The money we made paid for hostel beds, beer and wine, pizza and kebabs, postage for letters home and pirated cassette tapes of Nirvana, REM and The Cure. It was an honest living, a source of income not based on negotiation or luck. But we also took black market labour jobs. We worked in Munich for my second cousin’s landscaping gartengestaltung company, constructing fancy water gardens and streams on the properties of rich Münchener’s estates. A neighbour of one client complained about the croaking sound coming from one of Dieter’s water gardens. Turns out there was a district bylaw with strict regulations about homeowners’ responsibility for animal noises made on their property. We pumped the water out of the pond, groped around in the mud for three hours until we found the frog, and drove it to the woods.
I worked on a mussel farm in Scotland, heading out onto the loch in a dinghy and spending my days on a floating grid of aluminum platforms attached to pontoons. We hauled up 20-metre ropes with staggered clusters of hundreds of mussels attached and stuffed them into long sacks. After spending hours knee-deep in mussels, starfish and seaweed, I’d be sent off with a plastic bag full of mussels. I didn’t feel right rejecting the generous perk, but I had no appetite for mussels. After two weeks my caravan site was strewn with bags of mussels in varying states of stench and decay.
The need to play fast and loud to get people’s attention on the streets while busking informed my songwriting style after I got back to Calgary. I came home with a handful of new songs and sketches for a half dozen more, a book of lyric fragments with notes on tempo, and a primitive, self-styled music notation to remember melody lines. There was also a confidence level I had never felt before, a strong inkling that writing and performing could be my career.
I applied for a new artist demo grant, and got it. I released my first cassette of original music, put a piece of my dad’s art on the cover, and got an interview on CJSW, the U of C radio station. At the same time, I was working at the Good Earth café, and turned down a managerial position with a salary so I could “focus on my music,” a bold decision considering I had no serious income from music and no industry interest.
My brother-in-law Greg, who booked entertainment at the U of C, sat me down with a proposal: my sister Monika would sing harmony, we’d get my longtime friend Ron to play percussion, and become Tinderbox, a folk/pop trio playing all my originals and a couple of well chosen covers. In our first year together we got a gig at the Calgary Folk Festival, and over the next few years played dozens of shows in Western Canada and released a full-length CD, No, Really, Let Go (I was still pining for my lost love in England).
I started to learn the ropes, applying for festivals, grants, putting together a package to pitch to labels, going to industry conventions, sending recordings to radio stations, finding a good web designer and, oh yes, working on the craft of songwriting and guitar playing under various forms of soft-drug inebriation. To cover living expenses (again, all money we made went back into recording, postage and travel costs), I worked at a health food store, stocking shelves and pilfering as much organic cheese, nuts and meat as my conscience could handle.
By this time I was playing with my Crack Band: Diane Kooch, Chantal Vitalis and Peter Moller. The bonds formed between musicians in the same band over nearly 10 years are too deep to describe with any justice here. We share the joys and burdens, and talk about really filthy things in the car. The gigs got bigger and more varied, the money better, but it was still mostly re-invested into the music, or eaten up quickly by rent, food and booze.
I was supplementing my income doing songwriting workshops in schools for an organization called the Calgary Arts Partners in Education Society. I went into classes and taught songwriting with curriculum tie-ins. We’d write raps about the animal classification system (“Arthropods are invertebrates/ But they still get exoskeleton aches) and compose pieces about rainforest destruction sung to Britney Spears tunes (“Oops, we killed them again/ The rainforests fall/ Clear cutting them all/ Oh, maybe, maybe, there’s something we can do/ Like stop CO2 / The trees are innocent”). The ability to pick and choose projects and regulate their duration made the job ideal because I could tour and record without scheduling conflicts, but eventually I found myself relying on the same bag of tricks in the classes, recycling melodies and growing impatient with the kids. I come from a long line of innovative and proud teachers. So I quit.
Category: Career Track, Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
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