Monday…6:30 am…

LOYALTY…

LOYALTY is letting Pigpen sleep on your couch…

I woke up this morning on the couch at Artesian (GS HQ) to the sound of running water. It was the sound the pipes make when someone on the floor above you gets in the shower…and as I rubbed my eyes and wondered who needed to be clean this early on a Monday I saw my feet and realized the answer was me. Evidently wandering around a 37 acre tree farm all night barefoot isn’t the most hygienic play and so my feet looked like hobbits feet…though not Frodo’s cause he’s a whiny pussy and not Sam’s cause he’s a slob…maybe Pippin…that fool of a Took…

This last weekend took the GS circus on the road to the Hoppe tree farm outside Grafton WI for the first ever Uleo Creek Summer Fest, and to say the fest was smoky would be an understatement. As most of you know after a campfire everything smells like smoke. Your hair (I have none), your clothes (I have few) and your possessions (I have a couple) are all totally saturated and outside of a Febreeze shower all you can really do is clean up and wait for the smell to mellow…OR you can take everything you hold sacred in life and stuff it in a trailer covered in ash and let it clam bake in woodsy flavor overnight along with your sound guy…who sleeps in the trailer…LOYALTY…

Guess which option we chose?

Great times regardless! We played on the back of two parked trailers and our sound guys built a massive rig capable of playing Soldier Field. We jammed for a couple of hours in front of two bonfires the size of single family homes and got the opportunity to play in front of some great people who were extremely appreciative of our efforts. “You came up here from Chicago!? Why!? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

“Because everybody knows this is nowhere…”

“Huh?”

“Neil Young?”

“What about him? I like Rockin in the Free World!”

“Nevermind…have you signed the email list?”

Anyways we’ll be back there next year for sure…and we’re gonna spread the word too…and next time we’re bringing FOUR sound guys…LOYALTY is the Mahoney’s crew who takes care of us…thanks.

And now a moment on Friday’s activities here in the city…

Lilly’s Bar on Lincoln is one of the most fabulous spots in the city for live music. I’d say over 60% of the working bands in the city over the course of the last 20 years have played there and thanks to the amazing efforts of Lilly herself…who still does the booking by the way…thousands of musicians have had the opportunity to play live in the city for young, fun audiences in Lincoln Park. Lilly gave us the chance to play there in the summer of 2007 when we had played exactly ONCE in Chicago and since that night has allowed us to jam at her place probably two dozen times. Our LOYALTY to her is such that no matter what we have booked, inside or out of the city, we’ll take a date there whenever she calls if we’re free…proximity agreements be damned…and now if you’ll excuse me…

PROXIMITY AGREEMENTS ARE ONE OF THE MANY THINGS THAT ARE SLOWLY KILLING OUR INDUSTRY.

In the golden era of Rock N Roll, bands were quite literally packs of gypsies who traveled around playing to anyone who’d offer them the opportunity to play. Bands played every night if possible and for every show on a Friday where the dance floor was packed and hoppin there was a gig on Tuesday the band played for the bartender and the puffy looking drunk dude sitting at the bar all alone. Bands back then honed their skills both musically and theatrically every night so that they could be the best at their craft and in return for their efforts bar owners offered them food, or beer, or laundry, or a place to crash, or whatever was left in the till at the end of the night. The environment was harmonious, and the best bands rose to the top cause the bar owners wanted them back and only the toughest cats could survive the rigors of the lifestyle.

Today that attitude has been destroyed by vanity and greed.

VANITY is starting a band because you saw them on MTV when you were 13 and realized if Motley Crue was pulling chicks like they did in those videos you could too! So now you and your buddies are spending a few nights a month claiming your musicians and trying to get gigs and instead of there being 50 or a hundred bands in the city looking for work, there are 2000. Club owners are now no longer loyal to the working bands they once needed as every Friday some dipshit who reads Rolling Stone rolls into their bar thinking he’s Mick Jagger and brings 20 of his friends out and so he’s a rocker…music be damned.

GREED is the bar owners seeing the music scene slowly eroding and so they employ draconian measures like proximity agreements to keep money in their pockets. A proximity agreement for those who don’t know is an agreement many clubs employ so that bands won’t dilute their fan base before a show. As we’ve discussed in weeks past most local bands have no ACTUAL fans, just a group of friends who enjoy the party the band throws and so they continue to roll out when a band sounds the bell. Well if a band has a network of 100 “fans” and plays a show two weekends in a row in the same market, maybe half of them go to bar A the first weekend and half go to bar B the following weekend. Problem is bar B gets only half the crowd/money they assumed the band was good for SOOO bar owner B says, “Screw this. If you wanna play here you can’t play any club in the city for two weeks on either side of the gig. And if you don’t like it, I’ll get the Meatheads to come play instead of you and they only play once every three months and so they’ll bring out ALL their…uh…Fans.”

Now I’m a huge huge fan of live music. And I love the city of Chicago more than any place on the planet and so naturally I think Lollapalooza is an amazing event. However I PERSONALLY thought the line up this year was a bit thin on super cool bands (different strokes for different folks…you may have thought it dusted the original Woodstock). I have a theory on this I’ll share because I can…word around the campfire was that bands playing the show had to sign a 90 day proximity agreement on EITHER SIDE of the show…AND that they couldn’t play within x number of miles of Chicago. Now this is band talk in bars so I may not even have the numbers exactly right but assuming I’m close you’re telling bands they’re only performance in the city of Chicago for six months would be at Lolla!! I think certain bands…specifically road bands…i.e. the ones I love…may have decided that was too steep a price to pay. Think about this: If you were to draw a line from Minneapolis to Texas on a map only 15 of the 100 most populated cities in the country are west of it. So telling a band they can’t work regions of the Midwest for half a year if they wanna do Lolla is tough. Real tough. The only thing tougher would be playing the main stage opposite Jane’s Addiction and Tool and then being told to split for six months. Ouch. Hope it was worth it…

Anyways these agreements make perfect sense for club/fest promoters but totally fuck over people like Lilly (cool local bar owner) and real working bands (GS). Lilly and I bonded over this the first night I met her and we’ve talked about it dozens of times since then. So now days good bands are less likely to take gigs at smaller local joints like Lilly’s (if you have 40 people in Lilly’s it’s like CBGB’s in ’78) as they can’t have a 500 seat club knowing they’re “diluting” their audience by playing a pub show the week before! Can you imagine the look on Jimi Hendrix’s face if the guy at Club Aux Go Go in the village in 1966 says to him, “Hey James, you’re doin some really cool stuff but I can’t have you out playin every nite and stealing my business. Don’t play in the village again til next month and then we’ll have you back.” You see some bands NEED to play. It’s not always about the prestige or exposure, or even the paycheck…it’s about the desire to play together to create something that you think is special. Our band HAS to play all the time. If we have free time on our hands BAD THINGS HAPPEN. So we solve this problem by taking a show whenever we can…wherever. I meet guys in bands all the time who look me in the eye and tell me their strategy for success is one big show every three months which will show the club owners and promoters how bad ass they are. Well I don’t know shit about this business…we’re still total clowns…but if we play 34 shows in the next three months and you’ve played one, I like our odds. If the music is any good people will come out…sometimes four of em, and some times 400.

Unfortunately we have to play the game just like any other band these days though it doesn’t mean I can’t bitch about it and give a shout out to one of the coolest people still in the music scene today in Chicago. Thanks Lilly…and can we move the gong!? Two drummers in there is just madness…and pitchers of Long Island!? Is that even legal?

Lilly’s on Friday had another treat to it making it worthy of the ramble… Friday was the first time I ever saw anyone in my band whom I’m genuinely LOYAL to play in another band…

I am an EXTREMELY LOYAL person by nature. And I’m not talking about in my past personal life so save the fucking comments…kisses my dear…I’m talking about my friends and immediate family. I get tremendous satisfaction out of showing my LOYALTY to people who have earned it. In fact if I were to sit down and analyze it I’d say it’s almost a fault as sometimes I’ve pledged my LOYALTY to some rather…uh…strange people. There have been many occurrences in my life where I’ve found myself in really weird surroundings due to this blind LOYALTY, and Friday night at 12:30 in the morning as I watched my drummer rip a fan out of the wall at Lilly’s I realized once again this LOYALTY thing is a strange beast…

You see band LOYALTY is a very unique thing. Being in a serious band is like having a serious girlfriend…except you have four of them and they all have dicks. Usually you grow to love and hate these people just like you would anyone really close to you however as most people in bands are bi-polar there is an even greater amount of drama. All of the usual stereotypes are for the most part accurate…singers are prima-donna bitches…drummers are insane…guitar players think their shit doesn’t stink and bassists are the stoic, quiet types who keep the shit from exploding, however there is one thing almost everyone who’s played in a band can agree on no matter their choice of instrument and that’s their mutual hatred for CHEATING.

And I’m not talking about women.

Show up for practice one Monday night and wait until everyone is in between bullshit stories from the weekend and casually mention you’re gonna start playing with another band. There is nothing in nature like this…anywhere. I’ve been in many bands over the years and I can honestly say no musician knows how to react to this. One guy says, “Cool!” because he’s so shocked the first thing that runs through his mind is, “stay calm…” Another guy says, “Really?” because he’s just felt his blood pressure go up 50 beats per minute. This is usually a guitar player as his first thought is, “is the guy in the other band better than me?” Then there’s the singer songwriter guy who lowers his head thinking, “if I have to teach these songs to one more clown I’m gonna stab somebody.” And finally there is usually a guy who says, “Why?” thinking all is peachy and what need does this guy have for anything other than what we have? Anyhow you’ve just destroyed any chance at a good productive practice (I strongly recommend you try something like this AFTER practice) so you may as well just shut down the amps and head to the bar so everyone can get drunk enough to fight and yell and voice their concerns out loud. This is because of the LOYALTY that develops when you spend so much time together. The only way I can relate this to those of you not in a band…that you really care about anyways…is this:

Come home from work one day, sit down at the dinner table and as your passing the peas to your three loving teenage children tell your wife your starting a new business…and your partner is going to be a six foot blond woman named Monique. Do not send us comments on what happens next…

Point is, assuming the band survives this situation, there will inevitably come a time when you’re forced to go see a show with one or more members of your own band playing without you. This can cause any one of a number of reactions depending on your mental make-up and knowing mine I assumed it’d be similar to watching my girlfriend get fucked…

But it wasn’t!!

I actually felt an amazing sense of pride watching the whole thing and all that kept running through my mind (I was heavily medicated at this point…wasn’t sure how I was gonna react) was that I was so lucky to play in a band with the guy on stage! Then once the show ended and he tore his fan out of the wall and basically over turned his drums due to what he felt was a sub par performance (he played flawlessly) I nearly lost my shit. I thought that guy was the coolest motherfucker on the planet and realized once and for all that LOYALTY isn’t a curse…

It’s a weapon. And once you know how to use it the walls start to come down…

LOYALTY is to the Sugar…see ya next week…

GS-