I moved a lot when I was young. My father's business required it of us some of the time. One time we moved simply because we wanted out of the City. So I moved from New York to Portland, Oregon; from Portland to the country outside Spokane, Washington. From there my father's work took us to Seattle. After that, when I moved away from home, I moved even more. Sometimes because music required it, I would pick up and move from one state to another, one city to another.

But I never grew tired of travelling...only moving. So touring has never been an issue for me. And I was fortunate to have a lot of support from my family, too.

Back when I was coming up as a musician, if you wanted to succeed, you had to put yourself in a musical environment that was thriving and growing, an environment of great musical diversity and vibrancy. New York was the center of the Folk revolution in the early 1960s, and a Blues haven a bit later on. And Seattle gave us Hendrix and Nirvana. But Ray Charles, Quincy Jones and other notables spent time there well before then. Portland, Oregon became pretty hot for a while in the 1980s and 1990s, but intermittently so. It was hit and miss.

Los Angeles and San Francisco were always hoppin', so that's where most people on the West Coast would end up, and it's true even today. Nashville, of course, for Country and Western music and Bluegrass is the Mecca to which they travel. Chicago was Blues Central (and New York, too, as mentioned earlier). Austin, Texas has become alternative heaven. The SXSW festival is held there every year. I always seem to miss it by a week or more. Many other towns have their draw, too, each for varying reasons. If you're a Jazz musician, you'll have more success on the East coast and in Europe. LA is pretty good nowadays, though.

If we wanted to 'make it', which didn't necessarily mean "get a record contract", we had to make a lot of noise. We had to prove we were able to keep up with the established 'name' musicians in whatever town or city we lived. The bigger the town, the better players tended to be. So seeking out larger towns, or music hot spots (though not always BIG towns), was important. The reason was that we could learn more from better musicians, not just about music, but about how to survive as a working musician. And the better musicians tended to be where the action was, where the gigs were. So we sought them out.

And we all paid our dues...a lot of dues.

Everyone has to pay dues. Don't think you don't. You do, and you will. You may even get early success, bypassing a lot of hard lessons and crappy gigs. But you will eventually start paying dues. You'll just be doing so in a different way. Great success has its own set of demands, different than the 'working musician' circuits.

Paying your dues simply means that you will suffer for your craft in some way; you will experience hardships and troubles in the journey to become established as a legitimate musician or artist, songwriter or sideman. You will have to deal with losing gigs to another band, broken promises from promoters and club owners, band mates, firing band members, money, getting ripped off, stiffed for your pay, and a whole lot more. You will have to deal with shady characters, possibly drug addiction or alcoholism (we pray not!). You will have to travel vast distances, live on the road, stay at horrible motels, maybe even sleep in the van, eat really bad food, starve, go broke, break down in between towns and sit by the side of the road for hours waiting for the tow truck. You may have to hitch a ride to get the tow truck (before cell phones). You will go into debt, maybe be sued in court (and lose). You may get fired from a gig, your own band, lose your girl/boy friend(s), live on friend's couches. Ah, the list goes on.

You may go through some or all of this. But I want to tell you; if you are really cut out for this life, it will all be worth it. And it will all help you in the long run as the content of some of your best songs. Believe me.

Paying your dues is a filtering process. If you can manage to survive through all the weird and wild stuff, become a better player, avoid the pitfalls of addiction to various substances and basically prove your worth, if only because you manage to stick with it and endure, you just might have a good run. But this is no guarantee.

It is this filtering process, this method of weeding out the people who are not dedicated, committed and singluarly obsessed with music, that becomes so necessary, is so important to ensuring that, for good or ill, live music will survive. It doesn't mean the best musicians will ultimately come through this dues paying gauntlet - many truly gifted players fail to make it, many quit because it's too much or they can't cope with the "life". What it does mean is that those who are the most stubborn will often get through everything. We hope they will also learn to be better musicians, too.

This does mean that bands that are truly awful can and do get the good gigs. We scratch our heads and wonder how they managed to survive. But we already know the answer. They were willing to do anything and everything to get there, even, yes...sell their souls.

This means not that they went to the Crossroads and met with the devil and made a deal. It means in some cases that they were willing to pay to play, to play for no money at all... a lot, to get exposure. "Fame" and all that garbage were more important than talent. Well, that is part of the deal with paying your dues. We all pay our dues for different reasons.

The hope is that most musicians pay their dues to get to the place of being able to share their talent with others who have no real talent...our audiences. This is not to say that audiences are made up of untalented hacks, Quite the contrary. Many "fans" of music are quite knowledgable about music, even players themselves. They just don't do it for a living (for whatever reason, many not related to the whole dues process).

In my case, I was always on the road early on. That's where the money was. I needed to make a living, had no clarity, so went out to find out about what kind of life the working musician really could expect to have.

I worked hundreds and thousands of miles from home, often for six or more months at a stretch. The money was always good, with few exceptions, and I wasn't addicted to anything. So I was able to save money, too. That's a rarity in young musician circles, to actually think about times when there isn't a gig, but you still need money to live. It necessitated playing far, far away from where the 'action' was, the big cities where one had a chance of being seen and heard by big names in the industry, whether musicians or producers or whomever. But, truth be told, this is the real life of actual working musicians. Over 90% of working musicians are not famous, well known or hang out with famous celebrities.

I played in a lot of bands, almost never running any of them. However, I was the music director in most of them because I knew how to arrange music. So an education in music is quite valuable and can result in leverage to command a bit more than other band members might receive in some cases (but be careful, demanding this can also lose you a gig). In many cases I was a 'hired' gun, playing the 'name' artist's compositions and touring as a support player. Sometimes I would direct the band, other times I followed direction. These are good gigs with the right people.

In my own bands, I've come close to the 'big break'. But not often. The truth is, the 'big break' is quite rare. So many bands are out there doing their thing and looking for that elusive 'big break' that it becomes a circus - a circus I just don't have time for.

So paying your dues includes striving after that 'big break', too. Whether it is a record contract or breaking out with your own independent release that sells in numbers enough to make a second record feasible, original bands are everywhere, chasing after consumer dollars.

My personal goal has always been about working in my chosen craft, music, and carefully putting my own compositions together so it would be exactly what I am striving to accomplish. I go into studio only when I'm ready. And I have the specific songs chosen so I won't get distracted (too much) by frivilous ideas or flights of fancy. And, most importantly, I don't rush the process. It gets done when it gets done. Records get released when they're ready and not one moment earlier. That can mean years between releases.

You will not make a living on record sales alone. That's just a fact. Even famous bands won't begin to see sustainable levels of income until they have three to five albums out, and all selling well enough to make that possible. They have to tour to earn their "daily bread" until that ship comes in which allows them to not have to tour relentlessly. Remember, if it's a band, the profits they receive are going to be split three to six or seven ways. So if you're going to say that maybe 30 grand a year is your "living" wage, take performance revenue profits (after all expenses) and album revenues (after expenses or payouts to labels and publishing house), divide by number of people on the payroll, and you have your personal gross income.

You're going to be paying your dues for a while before that level of income materializes.

It isn't to discourage you that I mention all this. Paying your dues is a fact of life in any profession. Just ask any lawyer, doctor, sports athelete or actor. They'll tell you it's tough. Sometimes you get the brass ring early, sometimes you work for years before you get there. Most people work their whole lives to just make ends meet.

But the truly dedicated will tell you they wouldn't change a thing, not one stinking, rotten gig, bad road trip, horrible pay, bad food, bad accomodations, nothing. They wouldn't have it any other way.

And I am one of them. I just happen to have found a good degree of success. Do I want more? I wouldn't turn it down if it was in line with what I'm striving to accomplish in my musical pursuits. But, and here's the big one, if it doesn't help get me where I want to go, I will turn it down. Sometimes saying "No" is worth more than gold. There are many times I declined a gig and later found that particular gig was a disaster, a train wreck of epic proportions.

But then, I've said "Yes" to a whole host of disasters and train wrecks, too. It is unavoidable.

It's called paying your dues.