perfectly comfortable shoving themselves into the limelight armed with only a few power chords and a just-shy-of-mastered moveable pentatonic scale.
Now perhaps this all sounds like sour grapes. Matter of fact, it is sour grapes. That's why I bring it up.
Somehow as an artist I have to transcend, not so much capitalism or the general contempt for art so endemic to our culture, but my own faithlessness and second guessing as to both 1) my calling as an artist and 2) God's integrity in providing for those who follow their heart. I need to clarify the motives behind my criticism of contemporary American culture, particularly of its superficiality and the way in which it co-opts and makes merchandise of everything: I need to ask honestly whether I am motivated by the desire to see Truth, Beauty, and Goodness prevail, or by my own desire for a piece of the pie and the attendant self-righteous lust for seeing others castigated as sell outs. As long as it is the latter, I will find the way of transcendence - in other words, the way of the Kingdom - undiscoverable and inaccessible.
* * *
I used to daydream about never, ever receiving money for playing music just on principle. But then I had a wife and three kids and needed balogna, and music was a good way to supplement my income. All I had to do was become a jukebox, play Margaritaville, and voila! I could buy Juicy Juice and diapers that week. Pretty compelling argument. Pretty cowardly way to live, though, I am (almost) convinced.One of the big hang ups for me when it comes to being a faith-full musician, is that it is hard to shake the idea that God looks at art and music the same way that our culture does. At my best moments I might think, "Hey, God wants me to be independent of the empire; He wants me act prophetically and live out the Sermon on the Mount in a bold, tangible way; and when I do, He will supply the balogna and diapers, even if I don't get paid." That way, when I don't require money from the folks I play for, they have no leverage when they want to treat me like a jukebox. I don't have to play that dumb song that the redneck wants to hear, because he isn't paying me, doesn't own me - instead, I can play this dumb song that the redneck needs to hear.
But when it comes to actually living that way - taking the less travelled road and all that - there's not only the old reliable "need to buy balogna" fear; there's also the other, more insidious fear that God is really on the side of the redneck, the car salesman, the bureaucrat, and most evangelicals of every trade, in that he views music as a trivial thing, a silly diversion, and not as something to seriously challenge and change the world with. So I play the Jimmy Buffet song and get my chump change at the end of the night.
Paul says that the laborer is worthy of his hire. He says this in order to explain how it would be appropriate and legitmate in every sense for him to receive money for all of his apostle-ing. But then he did not in fact receive money for it. I reckon this is because he knew that, whatever fairness might dictate in a perfect world, in this world (the one people for some reason insist on calling the real world), money always comes with strings attached. I imagine he further knew that one of the main strings is this: tell us something comforting and cute, and for Heaven's sake, something that doesn't challenge or offend us.
* * *
Okay, I've been tinkering around with this one long enough. It doesn't look like it's going to come to a tidy conclusion any time soon. So hold that thought. More on all this later.
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