Trumpets, Mitch Clem and Rockstars

It always bewilders me when people think that just because a band tours, they’re ‘big'. What does that even mean?
I used to play trumpet and be exempt from singing in a ska punk band (we were going to write the next ‘Shoes’, I’m telling you), who, for a band full of late teens with better things to do, played a lot of shows and went on tour a couple of times more than we should have.
Our friends still ask us “how did you get so many shows?” and “how did you get to play a festival in Prague that Mad Caddies headlined at?”.
The answer’s simple: you don’t ask, you don’t get.

I have friends who are in great bands which write songs leagues above anything we ever wrote, but they feel that by asking a promoter/whoever to put them on this or that show, they're ‘selling themselves’. Avoiding the ‘should we sell punk rock music?’ nuclear explosion, I respect that way of looking at the whole deal. It’s just up to why you’re in the band in the first place. And if you don’t know that, then maybe you should find in yourself a reason to be in a band and start a new one.


Strip by Mitch Clem

My constitution about anything music related is this:

- Travel. You don’t need to be good to tour. You don’t need to be good to tour. You don’t need to be good to tour.
Put in the effort and get the hell out of your town. You lose money, but if you weren’t losing it on something you believe in then you’d be losing it at your local JD Wetherspoons (there's a good story about the company for another post) with all your old school mates who you don't even like all that much.

- Don’t play ‘the game’. If you hear that there’s going to be an agent/label/music entrepreneur genius at your show, don’t act or play how you think they’d want you to be like. Not only does it make you have a shit time trying to fit your big ol' square body into a tiny triangular hole, but if anyone’s ever going to come into your band’s life, it’ll come naturally without any try-hard masks.

- Don’t think too far in advance. Cross out your 5 year plan and tear it up. Big things can happen in the smallest amount of time. And that could be your singer going to university. It can go the opposite way aswell. Punk rock isn’t gonna start accommodating a whole load of career prospects, and even those on cool record labels have to work shitty jobs to pay the rent. It took me a while to get it into my head, but some of my favourite bands like Jawbreaker, Kid Dynamite, Lightyear… they never got so much as petrol money and a plate of food throughout their late years.
And when people saw those dudes at their shows, they would say “go on mate, buy us a drink, will ya Mr Rockstar?”.

To totally contradict my pointing out of FT's contradiction in my previous post, the line "there are no such things as rockstars, there are just people that play music" is very true. At least in my world.

It’s a morbid thought that a group of people have jeopardised their working lives to write records that have shaped some of the most financially stable employees in the world.

In a bit.