Parental Advisory Warning: the following is not fit for all readers so if you don't care for soap boxes and thinly veiled adult language, move on. I only do this about once a year.
I am naive. Today for the first time in my life I actually had to rebuff the explicit and pointed persecution by an attorney for my choice to be a career musician. He laughed at my colleague's claim that he worked full-time as a performing musician and told him "don't you think you could at least get a part-time job" to cover the debts in question. In his brilliant edict against our position he cited his own stint, in college, as a "bar band musician" and scoffed at my claim that it was a full-time job reminiscing that his time as a guitar player in college was hardly, (wink, wink) even part-time.
I invite him to eat my a$$. If it had been my fight to begin with, I would have been more brazen, though i never thought the conflict was with the attorney to begin with. Rather he seemed, accidentally, to expose what the plaintiff, and apparently secretly he, both harbor against working musicians.
I would have shouted in his face: Throw out all of your CDs, records, cassettes and 8-tracks, all your sheet music. Forget every song you ever heard on those albums. Have your musical memory erased, you're so cavalier about it, so you cannot whistle a tune, or hum a note in private comfort or celebration with yourself. Have erased from your memory every concert you attended, every symphony, every opera, every child's music lesson and recital, every jam session and summer concert series. Then I would invite him to re-live every memorial service, wedding or graduation he's ever attended, without music. Then, sit down to your myriad of movies and TV shows you cherish, and try to watch them again, without music. Then I would tell him, 'Turn off your radio and unsubscribe from all the free streaming music suppliers, like Pandora, whom you depend on for your musical relief. Spend a week without music. Any of you. I dare.'
If however, he felt a pang of conscience in leaving this session with me, I would suggest to him this path for redemption: Pay double the asking price for every cd you buy from now on; pay twice as much at the door or two times the price of a concert ticket; tip the band as much as you spend at the bar; buy merch at every show; empty your pockets in the buskers guitar case; pledge a donation to every crowd-funding musical project; and finally, fast from music for one week. Then come back to me and beg me for a tune, a lick, a chorus - I'll charge you $300 an hour - solo.
Until this day, in my 41 years of living, I still NOT ONCE have had to pay a lawyer for getting me through my day with his lawyerly services. Yet every day of my life, i have hummed a tune…
And finally I say to the starry-eyed potential suitors, the like of which who started this particular trouble: we were musicians when you met us. If you don't like the way we live, don't live with us.
Quenby Iandiorio
all photos in this post came from quenbywowband.com