By Mike O'Cull
Catchy title, huh? I thought you’d like it. I have always joked that myself and many other musicians have a love-hate relationship with their craft. This comes from beginning the musical journey all full of the wonder and excitement of playing and performing, discovering how the music business really is behind the scenes, and letting these realities turn you bitter. This happened to me in just this way, although I now know that I did a lot of it to myself with the ways I reacted to and handled certain situations. The main mistake I made was to let go of my creative side and solely concentrated on using music to make money. I went from being a hardcore original music person to being a hardcore cover band person, not caring what I was playing as long as it paid. I am an extremist in most areas of my life and this kind of thinking and decision making has always been pretty normal for me. I am either all in or all out. After being a broke songwriter for most of my life, I dove headlong into playing ‘the songs people want to hear’ or whatever you want to call The Bar Band Songbook. Big Mistake.
See, what I did was forget that life, art, and music are all about balance. I got the balance thing all messed up, to the point where I thought I could never get back to who I used to be and that I was done writing songs. In fact, at the bottom of it, I felt that I was stupid for ever thinking that my original music was worth creating and performing and felt foolish for ever trying. 'No One Cares’ was my mantra and I chanted it all the time. All that mattered was banging out three or four sets of cover songs so the band got paid at the end of the night and teaching as many students as possible with little regard if I was the proper teacher for them or if I could learn the songs they wanted me to teach them every week without going home and drinking myself into oblivion. This is known as ‘selling out.’ I lost my connection to why I started doing this, in the first place. I couldn’t find my way home from the wilderness. Music became my job. It was a job I was good at and suited for, but I might as well have been building birdhouses all day. Simply put, I lost my way. Now, I know most people go though lives with jobs they hate and responsibilities they don’t want. I get that. None of us, however, started playing music to get a job, good or otherwise. We started playing for the love of music, for the feel of the guitar in our hands, for all the promises and possibilities that rock and roll whispered in our 13-year-old ears. Music goes way deeper than a job, than a business degree, and is connected to a much more personal part of ourselves than are the skills we learn purely to earn money.
The funny thing about all of this is that I failed at it. I never made to the the kind of big money cover gigs I saw people doing all around me. I did OK but could never get all the way up the mountain. I realize now that it was because I was experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance over the clash of what I was doing versus what I wished I was doing and people saw through me, especially as time went on. I did the best I could to screw on a happy face and play nice with others, but it was false. What I really wanted to be doing was writing and recording songs, performing them in actual music venues, and doing my thing as a legit creative musician. Instead, I was playing classic rock and pop covers to drunks and other non-attention-payers in bars, restaurants, and nursing homes. After a while, the dissonance took over and I became a bitter old jobber, something I never wanted to be. I realize now that I should have kept writing my songs and just done the other stuff around it, but I lost perspective and I failed because of it.
The end result of all this is I started to hate music. I stopped listening to it, except when I had songs to learn for a gig or a student, held low opinions of those who did pursue the thing I gave up and thought they were charging at windmills, watched way too much TV in my time off, and generally became someone else, someone I never wanted or planned to be. Music, especially original music, became an emblem of my failings and I wanted nothing to do with it.
I am happy to report that this unhappy situation has changed. I am now back writing and listening to music, digging it, and looking to the future. How did I do it? How did I get my groove back, you ask? I quit. I walked away from band life after 30 years of it. I knew I wanted to get away from it but didn’t really want to admit it for a long time. When I got a chance to make a clean break, I took it. After that, health issues kept me out of bands for the next couple years, and that is where I still am today. The good thing about this long layoff is that I have had the time to really sort through my life and figure out some things about myself and my music. I also took this time to learn to run Pro Tools so I could finally record things my way, brushed up my bass and keyboard skills, and found a whole new lyrical gear I didn’t know I had in me. Now, I am creating the best music I ever have. I hope that my health issues will get resolved this year and plan to become more active as far as live playing again, but my days of ‘Mustang Sally’ in bowling alleys are probably over. I really did learn to hate music, I’m ashamed to say, but, in a roundabout way, all my personal and professional strife of the last few years has reconnected me to why I play and write music and what I need to do with it to keep my mind and spirit happy and functional. I guess I had to work through the hatred and realize that what I hated was not playing music, but taking the wrong approach to it. I had to learn to hate it to realize how much I love making music. I had to risk losing it to figure out why I need to keep it.
