Humor

CARTOONS

THE PRICE OF MUSICIANS

The guy says, "WHAT? FOR MUSIC?"

THE LEAD SINGER

A NEW MUSICIAN'S DICTIONARY

ADVICE TO CLUB GOERS: HOW TO BE FRIENDS WITH THE BAND

TALKING WITH THE BAND
The best time to discuss anything with the band in any meaningful way is at the middle of a song when all members are singing at the same time (such as a multi-part harmony). Our hearing is so advanced that we can pick out your tiny voice from the megawatt wall of sound blasting all around us. Musicians are expert lip readers too. If a musician does not reply to your question or comment during a tune, take this very personally. Singers have the ability to sprout a second mouth to talk with you and sing at the same time. If the singer doesn't, it's because he is purposely ignoring you. If this happens, immediately cop an attitude. We love this. When an entertainer leans over to hear you better, grab his or her head and yell directly into their ear, holding their head so they cannot pull away from you. This is an invitation to a friendly game of tug of war between their head and your hands. Disregard any respect for the musician's hearing.

BASS SOLOS

After years of hiding the fact that the love is gone, the last child moves out of the house and Mom and Dad announce they're getting a divorce.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE TOO OLD TO GIG WHEN:

1. It becomes more important to find a place onstage for your box fan, than your amp.
2. You refuse to play out of tune.
3. Your gig clothes make you look like George Burns out for a round of golf.
4. Your fans have left by 10:30 p.m.
5. All you want from groupies is a foot massage.
6. Your aftershow party is at the International House of Pancakes.
7. You love taking the elevator because you can sing along to most of your playlist.
8. You hire band members for their values instead of their talent.
9. Instead of a fifth member, your band wants to spring for a roadie.
10. You've lost the directions to the gig.
11. You need your glasses to see your amp settings.
12. You've thrown out your back jumping off the stage.
13. You're thrilled to have New Year's Eve off.
14. The waitress is your daughter.
15. You stop the set because your bottle of Ibuprofen fell behind the speakers.
16. Most of your crowd just sways in their seats.
17. You find your drink tokens from last month's gig in your guitar case.
18. You no longer use a tip jar.
19. You refuse to play without earplugs.
20. You ask the club owner if you can start at 8:30 p.m. instead of 9:30 p.m.
21. You check the TV schedule before booking a gig.
22. Your gig stool has a back.
23. You're related to at least one other member of the band.
24. You need a nap before the gig.
25. You don't let anyone "sit in."
26. After the third set, you bug the club owner to let you quit early.
27. During the breaks, you now go to your van to lay down.
28. You prefer a music stand with a light.
29. You don't recover until Tuesday afternoon.
30. You can't operate without a set list.
31. You have a contract.
32. You say you double on bass.

FAMOUS QUOTES

1. "One of the perks of being an unemployed musician is that you get to play much less bad music." - Jack Daney
2. "After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley
3. "Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself." - Igor Stravinsky
4. "Hell is full of musical amateurs." - George Bernard Shaw
5. "The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!" - Panama Francis
6. "Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins." - Dizzy Gillespie on playing the trumpet
7. "Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." - Duke Ellington
8. "Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time." - Ornette Coleman
9. "We never play anything the same way once." - Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians
10. "Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't." - Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman
11. "Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso
12. "The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - (unknown-talking about the Don Ellis band)
13. "If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton. - Chet Baker
14. "I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gon' keep playin'. - Clark Terry
15. "A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
16. "To be a musician is a curse. To NOT be one is even worse. - Jack Daney
17. "Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already." - Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.
18. "I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve." - Xavier Cugat
19. "[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art." - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.
20. "Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living." - Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer
21. "I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet." - Niccoló Paganini
22. "What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?" - Nathaniel Hawthorne
23. "Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats." - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.
24. "If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation." - Oscar Wilde
25. "Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together." - Mel Brooks
26. "Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." - William F. Buckley, Jr.
27. "You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow." - Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.
28. "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain
29. "Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently." - James Gibbons Hunekar
30. "If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder." - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland
31. "There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." - Sergei Prokofiev
32. "I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?" - Dimitri Mitropolous
33. "God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way." - Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player
34. "Already too loud!" - Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.
35. "I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere." - Frederic Chopin
36. "When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano." - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller
37. "Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them." - Richard Strauss
38. "In opera, there is always too much singing." - Claude Debussy
39. "Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!" - Giacchino Rossini
40. "I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse." - Bing Crosby
41. "A ponderous orchestral absurdity." - Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic
42. "The bottom line of any country is, what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong." - Tony Bennett

BOOKING REALITIES

1. When you are drunk, you just THINK you play like Eric Clapton. When in fact, you sound like Big Bird on a zither.
2. Bands are still making the same money they did 25 years ago.
3. People don't want to hear your 10 minute guitar/drum/bass solo no matter how good you think it is.
4. People will always say you are too loud and they are usually right.
5. Most people are not there to listen to the band.
6. You may think you're the opening act but you're really the sound check.
7. Everyone wants to hear "Mustang Sally" no matter how many times you've played it in the past.
8. Secretly you enjoy playing "Mustang Sally" cause it's easy to solo over.
9. A good way to send people to the restroom is to announce the next song is an original.
10. When you are hired to play an event what they really hired was the use of your PA.
11. At the end of the gig most folks couldn't tell you three songs you played the entire night.
12. The more complex a song is the less people want to hear it.
13. Most people don't even know the name of your band.
14. People will enjoy a bad band if they at least act like they are having a good time on stage.
15. Anything having to do with music takes a back seat when your first child is born, (band members without children will never understand this one).
16. At some point someone will request "Freebird". It doesn't matter if you play a banjo in a Spanish band & wear a sombrero, it's going to happen.
17. "Girlfriends" with tambourines are annoying.
18. Anyone with a tambourine is annoying, (this includes cowbells).
19. The "Chicken Dance" & "Play that Funky Music White Boy" are staples at weddings. Live with it.
20. If you play enough bars & beer joints, you will eventually get flashed -- by the ugliest woman in attendance.

BLUES RULES

1. Most Blues begin, “Woke up this morning………………..”
2. “I got a good woman,” is a bad way to begin the Blues, ‘less you stick something nasty in the next line: “I got a good woman - with the meanest face in town.”
3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes ... sort of:
   “Got a good woman - with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like a moose – and she weighs 500 pound.”
4. The Blues are not about choice. You’re stuck in a ditch: You’re stuck in a ditch, “ain’t no way out.”
5. Blues cars: Chevys and Cadillacs and broken down trucks. Blues does not travel in Volvos, BMWs, or SUV’s. Most Blues transportation is done in a Greyhound bus or on a south-bound train. Jet aircraft and state-sponsored motor pools ain’t even in the running. Walkin’ plays a major part in the Blues lifestyle. So does fixin’ to die.
6. Teenagers can’t sing the Blues. They ain’t fixin to die yet. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, “adulthood” means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.
7. Blues can take place in New York City, but not in Hawaii (or possibly, any place in Canada). Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just depression. Chicago, NYC, St. Louis, and Kansas City are still the best places to have the Blues. You cannot have the blues in any place that doesn’t get rain.
8. A man with male pattern baldness isn’t the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is. Breaking your leg because you had a skiing accident is not the blues. Breaking your leg ‘because an alligator is chomping on it" is.
9. You can’t have the Blues in an office or a shopping mall - the lighting is wrong. Go outside to the parking lot or sit by a dumpster.
10. Good places for the Blues:
    a. highway
    b. jailhouse
    c. empty bed
    d. bottom of a whiskey glass
    
    Bad places:
    a. Lord and Taylor
    b. gallery openings
    c. Ivy League institutions
    d. golf courses
11. No one will believe it’s the Blues if you wear a suit, unless you slept in it.
12. Do you have the right to sing the Blues?
    Yes, if:
    a. you’re older than dirt
    b. you’re blind
    c. you shot a man in Memphis
    d. you can’t be satisfied
    
    No, if:
    a. you have all your teeth
    b. you were once blind but now can see
    c. the man in Memphis lived.
    d. you have a retirement plan or trust fund
13. Blues is not a matter of color. It’s a matter of bad luck. Tiger Woods cannot sing the blues. Gary Coleman could. Ugly white people also got a leg up on the blues.
14. If you ask for water and your woman gives you gasoline, it’s the Blues. Other acceptable Blues beverages are:
    a. wine (usually out of a box and not French)
    b. whiskey or bourbon
    c. muddy water
    d. black coffee
    
    The following are NOT Blues beverages:
    a. cranberry juice
    b. kosher wine
    c. Snapple
    d. sparkling water
15. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it’s a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying lonely in a broken down cot. You can’t have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or getting liposuction.
16. Some Blues names for women:
    a. Sadie
    b. Big Mama
    c. Bessie
    d. Fat River Dumpling
17. Some Blues names for men:
    a. Joe
    b. Willie
    c. Little Willie
    d. Big Willie
18. Persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia, and Rainbow can’t sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.
19. The Make your own Blues name starter kit:
    a. name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.)
    b. first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi, etc.) (Now wait a minute! Kiwi is a blues fruit???)
    c. last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.) For example, Blind Lime Jefferson or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc.
20. I don’t care how tragic your life; if you own a Plasma TV, you cannot sing the blues. You best destroy it. Fire, a spilled bottle of Mad Dog, or shotgun. Maybe your big woman just done sit on it.