You’d figure it wasn’t supposed to work out this way, and when most of those crazy kids started out playing rock’n’roll way back when it was something that was a bit of an adventure before the reality of a nine-to-five job set in. “The guitar’s all very well, John,” Lennon’s Aunt Mimi is alleged to have stated, “but you’ll never making a living from it.”
Now, coming up to fifty years on from the halcyon days of the mid-sixties we’ve got some of those people still on the go. How do they manage to keep it going?
Reflection: On Keeping Things Going
Although I'm in the process of transferring content from the old pages on the site devoted to music and reading and consequently have a conscious don't embark on a major new project policy, there's also a long-term commitment to getting between eight hundred and two thousand words of new content up there six days a week.
That's usually a matter of finding a subject for meditation as I set off on the morning walk each weekday, something that I can spend an hour or so tapping out when I return to base. That's usually going to be something about what I've bought, read, listened to or drunk over the preceding couple of days.
Musings on The Basement Tapes filled that role very nicely last week, but as I set out this morning there wasn't anything obvious. I'd started the new Le Carre, but had only got about fifty pages into a gradually uncoiling plot line. Summer drinking's a subject that'll come in later, after I've had a chance to stock up on Rockford Alicante Bouchet and Pfeiffer Gamay, so that's not a goer just yet.
Looks like it'll have to be something musical, then, I thought as I headed west along Kennedy Street. The content transfer had almost reached the end of the Allman Brothers New York run from March last year, so I pondered just finishing that side of things, before dismissing the idea. No, need something new for the site.
Recent purchases, on reflection, have been largely composed of new or recent releases by continuing old favourites, so that, along with that Allmans theme and the recent R.I.P. re. Richie Hayward soon had Hughesy musing over the keeping things going theme.
Hopefully that'll provide a framework for the next few days, and an avenue that'll lead into reviews of, among others, the new albums by Los Lobos, Richard Thompson and Elvis Costello as well as recent releases by the Texas Tornados, the Bonzos and ex-Little Feat vocalist Shaun Murphy.
As I've remarked elsewhere, there's probably no way anyone embarking on a musical career forty years ago was looking at it as a long term career, but, equally obviously, after you've been doing something for a while you start to find that there aren't many alternative career paths. It’s not as if great technical mastery of a musical instrument flows over into other career paths if you rule out playing or a salesman’s gig in a music shop.
I started off teaching as a temporary fill-in measure while I finished off my degree and thought I'd end up in academia. Didn't work out that way, and I was still in the classroom thirty years later. It wasn't a conscious decision, I just found myself there and never left, largely because as time went on there wasn't anywhere obvious to go to.
More than likely, if you've been on the road playing music for a few years, you've closed off alternative career paths, so you're possibly (more or less) left without many options.
After all, there's no superannuation scheme (and, more often than not, no health insurance) for musicians.
So, what do you do to keep it going? It seems like most of the artists I tend to follow seem to have set about transforming themselves into a cottage industry, and recent releases are often, it seems, an integral part of keeping something new as part of the stock on the merchandise table. Performance payments might keep the wolf from the door, but I suspect you need as many additional avenues to keep the money coming in so you can put food on the table.
To that extent, of course, it's handy to have something that'll work on a regular basis.
That's, I guess, the beauty of the Allman Brothers' New York run in March each year. The fans know to expect it, and can probably plan long term holiday plans around something in that general time frame. You'd make the actual bookings once you'd scored tickets, of course, but you'd have things in place so you could proceed from there once you had.
Much of the attraction with that sort of thing as far as the band is concerned, of course, lies in the fact that you can take the travel side of things right out of the question. Book a theatre for a fortnight, promote the shows yourself, cut out the travel expenses, set up the gear once and (presumably) leave it there. Ideal. Keep costs down and maximize profits.
The fans know to expect it, and you can probably be certain of selling out a suitably sized venue. So it's all cream once those initial expenses have been met.
Touring, of course, is probably going to be the bread and butter side of your operation, so you're going to end up working something close to a circuit, preferably one that encompasses areas where you do well, and while the fans who live elsewhere (with northern Australia being a prime example) mightn't be too happy, the economics of getting to those markets probably rule them out.
If they don't actually rule them out, they'll have an influence on your format when you get there, which means that I'm more likely to see Elvis Costello or Richard Thompson in solo acoustic mode rather than in a band setting.
In those two cases you're talking performers who write rather well, are prolific enough to turn out a new album every so often, and have a large enough back catalogue to be able to sprinkle familiar material through the new stuff so that the audience isn't going to be grumbling about all this new stuff. Those extensive back catalogues mean there's enough material that can be tweaked to fit into two (solo acoustic and band) or maybe even three or more (Costello solo, with the Imposters or the Sugarcanes and in a big band or orchestra) settings.
Neil Young's another one who can fit that back catalogue into whatever format he's currently playing around with.
At the same time you have the rather prolific Stephen Cummings who manages to release a steady flow, mixing new material and reworking that back catalogue. He doesn't work live all that much, but presumably pulls in enough from what he does, combining what he gets from royalties, the odd gig here and there and the occasional excursion into fiction or other journalism-related formats, to get by.
That's fine if you've managed to tweak your lifestyle circumstances so you can get by on a minimal income. You mightn't be able to manage that if, for example you have extensive alimony commitments, ongoing family health issues or a large dangling mortgage.
On the other hand, if you're a musician who doesn't write, or don't write prolifically enough to maintain the sort of cycle that Costello, Cummings, Thompson and Young manage to churn out you've got a problem, even if there's a back catalogue to draw from.
That's exacerbated if you don't have the sort of name recognition that allows those four to sell out a reasonably sized venue, which brings us to the issue of when a name act ceases to be an entity that can use that particular moniker.
In some cases that question is academic. You were never going to see anyone going out as The Beatles without the presence of all four of Messrs Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr, and for each of those gentlemen there's enough name recognition to allow them to generate enough to get by without having to.
Then there are the obvious examples like The Rolling Stones and The Who, where a line up that didn't include both of Jagger and Richards or Daltrey and Townshend would be laughable. The matter of whether anyone should bother to go, of course, is another matter entirely, but if you went to a Who gig you'd be expecting a bit of Townshend arm-flailing and Daltrey microphone twirling along with a set list that included most of the classic Who tracks.
In the same way, anything that doesn't have Mr Jagger strutting out the front and Keef churning out the riffs ain't gonna be the Rolling Stones. Whether you'd actually want to see them go through the motions in a stadium, effectively watching what's happening on stage from the next suburb is an entirely different kettle of fish.
In some cases you have a lineup that's complete, so those considerations are academic. As they set out touring behind their nineteenth studio album, Los Lobos have their core membership intact, though one wonders if they'd still be a viable operation if they were to lose David Hidalgo and/or Cesar Rosas.
I've remarked elsewhere there's a body of opinion that it can't be Little Feat without Lowell George, or the Allman Brothers Band without Dickey Betts, and I guess this is the place to look at those factors more closely.
Each case, of course, needs to be considered on its own, and there's no way you can come up with a hard and fast rule. In many cases the lack of a high profile iconic figure means that you can get by without a single surviving member of the classic line up. If you see The Drifters, for example (and I have, that's why I use the example) you're not going to be expecting to see Ben E. King out front and provided you hear what you expect to hear and it sounds the way it's supposed to sound you'll probably go away happy.
With Little Feat, on the other hand, things are slightly more complicated, particularly now that Richie Hayward has gone to join Lowell George at that great gig in the sky. For a start I should point out that there were two Lowell-era lineups, and that the reformed outfit that has been touring and recording since 1988 has been remarkably stable, and reasonably prolific in terms of new material.
Given the fact that most people are unaware of the band's existence (at least in these parts, I'd like a dollar for every Who? that's come back at me when I refer to one of my all-time favourite bands) and if they are they probably don't differentiate between the quartet that produced Little Feat and Sailin' Shoes and the six-piece outfit that produced Dixie Chicken, Feats Don't Fail Me Now, The Last Record Album and the live Waiting For Columbus.
If you're familiar with those albums, you'll probably have your own opinion on The Lowell George Question, but you'd also possibly be aware that Lowell was encouraging greater contributions from his band mates, particularly Bill Payne and Paul Barrere. He didn't always like the results, but he was looking for someone to share the load.
Now, once Lowell was gone, once the remaining band members had completed and released Down On The Farm they were off on their own separate ways, until the opportunity to re-form the band came around in 1988.
Now, while you have to acknowledge the fact that Lowell was a major factor in the original outfit, you couldn't blame the surviving members if they found the prospect of session work or a gig in someone else’s band a less appealing prospect than playing the Little Feat catalogue.
Given a stint playing keyboards behind Bob Seger, Art Garfunkel or James Taylor, you're only going to get the solo spotlight once or twice a night. Those guys' shows aren't about keyboard solos, are they? Playing Dixie Chicken, on the other hand, you get a chance to stretch out.
On the other hand, provided the name on the billboard out the front is big enough that backing gig could be rather lucrative. Derek Trucks reputedly used the proceeds of his stint in Clapton's touring band to build a studio in his back yard and recorded Already Free there.
So when you're caught between those backing gigs and hitting the stage to do your own thing you're probably going to be sticking the toe in the water to check the temperature before you dive right in.
That seems to have been the way Little Feat approached things after the 1988 reformation, and eventually, around the time Hughesy joined the Hoy Hoy mailing list IIRC, they'd reached the point where it looked like it might work on a full-time basis.
There are a couple of issues that raise their heads when it comes to getting the band back together, though. One obvious point is the likelihood that one or more members of the outfit may have passed, or that one or more members have developed personal issues that mean they're not inclined to make the effort to preserve appearances.
When the band member who's passed is someone like Lowell George or Vivian Stanshall, you're going to have major problems replacing them - and not only because of their creative personalities.
In Lowell George, Little Feat had an outstanding vocalist with a clearly identifiable sound and a bloody good guitarist. Finding someone who'd match up in both categories would (you'd expect) be close to impossible and so it must've made sense to get someone in for the guitar role and find a dedicated singer who's reasonably close to the vocal timbre you're going to need.
So longtime Feat friend Fred Tackett looked after the guitar side of things and Craig Fuller took on the vocal bit.
When the Bonzo Dog Band got back together for a reunion back in 2006 they had all surviving original members there including Bob Kerr and Vernon Dudley Bowhay-Nowell, but there was no single person who was ever going to be able to replace the late, great Vivian Stanshall.
The solution, repeated when they went into the studio to record Pour L'Amour Des Chiens, was to use Stephen Fry, Adrian Edmondson and Phill Jupitus to tackle various Viv-substitute activities. Given the fact that it's Stephen Fry up there replicating something as a long term fan might tend to make up a bit of the disappointment that you're not seeing the man himself.
Then again, over the intervening years personal relations may have deteriorated to the point where two or more members of the outfit can't stand to be in the same building, let alone on the same stage.
Rod Stewart claims to have spent most of his tenure with the Jeff Beck Group without once looking the leader in the eye. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee apparently loathed each other, and Sam & Dave were in much the same boat. They might have been best mates back in high school, but Simon & Garfunkel are another name duo who apparently don't see eye to eye anymore, and then there's the thorny relationship between Elvis Costello and ex-attractions bassist Bruce Thomas.
Now, in some cases, sheer economic necessity might force one or both protagonists to back down, and we might not be talking actual hardship here. If a promoter came along and made you an offer most people would have trouble refusing and you knocked it back you must really hate the other bloke's guts.
But sometimes things have reached the point where the situation is irretrievable. That was presumably the case where Dickey Betts and the Allman Brothers Band were concerned. Now, after all the ups and downs that've affected the ABB through the years you may well have assumed there'd be nothing new that could upset the apple cart but back in 2000 Gregg Allman, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe had apparently had enough.
That's not meant as a criticism, more a reminder that while you might manage to keep things going the interpersonal dynamics may well change along the way. With the passing of Duane Allman and other developments it probably came as no surprise to find Dickey Betts taking over the leader's role. Someone needs to write the set-lists, and in many cases you might prefer to leave the task to someone else.
There are two things that come out of that, however. At this point I'm exploring some of the issues relating to keeping it going after you've got it back together rather than taking a serious look at a particular set of musical circumstances.
The first issue with having someone else doing the set-list is that it also tends to put them into the spotlight. You might not necessarily have a problem with that as a concept, but you might have some objections to what he does when he gets there.
Then there's the question of what they put into the set-list, along with, possibly, what they leave out. Speaking as an observer, I was moderately bemused by the presence of the number variously labelled Tombstone Eyes, Those Eyes and Good Times in the set-list on a nightly basis and the continuing absence of Mountain Jam.
And it's probably significant that the first post-Dickey ABB show kicked off with a half hour Mountain Jam.
When something like that happens, you get the question of how many members of the classic line up you need to still be up there on stage using the well-known moniker. We’ve already taken a glance in that direction, but this is about where we start winding this puppy up.
Your mileage may vary, but for my money it's a case of it doesn't matter who’s there, as long as there's no one who you'd expect to be there obviously missing.
Maybe that skirts around the Dickey Betts issue, but I, for one, am disinclined to look at someone who's been asked to leave as obviously missing unless there was a substantial deterioration in what's going on up there on the stage. If that hasn't happened, fair enough.
I'd invoke the same principle if there was the prospect of, say a Jagger-less Rolling Stones, a Townshend-less Who or, say, a Bryan Ferry-less Roxy Music. Much of the reason you'd go to the concert would be to see those three do their thing, and if they aren't there. On the other hand, that outfit labelling themselves The Drifters are fine as long as they sound like they're supposed top sound.
There are any number of other aspects of keeping things going that could be explored here, but the exercise has, at this point, done what it set out to do, namely provide the basis for an article while I go about switching data around.
For the albums that prompted these musings, I can explore some of those other aspects in the Reviews section:
Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band Pour L'Amour Des Chiens
Elvis Costello National Ransom
Stephen Cummings Good Bones
Los Lobos Tin Can Trust
Shaun Murphy Living the Blues
Texas Tornados ¡Esta Bueno!
Richard Thompson Dream Attic