37 : Touring Musicians
Imagine how depressing it must be to be a touring musician. There you are playing to thousands of people in massive arenas & stadiums for , say Morrissey for example. and not one person in that crowd has any idea of who the hell you are. Worse still if you're his guitarist everybody in that arena is looking at you wishing you were Johnny Marr as you try your best to make all the Smiths songs in the set sound as convincing as possible.
But it gets worse than that. Imagine it's the tail end of the 70s and your Bowie's guitarist you've just finished a successful tour and Bowie is about to record a new album , you get all excited at the thought of playing on a Bowie record only to discover that you've been dropped like a bad habit because David got in his mate Robert Fripp to do all the guitars on the album instead of you. But hey never mind , at least you get to play all Fripp's stuff on the next tour. You could go out and record an album of your own during the meantime but you know full well that those millions of people you played to on that last tour don't give a flying f
uck about your own material and won't buy it.
Touring musicians , don't get me wrong I don't hate them but you have to admit it is a rather pathetic existence and is probably the worst case of selling your soul. I recently was channel surfing the other day and saw Cliff Richard playing his new single. The bassist looked about 20 years old and didn't stop smiling the whole time , and I just thought to myself 'F
uck , imagine how much stick he's going to get from his mates for that' , especially if they're all in trendy indie bands'. I mean if you love music enough to want to learn an instrument why the hell would you want to be in Cliff Richard's band at that young age?
I just don't get it. I'd rather be broke playing my own stuff at that age than play songs for a God botherer whose nearly in his 70s