Musicians of the world unite – cast off your chains…….

You know, the state of the music industry greatly saddens me these days. I have been deeply involved in music since I was conscripted into the Hanover Musical Society junior town band when I was four-years-old. I played clarinet for eight or nine years, until the mid-Sixties when I realized you couldn’t really play clarinet in a rock ‘n’ roll band….then, I switched to bass guitar and I’d played in rock, blues and country bands for 53 years when the pandemic hit. I surely wasn’t good enough to be a professional musician – my first choice in life – but I was good enough to do lots of playing and have a really great time….

When I started playing, seriously in 1968, music was just bursting out all over…..while my garage band, Strange Brew, was practicing in my parents’ basement, my buddy, Dick Knechtel and his band, Local Disturbance, were practicing in our back yard in an old barn – it was a very noisy neighbourhood every night after school and on Saturdays. And there were gigs everywhere. In those days, before the advent of “disc jockeys”, if you were holding pretty well any type of event, you needed a band. There were dances everywhere and all the time….there were parties and there were coffee house-type venues. And in those days, we were too young to do bars.

Then, the drinking age dropped when I was in about Grade 12, and, suddenly, there were really gigs everywhere. Lots and lots of gigs – and you could even make okay money…..a three-nighter in a decent bar might get you $1500…..and my point is that you could actually aspire to be a musician in those days with some hope of paying your bills. That has mostly changed over the last few decades so that today it is pretty tough earning a living as musician. You’ve always had to work hard to be successful as a musician. But today it seems you have to work even harder….

And, of course, as live gigs have dried up and the money for playing live has mostly dried up, along have come these wonderful streaming services that the public just thinks is the cat’s ass….and why wouldn’t they. For ten bucks a month, they can have unlimited music from unlimited sources….hell of a deal – unless you’re a musician trying to sell your music to help pay your bills. Then, it’s only okay if you’re one of the truly big-time folks who get millions and millions of streams. Everybody else is dying – you might say they’re gasping for air in the middle of a stream of music. Anyway you look at it, it’s a hugely large pile of shit. Meanwhile back at the gold-plated ranch, the guy running Spotify is worth about $4.5 billion…..

In the middle of all this, I truly don’t understand why musicians, big and small, don’t start pulling it together to take on these music streaming services. Way back in Hollywood, when Charlie Chaplin and a bunch of other early-day actors thought they were being ripped and gouged by the movie studios, they started their own – United Artists – and it basically broke apart the stranglehold a few major studios had on the movie business. Why in the world don’t today’s musicians try to pull something similar? Musicians have long worked together collaboratively, forming bands, orchestras and putting together large and complicated projects and shows. How hard could it be to get some type of union or association together to protect musicians’ rights….there is indeed strength in numbers….there is indeed.

In fact, back in the old days when I was just starting to play, there were still musicians’ unions operating all over the place. And some of them were pretty powerful and lots of clubs and bars wouldn’t book a non union act back then. Are these unions still around, and if they are, what in the world are they doing…? Part of the problem in modern society is that the word “union’ has somehow become a negative thing and this is truly a stupid thing…..the folks who are running our world – not quite sure who that is these days – love it that the common people aren’t organized and have nothing to represent them and have to fight all their own battles. It’s something called dividing and conquering….and it’s working really well…..

If musicians – or any other part of society – want a fair shake from the system, they need to “band” together and force the system to change. It ain’t gonna happen if you don’t push and push real hard. The rich folks – the folks in control – never give it up without a fight. Make it happen, people. Musicians of the world unite – cast off your chains….