Hard Work For Them

We were in Green Bay to see the band The Twistin Tarantulas, my partner, his brother and I.

They are a punk-rockabilly band - their music is right on the boundary between the two.  Very fast, very funny.  Only one original member was touring with them, the bass player and singer.  The other members were quite a bit younger, but killer players, so the music was exciting and accomplished and fun.

The three of us all are guitar owners and guitar players, and we have gone out to see bands and have been collecting records for all of our respective lives.  We know lots of musicians, and so we know what they have to do, first to be able to play at that level, and second to live the life.  This band is out of Detroit, but had travelled all together in a van to Wisconsin, to play for a couple of hours in this dark bar to this baker's dozen of people.

We know that touring bands make most of their money from merchandise, and this band had just finished recording a new CD, which the bass player-singer promoted from the stage.  He said, "We just finished a new album," so see him after the show to pick one up, and support the band.  "We worked hard on it.  And hard work should be rewarded!  So come by after the show and pick up our new CD.  Here's a song from it..."

There was a skinny, weedy guy standing next to me, beer in his hand.  Sinewy, maybe, is a better description.  Not young, not a young guy, maybe 40's, but they had obviously been a tough 40-some years.  Jean jacket, maybe.  After this speech from the bass player, this guy caught my eye and smiled.  He leaned over and said in my ear, which you had to do because the bar was so loud, he said, "Hard work! Hard work for them might be the tips of their fingers get a little sore."  He curled his left hand and gestured to the fingertips with one of the fingers from his beer-holding hand.  

I was struck because this was so opposite from my beliefs about touring punk-rockabilly musicians.  I knew that all three of us were there to bear witness in awe to their might and grandeur, dreaming but knowing that we could never, even if we started today and gave everything to it, never play as well as they were playing, and do what they do.  I had been standing there in that shared knowledge and admiration, so this perspective was so opposite, but then looking at the guy, you knew that in fact he did know hard work, and none of us had any grounds to say anything different about it.

My boyfriend said several days later - "I realized at the time, I just had the 'Money For Nothing' conversation."