From Aces to Angels

Is it Work?

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Earlier I touched on the adverse side of bandlife, now let me elaborate further.
  I wish I'd a pound for everytime someone said to me, 'For god's sake playin' in a band's not a job. That's money for oul rope!' I've spent most of my life playing in bands and I'll be the first to admit that overall I enjoyed my bohemian lifestyle despite the fact that  often it was a little less glamourous than a lot of people imagined. 
  Being a musician has its perks, but there's another side to a bandman's life which the general public seldom sees. There's more to it than the obvious bit that people see on the stage. But before I go any further, I must draw a distinction here between those who take up music purely as a hobby, and those who chose it as a profession, especially in a travelling band.
  The first thing that people don't appreciate is the fact that to get into a band in the first place, you have to learn to play an instrument, and that can take years of hard work. Admittedly there are good, bad and indifferent grades of musicianship, but still a minimum level of competence has to be attained (even if you only achieve 'three chord man' status) before you can become part of a band. As well as being out on the road four or five nights a week and the individual practising, there is also the rehearsals with the band, and these can be as often as three or four times weekly.
  Well it may not be work in the strictly physical sense of the word, but at the same time playing in a band is not something that you can walk in from the street and do. To demonstrate my point perhaps I can give you an example of what I mean.
  If you take the average worker and put him or her onstage with a band, it's very unlikley that he or she would be able to cope. Conversely, if you put the average musician on to a building site or into a factory (no mean feat in itself), within a short time he or she would probably make a reasonable attempt at doing the job.
  I mentioned earlier that it wasn't physical work, but sometimes physical strength was called for. It wasn't the first time we had to employ brute force to lift the van when we got a puncture in the middle of the night and discovered that the spare wheel was flat, we had a broken jack or no jack at all (a classic example of this later on).
  I'll tell you something now and you can decide for yourself whether playing in a band is work or not. This is just one example of many such incidents.
  The day the Jokers acquired their brand new Commer van, that same night we had a job down around Magherafelt or Toomebridge direction. We were no sooner on the road until Tommy realised we had problems. For some reason he couldn't engage first or second gear. Eventually Colm got out and had a look but there was nothing he could do as it was obviously an internal gearbox problem.
  To cut a long story short, the whole way to the job and back, every time we came to a hill we had to get out and push the n,va and incredible as it seems, this included the Glenshane Pass, which, back in the early sixties it has to be remembered, wasn't the big broad highway it is today, but a little narrow road with a sheer drop at one side in parts. I recall on many's a foggy winter's night one of us having to walk along the side of the road with a torch to make sure that the van didn't go over the side. As a consequence of driving in high gears all the time we enevitably burned out the clutch as well as ourselves. We arrived home exhausted and it took us a week to recover.
  On one other occasion when the Jokers' van had two punctures in the early hours of the morning, we all walked from just outside Raphoe to Derry (8-10 miles app.) carrying our instruments. In those days you'd hardly ever see another vehicle on the road in the middle of the night so we didn't manage to get a lift until we reached the border. If somebody had have come up to us on those nights and declared that playing in a band wasn't work, I can assure you now that he would have gone home with his head up his bum.
  As well as being demanding physically at times, band life can also have other very negative effects on the mind and body. It isn't a very secure profession and it has its fair share of disappointments, frustrations and general depression inducing episodes, and many's the time I swore I'd had my fill. Still, music is like a drug and I just couldn't seem to get away from it. Let's deal with the mental bit first.
  There's nothing to compare to the sick feeling you experience when after driving for nine or ten hours, you arrive at the gig only to discover that there's another band booked, especially when your name's not on the poster. On other occasions you find that someone has failed to inform you that the dance has been cancelled, or it was never on in the first place. And even if the dance is on, for one reason or another nobody turns up and you have to pack up early and return home disconsolate and penniless.
  It can work both ways of course. On occasion you never reach the dance at all because of a breakdown, accident or some other unfortunate circumstance. This scenario could entail sitting freezing and hungry for hours in the wagon until someone came to rescue you. But the  suffering and martyrdom endured by the poor struggling musicians didn't cut any ice with the odd unsympathetic promoter who didn't think twice about suing you for the money he'd lost from having to cancel the dance. In fairness, these promoters were in a minority. Either way the poor band usually came off the worst. Now onto some medical matters.
  In addition to the awful dietary habits and their consequences of musicians mentioned earlier, there were other physical discomforts as well, like spending too long in cramped vans and cold halls. In later years this could lead to conditions like rheumatism and arthritis. 
  Another problem was the constant exposure to noise, especially in modern bands, which could eventually cause distressing problems such as tinnitus (ringing and buzzing noises in the ears). In the showbands you were lucky if you had a fifty watt amp for the P.A., and a twenty watt amp for guitar, so the noise level was within acceptable limits. Not so these days, for the watts can be counted in their ear blasting thousands. Some years ago I myself was diagnosed as suffering from both ailments, the latt bereing caused by a loud drummer's crash cymbal to which my position on stage was in close proximity. While on the subject of noise, here's a little story from my Golden Seven days.
  On a gig somewhere in England, which was a massive out and out R 'n' R venue, we set up our gear and started to play. Almost immediately, the management came up to the stage and started to complain about the volume. Naturally you're going to think we were too loud, but no, it was the opposite, we weren't loud enough. We turned up the volume but still they complained. Well we couldn't get our old equipment up any louder but the problem was partially resolved when they switched on their own house P.A. and stuck microphones in front of everything. Even then they weren't entirely happy. Apparently they were used to loud R 'n' R bands and that was all they wanted to hear. It was the only time in my life that I remember anyone asking the band to turn up. To make matters worse, only about a third of our programme was up tempo Rock 'n' Roll numbers so we had to repeat those all night. Now back to the business in hand.
  There were other less serious medical ailments suffered by musicians like haemorrhoids (piles), caused by sitting too long on hard seats and an inability to sleep during the hours of darkness (most likely because they slept most of the day).
  Now, lest I forget, being a member of a travelling band could play havoc with your social life, especially relationships with members of the opposite sex (or on occasion, the same sex). To have a peaceful life while gigging in a band required a very understanding wife or girlfriend (I must stress that today I'm lucky in that respect), for no matter how much reassurance to the contrary was forthcoming, there was always the underlying suspicion that like the proverbial sailor, you had a bird in every town. Many's a good marriage floundered under these conditions.
  From a personal point of view, there was something else that made big demands on the poor frail body of a musician. This usually happened after a gig on a Friday night when earlthy e next morning, after having about two hours sleep, some sadistic soccer freaks, masquerading as my friends, came banging on the door. They pleaded that they were short of a man to play a match in the Saturday morning D & D (Derry and District) league and they needed my services badly. Well although I was certainly no George Best, I liked playing football, but on those cold winter days I could have seen it far enough as I struggled out of bed to stagger my way to the B.S.R. pitch or St. Columb's Park (the former now covered by large warehouses in the Pennyburn Industrial Estate). It didn't help my already weak physical condition when I was choked by fumes drifing over from The Du Pont chemical factory and I had to make a swift bee line to the nearest bushes to be violently sick.
  Finally, leaving aside the fact that we could be travelling up to ten hours and on the stage up to five hours four or five times a week, what could be harder work than having to sing songs like 'My Boy Lollipop' or 'Dedicated Follower of Fashion.' So all things considered, while bandlife may not be in the same category as manual labour, it certainly could be difficult at times.

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