By Kris Demeanor / Photographs by Bryce Krynski
In Grade 8, I joined an extracurricular social studies club called Project Business, designed to help young people learn about supply and demand economics. I signed up because Krista Copper was in it. She had brown feathered hair, eyes like a stunned deer, and wore a corduroy jacket buttoned right up to her chin, which gave her a look of impenetrability that I found alluring. We were to make peanut brittle and sell it at lunch hour, calculating the cost of the peanuts, sugar, molasses and labour time, and fixing a price that would recoup our costs or, even better, make a profit.
The club was divided into three competing groups. I made sure I was in Krista’s, and she set the strategy. The key, she said, was the quality of our peanut brittle. Her mom’s was awesome, so she’d get her mom to make it. We would charge the same price as everyone else, but ours would be better, so we’d sell more. Ours was indeed better, and we did sell more. We made more money, but we used twice as many peanuts, which were the most expensive ingredient. Our expenses were nearly double those of the other groups, and we made less money than everybody else. Krista was demoted from club president to treasurer and I joined flag football.
From a slave to ulterior motives to a career in the performing arts, I’ve spent the past 10 years cobbling together a viable existence by writing, performing and recording original music as Kris Demeanor, often with my Crack Band. Sure, under the auspices of making a respectable living, I have made halfhearted stabs at biology, architecture, horticulture, English literature, but none stirred in me a sustainable passion. Many people love music, and love to play it, but playing professionally requires a type of enthusiasm akin to mild but unrelenting panic. I liken it to navigating through the maze of mirrors at the Stampede as a child. It was confusing, frustrating, and everywhere was me. I would bash into the glass and cry, but suppress my sobs and get it together so dad wouldn’t have to rescue me. I’d go in again the next year.
Life as a touring musician is one of thrilling variety and profound uncertainty. I have been involved in theatre, film, public education, television and spoken word, putting as many fingers into as many pies as I can without feeling like a cheap huckster. Most artists, in their early years, and often throughout their careers, need “real” jobs to supplement their grand ideas. By real, I mean any job with a defined payment structure, with shifts of a set time frame. When the Crack Band and I play to drunken snowboarders at the Rose and Crown in Banff for $300 and nobody listens until an insufferably insistent guy crashes the stage and plays “American Pie” to grateful screams, we call it a paid rehearsal, a punch-the-clock gig. Sometimes, a great gig pays good money; it doesn’t feel like a real job when you’re backstage at a folk festival chatting with Bruce Cockburn in the port-a-let lineup.
Usually, though, it’s difficult to quantify where art meets making a living, or what is a satisfying experience as opposed to a perversely interesting one. Creating quality art sucks time and energy, and it takes years for the monetary payoff to come close to equaling the time and personal resources spent realizing the vision. An artist’s ongoing internal debate bats around many questions: How much do I need in order to live comfortably? Will CD sales and live shows pay the bills? Should I focus on publishing and write a cookie-cutter country hit? Learn a bunch of Neil Diamond songs and do corporate parties? If I do these things, am I still an artist? Who cares? Where is the romance in being an artist of unwavering integrity when Alberta Health sends the collection agency after you? Do I party because I’m a musician or did I become a musician because I like to party?
Most musicians I know are in a perpetual state of unease, continually revisiting these questions and revising our answers, knowing that we’ll be asked, at family parties, by old friends at bars, and by other artists, “So, can you survive doing just music?” We all want to look at them squarely and say, “Yes, that is all I do. I live humbly by some standards, but I stand before you, clearly surviving.”
Many artists have colourful “real job” histories, though not because they have a lot of interests. They love their art, and secondary loves such as cooking and bird watching don’t make any money. An artist’s catalogue of real jobs is unique because they take whatever outside work they can, only when they absolutely have to or when it’s convenient, jobs with flexible schedules, jobs devoid of deep responsibility.
By global standards, of course, we enjoy lives of ridiculous comfort and wealth (understanding this helps us through the droughts).
And, like every successful business, we’re helped by the supportive “teams” we’ve compiled: encouraging parents and spouses, understanding bandmates, the odd fan-turned-patron, a friend with some industry clout, the Canada Council. Still, it’s a tenuous existence, because not only are we trying to create decent art, we are also trying to invent our own job niches. The dangerous thing about saying goodbye to real jobs is that the more time passes without one, the more impossible it is to imagine ever getting one again. But then, the most dangerous animals are the hungriest.
Let me regress.
Category: Career Track, Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
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