Why I Am Not A Musician

In 1970, I went to work in Hereford, Texas (where the tube goes when the world gets an enema).  One of my co-workers in that godawful job, and even worse employer, was a mechanic named Carl.  I’ve written about the things I learned from Carl several times before.  He once told me a cowboy joke that stuck with me like jokes almost never do.  A cowboy comes off of the range after a long drive and, after a drink or two, he locates a hooker and she takes him upstairs for a poke.  After the economics are taken care of, she strips and gets into bed and he takes off his clothes. When she sees that he is “under-endowed” she blurts out, “Who are you going to please with that little dingus?” 

He answers, “Me.”

I first started fiddling with music on cornet in grade school, but when I was 13 I was beyond inspired by trumpet players Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.  I still am, but I have long accepted the sad fact that I am not them.  My brain and fingers are not wired right for that kind of brilliance.  I’ve kept my first-ever record, “An Electrifying Evening with the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet,” and it’s even “signed,” in Dizzy’s most impatient scrawl, and I listen to the CD often.  That’s my measure of “a musician,” as Joe Sample and Will Jennings said in “Soul Shadows,” “Coltrane reaching for the notes his mind can hear.”  I hear music all the time, so much that I never wanted any sort of sound or communications system on my motorcycle trips because it would interrupt the music that was constantly playing in my head while I traveled.  However, that rarely manages to make the convoluted trip from my brain to my fingers.  That is one big reason I am not a musician.

For years, when visitors saw guitars hanging on my walls and they’d ask “are you a musician,” my answer was always “No, but I own some guitars.”  I still own a few guitars and I’m still not a musician.  I am so not a musician that I gave up playing entirely for 20-some years.  Real musicians can’t give it up for more than a few hours; or days, max.  A few years before I retired, some friends in the Cities asked me to play bass for a show they’d booked at the Hat Trick in downtown St. Paul.  The songs were pretty simple, especially for bass, and I owed those guys for a lot of my outside-of-work social life.  I hadn’t played for an audience since 1981, or so, before that.  I hadn’t played much for my own entertainment either.  Almost 20 years later, we’re trapped in New Mexico while I fussed with trying to repair our junk VW Eurovan-based Winnebago camper enough to get us back home, I started playing the most awful instrument I have ever owned to distract myself (a Martin Backpacker, pictured above).  I’ve been playing to distract myself since.  But I’m still not a musician. 

I know a few real musicians and I try not to envy them.  Being a professional musician, though, is a tough, committed life and, as much as I once imagined myself taking that road, I didn’t.  A good friend used to tell me, “If you can think of a better way to make a living than music, you should.”  I have had one dependent since I was 19 and poor enough to be nearly homeless and two since I was 23 and three since 25.  I played in a variety of bands for several of the years when my daughters were little, but I never risked their security by diving off that ledge.  When normal people have a backup plan, I have never settled for that little security.  I have at least a Plan B through F or M.  Because the music business is high-risk and rare-reward, a musician’s career would always be near the end of the list of my plans.  Right next to total failure.  For many reasons, all insecurity-based, I consistently found “a better way to make a living” from everything but music, even when I was presented with what many people would consider to be a golden opportunity.  I even considered some of those opportunities to be pretty hard to turn down. 

Since I started playing again, I’ve had a few “opportunities” to join or form a band and I have no interest.  I do play, occasionally, at open mics and local “talent shows,” but I’m not in it for anything other than the opportunity to test myself and to play some unusual music for an unsuspecting crowd.  Like that cowboy, there is only one person I’m trying to “please” with my music and performance; me (and, Ideally, Ms. Day).