My very first tour, following the release of my debut album, was a dizzying and tumultuous affair, with hurried rehearsals, circuitous routing, haphazard organization and a coke-impaired agent supposedly orchestrating it all. The one saving grace was that I was lucky enough to put together an able band of talented NY musicians including Mark Rivera on sax, Don Sarlin on guitar, Bruce Samuels on bass and Tom Rossetter on drums.
We had our first rehearsals in the Bottom Line nightclub, run by my managers, in the afternoons before the evening gigs. Donny missed the first few rehearsals because he was finishing up a tour in Japan. The big joke was whenever we came to a difficult vocal part, the refrain became, ‘Donny can sing that part’. Of course, when Donny finally showed up and started to sing, we all cracked up, realizing that his forte was definitely guitar playing, and not singing. And Donny was a fine guitar player, with a keen sense of tone and articulation and an impeccable feel for playing just the right lyrical phrase, or percussive pulse. Plus, a really good guy.
But there was one odd thing about, Donny.
He always woke up suspiciously early in the morning.
Suspiciously early for a musician, that is.
The rest of the band would stumble out of our hotel rooms, sometime around noon, and Donny would already be sitting in the lobby having woke hours ago, gone for a walk, had breakfast, read the paper, finished the crossword puzzle, changed his guitar strings, called home and written a letter.
No reflection on his excellent musicianship, but there was something decidedly odd about this behavior. Musicians weren’t supposed to rise up, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at the break of dawn, ready to face the glorious day. They were supposed to roll out of bed, mid-day at the earliest, one eye still closed, shielding their open eye from the glaring sunlight pouring in through the open curtains. Then they would drag themselves, half-dressed and unshaven, to breakfast, in slow motion, mumbling incoherently, until 8 or 16 or 32 ounces of coffee infused them with enough caffeine to convincingly simulate being wide awake.
Even this was a ruse, because it took another two hours, at least, for them to be able to string a coherent sentence together and it wouldn’t be until close to dusk that they’d be in full possession of their faculties and finally be able to play their asses off in front of a roaring crowd.
Drugs had nothing to do with this, by the way. We were being paid bubkes (Yiddish: nothing) and recreational drugs were in short supply. Pancakes were our big indulgence. No, this was purely a musician thing. A genetic marker, somehow associated with being able to play in tune combined with the basic reality of musician working hours. Just as all the doctors, lawyers, accountants, librarians and real-estate agents were settling down for the night, flipping through TV channels, preparing to drift off into slumber, we’d be starting our work day - playing our first set of the evening. While most of the world was counting sheep, we’d be firing up amps, tuning instruments and riding a great adrenaline rush as we walked on stage to begin our ‘regular’ jobs, making music, for ourselves, each other and any other adventurous spirits in the audience that didn’t have to wake up at 6:00am to catch the train to work, the next day.
We are not alone in this distinction. Musician hours are shared by other noble professions - police, firefighters, nurses, waitresses at the all night diner… - anyone who works a late shift, whose mid-day is mid-night, who greets the dawn at the end of their working day, knows what it’s like livng life upside down, so-to-speak, opposite the rest of the world. And they also know where to get a good bacon cheeseburger at 4:00 in the morning.
Although, to reiterate, it’s no reflection on his excellent musicianship, the fact that Donny eventually left the music business and went on to work for a large multinational finance company only served to confirm my suspicions at seeing him rise at the crack of dawn to start his day. (He’s still a great musician, even so. Maybe his great uncle was a baker, or something.)
In any case, sleeping late is not the only perk that comes with being a working musician (there are others, but my affiliation with the musician’s union local #802 - and common sense - prevents me from revealing them here) but, it is the one musician trait, which in my experience, irritates the straight world the most.
They just can’t stand it. It drives them nuts.
And why shouldn’t it? Who wouldn’t be jealous of someone who gets to ‘play’ for a living, and sleep late on top of it?
Of course, there are some problems associated with the lifestyle.
In musician’s parlance, these problems are referred to as… kids.
There is a basic conflict between finishing your last set at 2:00am, breaking down the gear, loading up the van, stopping off at an all-night diner to grab a cheeseburger deluxe, finally making it home by 4:00am, unloading the gear, rolling into bed a little before 5:00am and drifting off to sleep…
…just in time for the clock radio to go off like a bank alarm at 6:00am and send you leaping out of bed in order to drive the kids to school, ’cause it’s your turn.
Sans massive amphetamines, these two lifestyles are mutually incompatible, a fact that helps explain why married musicians with young kids walk around looking like zombie extras from the latest George Romero remake. Again, let me stress, it’s not the drugs… it’s the kids.
I confess to having tried various, ultimately unsuccessful, strategies to compensate for this incompatibility. Unfortunately, as I quickly discovered, 6 year olds are simply too young to drive themselves to school, even when perched atop a phone book, thus enabling them to see over the steering wheel.
But the point is, logistics aside, it’s the social stigma, more than anything else which musician suffer, for their insolence in sleeping late, regardless of how productive they might have been the night before.
Obviously, my crawling out of bed by noon is evidence of my being a lazy, good-for-nothing, commie-radical, with no self discipline or moral rectitude.
And even though that may well be the case, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t up all night working harder and more diligently than any bank clerk, orthodontist or school principal.
It just means I keep different hours. Musician hours.
Time hasn’t alleviated any of the stigma. Friends and relatives still call at 9:01am, exactly, presuming, completely erroneously, that any decent, responsible citizen has already completed their morning constitution and is alert and eager to engage in social discourse.
“…mmmnumbble, er, no, that’s fine… I’ve been awake for hours.”, is the diplomatic, yet humiliating, lie I am forced to tell, to keep from screaming into the phone at them, “stop calling me so f*cking early in the morning, you f*cking moron!”
But, alas, I am resigned to this social schism. There are those of us that keep musician hours. And those of us that don’t.
And then there are those of us that can’t wait ’til our 16 year old is finally old enough to drive himself to school, so his dear old musician dad can revert to waking up at a human hour.
In summary, to paraphrase that shampoo comercial, with the girl with the luscious locks…
Don’t hate us musicians because we get to sleep late.
Hate us because we have so much more fun staying up all night! 
Sleepily yours,
Deano
Footnote: I was pleased to learn that the word ’schism’ has an early musical derivation. Other than its common use in Greek to refer to a crack in a wall or an egg, the original use of schisma (σχισμα) as a technical term was in ancient Greek music theory, and referred to a slight difference in pitch. The term is still used for that purpose in modern microtonal music and theoretical treatments of musical tuning. The term is used for a separation in pitch a few times less than a comma; usually a pitch difference of about 5 cents. Imagine that! source: wikipedia.org
Here it is, my first ever WordPress blog attempt. Feeling like a technical virgin about to get literal. Creeping into the neighboring cabin, getting up to mischief. Shhhhh…, don’t wake the counselors.
