My last job outside of music, or at least outside the arts, was with Paul, comrade from the seminal busking trip to Europe. I was gigging a lot at the time but had a couple of dry months ahead. Paul had his own construction business and needed a hand. I got my own tool belt and prepared myself for the classic rock that invariably gets blasted at construction sites. We painted baseboards in apartment buildings, built porches and painted faux window frames onto stucco walls six stories up on rickety ladders. We did jobs in the newest communities on the edges of prairie, sterile homes big enough to be orphanages, every design the same, a postage stamp lawn and three-car garage, each community adhering to a limited colour palette of earthy pastels.
The hours were flexible and it was cash under the table, but Paul and I hadn’t been hanging out regularly for a few years, so each day’s work would be sabotaged by a lunch-time joint, a reminiscing session, and the subsequent installing of a window upside down, or the pull of the early afternoon sun to enjoy a pint on the nearest patio. These distractions forced us to work frantically to hit deadlines. One Friday, we were trying to finish a drywalling job in Mackenzie Towne before the weekend, before a sound check I had at 5:30 p.m. I was measuring and scoring sections of drywall, and in my haste sliced open my left index finger with the exacto knife.
I rushed over to my guitar player Chantal’s house, taught her the basic chords to half a dozen songs, and at the show did the other songs either a capella or blowing into a harmonica and stomping. That’s where it ended. That was it for the real jobs.
It’s been seven years since that fateful slice of the finger and I feel like an inventor who, instead of developing and marketing an actual really good new can opener, is trying to sell the instructions for making your own really good new can opener, with a footnote saying it’s OK if you accidentally put together a potato peeler.
What I mean is that on the fringes of the working world, I can be industrious and ambitious, but in essence must create my own job description daily, and try to ascertain who it is I am delivering a service to. Some bands sell bouncy, sea-of-no-cares escapism. Some sell free-floating adolescent aggression. Some are the soundtrack to fashion. Some have a target demographic that must be keen on word-heavy, satirical story songs about immigrants, the suburbs, dead elephants, police murder and gambling, each in a markedly different musical style.
The questions get more existential. Have I turned my back not only on real jobs, but also on the real world? Will my songs become intellectual exercises, using the lives of others as fodder like a tick feeding on a plump host? Will vitality and experimentation be silenced in a bubble of self-indulgence and complacency? Should I dumb it down for the masses? Are the masses wrong? Who are the masses? Who knows a cheap accountant?
Ultimately, all I need to know I learned from Krista Copper. I will do whatever is in my power to make the best peanut brittle I can, for as many people as I can, for as long as I can, and in case of a shortfall, hopefully Krista’s mom will help pay for the next batch of ingredients. Regardless, I won’t quit to play flag football. This is a full-tackle game. U
Listen to Kris Demeanor (exclusive to Unlimited online)
Real Jobs • Dr. Meat • Bring Our Boys Home
Listen to more Kris Demeanor at his myspace page.
Category: Career Track, Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
Leave a Reply
