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Notes from the Field

Well duh...

Rating: 1 votes, 5.00 average.
A Twilight Zone moment, where the wise old seer at the carnival tells me my limitations. “You are never going to be a professional musician. You will never perform on a major stage or large hall, or release a CD that anyone wants. You will never be good enough to catch the attention of even a janitor in the music industry. You will never have fans beyond your friends and family. No never. Listen, no, not ever.”



“But you will be fun to play music with, and you will get to play in pub sessions and festival jams and camp grounds and parking lots and family rooms and kitchen’s across the country.”

My response would be a huge ridiculous grin. “Well duh… that’s what I am in it for”.

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Comments

  1. Gelsenbury's Avatar
    I'll settle for that quite happily too. Well written.
  2. Mike Steadfast-Ward's Avatar
    Me as well, your seer is just stating the patently obvious. I missed the boat in my teens, when the Beatles, Stones and Elvis were being discovered. Although we did have a recording artist in his seventies who made a mint 'The Singing Postman' went on to have half a dozen hit songs No1 in
    the top 20. So no ones really a write off. You never know, Even Telly Savallas and Clint Eastwood have hits and they can't hold a tune in a bucket !!!!!
  3. JeffD's Avatar
    Well for me the problem, right from the beginning, has been that I am not a natural musician. I am adept at figuring out from instructions and watching others "what to do", and playing the mandolin has always been about "what do I do, how do I do it". I should have learned, right from the start, how to play music, as opposed to how to play the mandolin, and about how to play musically as opposed to how to play accurately, or quickly, or loud.

    In my youthful exuberance and healthy ego, I thought music could be a career. But things never got beyond exuberance and ego.

    Unless I had started ten years before I was born I will never be so good as to be an awesome picker. But a long time ago I was "accomplished enough" to play music. I just wasn't thinking of things in the right way. And had I pursued the goal of becoming a better musician, rather than a better mandolin picker, well....

    I early on got addicted to jamming and playing with others, and found the instant gratification of such activities so overwhelming that I was diverted from a greater goal, in which I might have found some ability. That endorphin rush is hard to buck.

    But since the day finally realized what I really was "in it for", and stopped trying to buck the endorphins, I am much happier, much more enthusiastic, and much more overwhelmed (in a good way) by the joys of playing music. And (irony is a horrible thing), a much better mandolin player.

    It is a stereotype for a person my age to look at the avenues not taken, I suppose, but its an indulgence with no payback. No reality can ever compete with the fantasy of what might have been. And it wastes time I could be enjoying, slurping up the berry juice, of what is right in front of me.
    Updated Mar-17-2014 at 10:52am by JeffD