Fingers were pointed at the increasingly absurd and ever more irrelevant Lily Allen the other day. The multi millionaire was experiencing some difficulty with tenants in her Notting Hill home as they were allegedly refusing to leave and were claiming diplomatic immunity. This turned out to be overblown and ridiculously exaggerated as is so often the case when a waning star seeks to make ink in order to revive a distinctly flagging career. Expect a Great American Songbook album any day soon. Anyway, quite a few wags and wiseacres got on board with this suggesting a social media whip round to shore up poor Lily's diminished circumstances. Last I heard she was down to her last four million.
How we laughed.
Then, as if on cue, over here in our little corner of 'the industry' a prominent figure fell prey to genuine tragedy. A legendary and highly regarded fellow drummer who I don’t know personally lost his home and posessions in a wild fire in Ventura County, California.
It's hard to imagine how you would so much as start to deal with a crisis on that kind of scale. Anyone who has ever tried to make even the smallest insurance claim will know that the companies seem hell-bent on moving heaven and earth to wriggle out of any sort of settlement, to say nothing of process moving at a glacial pace once a pay out has been grudgingly agreed.
In what was a remarkably level headed and really quite entrepreneurial move our man set up an appeal on the Go Fund me Platform. I sent him thirty dollars, it's a slow week. Although an undisputed monster player I don't have any of his records and have never been influenced by him but I donated what I could afford, which more than anything is about our little community looking out for one another.
Not everybody feels the same, and there have been one or two outbreaks of high dudgeon at the effrontery of a <quote> 'very rich musician' seeking to enrich himself, one assumes, at the expense of the good-natured paupers who buy his million selling records and subsidise his private jet and mansion habits. <Insert dictionary definition of irony here>
As I said earlier in the post I don't know this gentleman personally but I can tell you something that he and I have in common, along with the vast majority of those who have made a career out of producing sounds from musical instruments.
We all earn a great deal less than you might think.
Don't get me wrong, by no stretch of the imagination have we 'got it tough'. To be able to spend your life pursuing music as a profession is a gift in direct proportion to the requisite gifts that make it possible in the first place.
Consider this: just because he is considered (rightly) to be a big name on the drum scene doesn’t mean he is worth a fortune, not even a small one. A lot of recordings with strong 'muso appeal' that are known to very many of us actually sell in miniscule quantities to the point where the bean counters at the major records labels long since shut the door. Much of what gets out there does so at the behest of small, enthusiastic outlets who value artistry over profit. A very large percentage of the best recordings of your musician heroes fall very squarely under this subheading. Conversely there are musicians out there you never heard of who played on stacks of hit records back in the 70s and 80s; records that still get played on mainstream radio as a result of which the musicians get a very small royalty, but if you were on enough of the right sessions way back when people used to all gather in the same room to record stuff (nostalgia!) a decent income stream from PPL (look it up) is still very possible.
It's a common misconception that musicians, especially those with any kind of individual profile are making out like footballers whereas the reality is that visibility is in no way a reflection of turnover. Some weeks you do really well, some weeks are just passable, and then there are those weeks when you earn absolutely nothing at all. If very fortunate there might be some income from songwriting or airplay (my PPL averages about two quid a week) but being dependent on playing exclusively is a very hazardous path at the best of times. Even household names have lean periods. I remember in the early 90s I had become friends with the great British jazz drummer Martin Drew who had an international profile at that time on account of the best part of two decades as a member of the Oscar Peterson trio. He invited me round to his house to hang out and my mental image of a six bedroom Georgian detached house with a carriage drive turned out to be slightly wide of the mark, which brings us to the other misconception that stellar skill on your instrument somehow equals big paydays. It doesn't.
All the virtuoso chops in the world won't get you anywhere close to Queen's Roger Taylor for having written 'It's A Kind Of Magic', and if you are a named artist on a record receiving mainstream airplay you can do very well too. When Radio 2 played one track off my Upswing album and I got almost forty quid I couldn't help but extrapolate that to what Adele must be clocking up.
Anyway, I hope our man gets back on his feet quickly and completely. In any event perhaps if he raises way more money than anticipated (which is looking entirely possible) he might then be minded to pass any excess on to other deserving parties in our community, and having been able to produce creative work of my own this year via crowd funding I know first hand how it feels to be on the receiving end of support that makes things happen.
In the myriad complexities of human nature I like to think that our default setting is to help people in times of need, without always choosing to ascertain how they got to that place. I know a couple of fellow musicians who have experienced extremely straitened circumstances and have been on the receiving end of all kinds of help, money, a place to live and often a place to play. All done without judgement when you consider how one or two characters spent much of the 80s and 90s propping up the GDP of a certain Central American republic.
But really it's all about proportion isn't it?
If a billionaire donated a million pounds to a good cause it would have an impact as a proportion of his nett worth equivalent to me giving a few quid to a homeless person (or thirty bucks to a fellow drummer who lost everything in a house fire for that matter).
Money by itself is worth nothing.
It's what you do with it that counts.
