datamusicata

Sitting in the airport in Los Angeles, after an hour and ten minutes to go through security, gives you plenty of time to think.    You now must arrive at the airport at least 90 minutes before your flight at a minimum.   I always arrive two hours early.  That way there is no stress for me.   No matter how long it takes for baggage check, security, etc, I have time.  

I even have time to spend ten dollars on an egg sandwich and an orange juice.

The reasons that they charge you so much for nothing at the airport  are twofold: 

First, you are a captive customer.  You cannot go any place else.  So they do it because they can.  

Secondly, the folks that build the airport for the city, and the city itself, charge so very much for the right to have a concession stand at the airport that they must raise their prices some on a variety of things.

American Airlines charged me $25 for my checked bag.   They raised it from $20.    The reason that they started charging us for bags was because fuel costs quadrupled, thanks to the appointed Bush regime and the fact that they put this country completely into the corporate pocket.  Not to mention the fact that it was that party that was directly responsible for the falling dollar.   But that’s another story.   Sorry for that outburst.

We may need another revolution to put the country back to what the founding fathers considered a democracy.  Whoops, sorry again.

In the meantime,  let’s get back to the airport.   My recommendations are to definitely give yourself enough time to go through unforeseen traffic james; all the bureaucratic “going through the motions” security; and any other surprises a bored deity may create for you.

And don’t carry anything that is going to cause you delays at security.   But sometimes we forget.

Two decades ago, my father gave me a beautiful Buck knife in a leather case.   I’ve carried it ever since.   It is a knife with a locking blade.   Absolutely not permitted on a flight, so I always put it inside one of my shoes in my suitcase.

That’s another idea you should employ by the way.   They go through your bags now and you can’t lock them, so anything valuable that you put in the suitcase is at risk.

When they check through the bags, they have to do it fast, so put things inside your shoes that you don’t want to tempt the inspectors.

In any event, I forgot to put the knife in my shoe in my suitcase and it was still in my guitar case.   When I got to security, they went crazy and of course, wanted me to surrender this $50 knife to them.  I refused.   They said I could not go through security with the knife.

I turned around and went back down to the ticket counter and requested that they hold the knife for me until I returned the following Monday.   The said that they couldn’t do that.   “What if EVERYONE wanted to do that?”   The lamest of the power platitudes.

Okay, I said.  Do you have a lost and found?   You do?   Great!   I lost this knife.  I think I’ll find it next Monday when I return.    She laughed and took the knife.   I picked it  up the following Monday.

Keep your wits about you and don’t get angry.   Get smart.

Here’s an interesting conundrum.    A friend of mine, a few years ago, wrote a song that he thought was pretty good.   He demo’d it.   Then a few days later, ran into another one of his friends who had been a recording artist and songwriter but was not just working for a messenger service, and not doing any writing at all.

Feeling bad for his friends change of fortune, he encouraged him to get back to writing and playing and even invited him up to try to come up with a song.

The pal showed up at the house later that day and for several hours nothing came.    Finally, my friend pulled out the song he had just written and he and his friend then wrote a new intro for the completed song.   In a burst of generosity he gave his pal half credit for the entire song.   They made a rough demo.

The intro was never used again anywhere, but the song was picked up by another artist and recorded.   It was a minor hit and still creates a little income for my pal, who also recorded it on two of his albums.

Now his friend shows up and is demanding his half writer share and my pal doesn’t want to pay him.    So that’s the dilemma he brought to me.

My take on it is pretty simple.  Whether the other guy wrote a note or not, my pal made a deal; gave his word; and pretended that his friend wrote half.

When you do that, you are being enormously generous and noble.   You can’t maintain that status and also take back your gift.  

While I applaud what my pal did for his pal, it’s not something that I recommend that anyone do.   When you give undo credit to anyone for anything, it only serves to set up an imbalance that can not be maintained or cheerfully honored.

It just makes for resentment from all parties concerned.   If you want to help a pal that needs some nurturing, then do it.  Help them, nurture them, but don’t give them credit for something that they did not do.   It will only come back and bite you in the ass.

I hate when that happens.

How happy are you?   How does one be happy?   Is it possible to change and be happy?   Let’s talk about it today, because it impacts your music, your performance and, of course, your life.

A friend of mine was feeling really down a few days ago and I tried to help her.   She said that it was easy for me to handle stuff because I was happy all the time, while she had to deal with this chronic but not severe depression.

Her response made me laugh out loud.  (hmm, maybe  she's right?)

No one is happy all the time, least of all me.   We all have things coming into our lives that disrupt, challenge, disappoint and betray what we are hoping for.

I have recently experienced the loss of my father.   It is a profound loss and it effects you in ways you can’t imagine.    I find myself frequently blind-sided by bouts of weeping and grief and these bouts happen at the most inopportune times.   I deal with it as best I can.   But I do have a tool that I learned about in an acting class that I took years ago.

In this class, we were given a variety of exercises to free us up and to demonstrate to us what was emotionally available to us as actors; as access to one’s emotions is essentially the actors palette.

One exercise was to stand toe to toe with another actor and simply say yes to your partner’s no.  This was repeated for about three minutes.   What this particular exercise brought out was a thousand different ways to say “yes” or “no”.

Angry, sweet, disappointed, sad; the entire gamut of emotions would show up for both of us during the three minute exercise.   

The coach then explained to us that he wanted to demonstrate to us that in fact, all of our emotions are available to us at all times.   The exercise clearly corroborated that.

On the way home from class, I was thinking about the exercise and I realized that the coach was right!    We do have all these emotions available to us at all times.

Then the question presented itself to me:   If we have all these emotions available to us at all times, why are we choosing to be angry or petty or enraged.   Why not choose joy?

I mean if they are all there all the time, then we are clearly choosing which one we want to use at any particular time.   So why not choose joy?    Why not choose happy?  Why do we  choose to experience or to actually be any of these crappy emotions.   I mean, i know that they show up, but they don't need to stick around for weeks or months, do they?   Choose happy.

It’s not faking it.  It’s choosing it.  

Think about it.

This is a difficult post to write because I don’t want it to be taken wrong or be misconstrued so I sound like I am not grateful for the gifts that my patrons often bring to me.   Yes, I am touched by it, humbled by it and truly love the thought, but…

I am a traveling musician in a time when the airlines are charging me for each bag and then charging me for any weight overages on those bags, (while a three hundred pound passenger pays the same price that one hundred and ninety pound me pays—but that’s another story).

Imagine if you, who love me and what I do, want to do something wonderful for me and, because I sing a song called Three Monkeys, you decide to give me a twelve pound ceramic three monkeys statue.  A statue which I must take care of on the road to insure it doesn’t break, and then carefully pack it, so that it doesn’t  break while it is flying home with me in my overweight suitcase.

Okay, now imagine that in every town, a generous, well meaning patron brings me a gift of equal weight.   Imagine that I am on a ten city tour.    I now have a hundred and twenty pounds of ceramic monkey to care for, and package and ship home, all from well meaning fans, and that means three more bags which I must buy, along with the bubble wrap etc, to keep it safe.   That’s $150 in excess baggage charges at a minimum.

Unless, I go to the trouble of packing it up in boxes that I buy from Mail Box International and paying the shipping home from there.   And if I am doing one nighters (and that’s all you get anymore) then I barely have time to travel from one gig to another and do the sound checks and check into the hotels and find my way.   

Now I also have to locate a UPS store and take care of that.

All of the things that I have at home that were given to me by patrons, fans and friends, I love having.   I enjoy seeing these things and remembering them giving them to me.    But I have so many there is no place to put them and I can’t throw them out or give them away without feeling like less of a person than I believe myself to be.   It’s a conundrum.

I really do understand and connect with the impulse, so let me tell you what I do with that impulse.

I buy extra copies of my friends CD’s and books and I give them to other people that I think would enjoy that person’s work.   Think about it.  You go up to an artist that you love and you tell them, “Look I have all your work at home, but I believe in you and what you are doing,so, I’d like to pick up another copy of your latest and give it to my sister, brother, friend, parent, boss, employee, cousin… you get the picture.

You can’t imagine how fantastic that makes an artist feel.   And speaking for myself, I can tell you that I remember those people and I tend to send them post cards from the road, or a copy of the new poster I had made, or something.   

It really works and I really remember it and it doesn’t involve me having to package something up for shipping and then find a place to have it shipped home.

So today’s tip is this:   if you love an artist’s work, then turn other people on to that work.   Bring them to the concerts, connect them on myspace or twitter or facebook to the artist; buy their work and give it to people that you think would enjoy it…and make certain that the artist knows that is what you are doing. 

That turns an artist you like into a friend.   It really can evolve into that and that’s a fun thing.

Do for the others, as Stephen Stills (www.stephenstills.com) put it, do for the folks you believe in and from whom you receive comfort and joy.   It will always come back to you.

Years ago, I became acquainted with a remarkable talented and delightful person who wrote a national comic strip.   She came to my shows and was enormously supportive.   She told me that if she ever had an opportunity to help me, she would.  

Needless to say, we’ve all heard that before but this time was different.  She was as good as her word, and hired me to score her Prime Time CBS TV Special “Cathy”.

I had never scored a TV show before but her confidence in me was inspiring and I did the show.   It won an Emmy and I went on to score the other two Cathy Specials as well.

From the success of those TV Specials, I secured the services of a neophyte film agent.   She was delightful and aggressive and I thought I was on my way.

That’s when I found out that there at ten million people in Los Angeles waiting for a chance to score anything.   Competition is more than fierce.  There are seriously talented people who will score a show for free, just for the chance.

We had, needless to say,  little success securing me another scoring gig, but after a while, she asked me to watch a variety show called the Tracey Ullman Show.

It seems that there was a little five minute cartoon on that show that Fox was taking to its own spot as a thirty minute animated series.

I explained to my agent that I had no interest in becoming a guy who just scored cartoons, but she persisted and finally, just before the deadline, I half hearted put something together just to placate the agent.   I really didn’t see where this could go anywhere.

The gig was landed by a fellow named Danny Elfman  (http://elfman.filmmusic.com/),  the series was called The Simpsons. (www.thesimpsons.com/)

The lesson here is that you never know what a real opportunity is, so you do the very best you can everytime you get a chance.   I am not saying that I could have or would have aced Danny Elfman for that gig, but we’ll never know will we?