One of my friends plays drums for Doro. In Europe, he plays festivals for PACKED stadiums. In the US he has to work painting houses while he is off tour.
I read an anecdote a while back - I think it was from Motley Crue - where an exec from the label showed up at a session with a six pack and a bag of chips. He ended up charging $150 or something like that to the band's expenses for it.Precisely.
I didn't think that wedding/corp gigs were all that bad.
I've seen my share. It's amazing what some people think they can slip through. I once had a consultant from one of the Big 4 try and expense insane amounts for food, gym memberships, clothes, etc. When challenged, thier literal response was "oh, it's a multi million dollar project, we didn't think anyone would notice." Greed, pure and simple (and no shame about it).
Might be a little worse for me since I’m in Colorado and people like to get married in pastoral mountain locations. Sure we charge mileage and we might get “lodging” for the night after the gig. Sharing a room at the local motel with four other dudes after a gig and selling out my entire weekend in the process just isn’t where I’m at. I didn’t mind as much when I was 23.
Same here! At my age now, I wouldn't be interested in what I did in Seattle - lots of destination weddings in the mountains, background music for corporate events (although one Microsoft party did get pretty rowdy) ... but there were quite a few nights in lodges and cabins. I didn't mind too much tho as my wife and I were in the slow stages of divorce. But now that I live in New Orleans (and am happily married) it *is* a destination for weddings and events in itself.
I spent my first 10-15 gigging years in Austin and I agree. Live music seems like such an afterthought here, versus there, in all but a handful of places. I’ve played with pretty established bands here who carry the PA to every gig, as you say. One of the presumably Tier 1 rooms downtown has a “stage” that is nothing more than a 4” rise in the floor at a certain spot in the room, which is a perfect height to trip people who don’t see it and send them sprawling onto the stage floor.
I played a wedding in Crested Butte a few years ago. Check a map, that’s a solid 5 hours from Denver. I think the gig was 400 bucks.
Turns out I have a picture from that gig, which calls up a good story. I took this maybe 30-45 minutes from the downbeat, and ask yourself what’s missing:
Glad it's not just me. In Texas we only brought the PA if we were being paid which was not as often. Where I'm at there's maaaaaaaaaaybe a dozen local bands and everything else is regional though so it's an insular little scene. We played a pizzaria which is one of the nicer places to gig in our town and got a complaining text the next day about the cleanliness of their stage and things not being returned to their locations. It apparently was onerous and "created a lot of extra work" for their staff. I was the only one who brought a drink on stage so no drinks were left behind, and I had to borrow an extension cable because of the way the headliner had taped down and left all their gear on stage and we were basically gigging around their stuff.
It’s not too bad westbound, but eastbound is a little more pucker inducing than it gets credit for. More so with snow on the road.
We say the same thing around here, too. I haven't been to a big name big money concert in years (I have been to hundreds of concerts when I was younger), I refuse to pay the outrageous prices, especially for old bands (I'm old, too) that have few if any original members and really don't sound the same anymore. The young big name acts just won't separate me from my money either with rare exceptions. Go local. As others have said, there is plenty of great new music out there to support.
