Musician's Wages: 1976 vs 2013

Oh boy, does this topic ever get me riled up.

Back in 1976 I worked with several bands, notably Sofrito--a salsa band we made up out of whole cloth--and Scary Lala, the guitar-based quartet consisting of leader Larry Scala, Tom Moelering on bass, and me on various saxophones. I was living by the yacht harbor in a place we rented for around $300 + utilities. When the weekly total of gig money was made, I would often have pulled in $300-400 for just 4-5 gigs, most of them recurring weekly slots at local restaurants like the New Riverside (Francis Tong!), the Crows News (2 blocks from my house), the Pacific Steamship Company by Harvey West Park, and a couple occasional places downtown like Pearl Alley and the Catalyst.

The bad news is that the $40 gig back then pays $30 now, and that's without adjusting the cost of living from that era to this. You already know what I paid for rent, and gas was still under 50 cents a gallon in 1976. Some of the places even just give the band a meal and the right to lay out the tip jar. Some of the places noted above are still in business, and usually it'll be Olaf playing them on drums. How he's managed to make the adjustments from yesterday's money to today's is a great mystery to me. He's a fine drummer, a reliable guy to have on the gig. But can you think of any other profession where the wages paid are the same or less than they were 35+ years ago?

I didn't think you could.

So what's different?

First and foremost, the owners of restaurants and clubs are operating with a different set of assumptions about musicians. There's enough squeeze on the jazz musicians from the retired set who've moved into town with no professional aspirations but a willingness to play for free. That's new. There used to be young energetic rockers who'd do it for free, and that whole scene collapsed when the club owners found their liquor sales down.

A side note: I am a musician, but I am also in charge of selling beer, wine, mixed drinks and food. I'm the guy up on the bandstand counting drinks and making sure that our crowd for the evening is spending money. If we need to, I adjust the repertoire and the "heat." I consider this to be a sacred responsibility.

Now I know it's a time of shrinking margins, and I know if the ASCAP guy comes around, the BMI guy is sure to follow with licensing fees nobody told you about when you were opening a restaurant. But, and I'm speaking to club owners everywhere here, how can you in good conscience pay less to a band of musicians that fill your bar with drinkers than you pay your lowest-rung server?

Santa Cruz was a whole different city back then, of course. In the bicentennial year, there were two (TWO!) television stations you could get if your rabbit ears were set just right, and no cable TV. There was one screen each at the Nickelodeon, the Del Mar, the Rio, and the Capitola Theatre. The trek over Highway 17 and thence to "civilization" was a lot curvier and more dangerous back then, so there there's another reason to support local bands.

And I think there were less expectations about music generally, so that whatever one found out there was just good enough. (I've got some Sofrito tapes that Steve Peterson made with a handheld cassette recorder, and they don't sound half bad. I also have sound files of the 1972 Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble which are downright frightening, the best big band I think I ever played in.)

So what are the musicians to do?

I for one am venturing into the belly of the beast and started a biweekly gig under my name at a notorious venue just to see what the deal is. All we get are the contents of the tip jar, a drink or two, and a meal for two hours with a quartet.

I'll let you know how it goes. I want to gain the perspective of the the musicians who work these gigs, the restauranteurs who supply the space for what might be a working rehearsal, and the folks who come and listen.

I've already been the latter, hearing bands whose members I know. This I know from the experience: It's an odd thing to know that the musicians putting in their dinner orders at the end of the first set are ordering their pay.

Still, it can get worse. I know that there are clubs in Los Angeles and Austin where bands are responsible for selling a set number of tickets for each gig. THEN they play. And if the door count and the bar receipts are favorable, they might get payment for their efforts.

Don't like the system? Next!!

It hasn't gotten that bad here, yet.

I have a theory that there's an invisible tollbooth at Summit Road on Highway 17 which neatly divides Santa Clara County (where there are both jobs and commerce) from Santa Cruz County (which has neither). When you go through that invisible tollbooth you take a vow of poverty, which makes those who live here convinced that, even though they may drive a 700 series BMW and live in a house worth three quarters of a million dollars, they are poor.

I think that's the real issue. A poverty of spirit prevents these sackcloth and ashes wearing simpletons from doing the right thing: You gotta pay the band.

More later.

Trader Joe's should be in Austin: a post from my 2006 blog

UPDATE, 5/19/2013: Trader Joe's has announced plans for their third Austin store, even before they cut the ribbons on the first two. There's now a store in Ft. Worth, near my son's house, which is also very close to an Aldi Mart. I now live close to the downtown Santa Cruz store (which used to be an Albertson's when I lived here before) and the Capitola TJ's I mention in the post.

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One of my first memories when my family moved to Laguna Beach from the steely northland was a high-pitched, rather strident owner of the Pronto Markets chain who insisted on doing his own radio commercials. That was Joe. Joe Coulombe. When 7-11 stores started popping up like mushrooms after a rain in the forest, the story is that Joe went to a hilltop overlooking the Pacific and came back with a plan. He would reshape Pronto Markets into the "anti-7-11." Instead of trying to sell lots of things, the new markets would concentrate and staples, wine and beer, and quirky gourmet items packaged with "house brand" labels. Workers would wear tropical shirts.

And so Trader Joe's was born. You've gotta love the image of the owner of these stores responding to the invasion from Texas by deciding to do something so different that the Southland Corporation just washes over him and something unique is born in the process. This is the stuff of fairy tales. Does it matter that it might be weak on details? Did it matter when Moses brought down his tablets from the mountaintop?

Years later I went north for college and Trader Joe's followed me with a pretty large store in Capitola and, eventually, like the string of missions founded by the Franciscans, a necklace of TJ's went up El Camino Real to San Francisco and beyond.

I married and moved back to southern California. Our apartment was within walking distance of a busy (and small) west LA TJ's.

They say you never miss the water 'til the well runs dry, and ten years ago I learned what that really means when I moved to Austin, Texas. Austin is a great town, and I moved here to share it with someone I deeply loved. There is a great big supermarket here called HEB that does a pretty good job of things. Whole Foods started here. Central Market was started here by HEB. The town is food obsessed. But where was Trader Joe's?

Of course, ten years ago TJ's just occupied the west and east coasts. Around that time a TJ's opened in Worcester, Mass., which is pretty clost to where I was born. But no TJ's in Texas.

I understand distribution. I used to work for a tradeshow contractor who dealt with every concievable problem of logistics. I knew warehouses had to be built, trucks needed to roll to supply these stores. Still, when a couple stores opened in New Mexico I began to think the days of my flying places with empty suitcases were about to end.

But they didn't end. Now there are TJ's stores in New Mexico, Missouri, Georgia. We're surrounded, though Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana buffer us to the east.

But clearly there is movement on breaking into Texas. You'd think with a state as business-friendly as Texas is that there would be no problem. They might get a sweet deal on tax abatement. Everyone else seems to.

I'm thinking it's a complex set of circumstances. Besides logistics, there's the TABC, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Control folks. Last year they famously stationed investigators with arrest powers in bars and had them arrest drinkers for drinking.

TJ's is first and foremost a liquor store. The first one I went into, when I was too young for it to matter, had an impressive wall of Scotch. Something tells me that it might not be a good match, that maybe we're waiting for a political turn in the direction of the government agency responsible (still) for making sure that grocers don't selll booze before noon on Sunday.

Meanwhile, before I go to a gig out of state (I play saxophone for a living) I plan my TJ's stop. I spent the summer on a cruise ship in the Baltic, where TJ's owners since 1979, Aldi Mart, dominate the discount wine and booze marketplace and resemble in some ways TJ's. I'm trying to get on a ship for winter that docks every ten days about 4 blocks away from the North Beach TJ's in San Francisco.

The underlying problem, though, is that we don't have a TJ's in Austin, nor anywhere else in Texas. And that, besides the anecdotal reminicences of various former Californians, is what this blog is alll about. Thanks for checking in, and let me know if you have a story to contribute.


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This is a post from this summer's blog about working on a cruise ship in the Baltic. Not many folks know that TJ's is owned by a reclusive German company, reclusive in large measure because one of the owners was kidnapped in 1971. While mighty Wal-Mart gave up on the German market, the Aldi chain owns 3.5% of the marketplace in ALL of Europe.

This entry starts off with a complaint that the English panic over alleged highjack bombers had made hash out of travel, while the English Minister of This and That would come on and report that the investigators had unearthed another pint of hydrogen peroxide. We had passengers on board the ship whose luggage, detained by the crunch in Heathrow, never in their 10 days on board the Star Princess caught up with them.

Seems like an odd transition to Trader Joe's, but bear with me.

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Well, the British have managed to get the all that unpleasant business in Lebanon off the front pages or, in the case of the cruise ship musician, the crawls of CNN international and BBC World. What they did was round up a bunch of Pakistanis who may or may not have figured out a plot to make bombs out of common household materials that could be smuggled on to planes undetected in common carry-on baggage. As a result of all the hysteria there is no carry-on baggage allowed at Heathrow, All well and good, but if this catches on it’ll make it difficult to fly back to the states with my horns and my Powerbook in tow, to say nothing of my effects, as they call all my stuff I packed for four months in the Baltic.

I don’t anticipate flying through Heathrow. but what scares me is that this might spread to Copenhagen, where I will likely depart Europe in 31 days (this having been written August 11) for JFK or Dallas if I get real lucky.

Good news, though, as we are in Warnemunde for one last time. The last time we were here I thought I’d stumbled upon a store owned by the parent company of Trader Joe's. Our Berlin tour guide pointed out a market about a mile from the ship and said that tourists from Sweden came in on ferries to stock up for parties. So I checked it out that night, only to find the store closed. I did manage to look inside the place, though and it had a very TJ's feel to it.

Of course I had my doubters.

But when I got there this morning, three weeks later, I found a place very much like TJ’s. Things for sale were piled up everywhere, the booze boxes had been knifed open on one side, there were plenty of pre-wrapped cheeses and produce, and the usual assortment of sausages (Germany, remember) and frozen stuff and chocolates. I was delighted to find some Arnica gel, which I’d run out of, and which is spelled completely differently in Germany. It’s a great relief to my neck, which gets a workout holding saxophones. Still, I hadn’t found the smoking gun until, turning to the freezer case form the cereal, I found Trader Joe's branded prunes! I know that Joe doesn’t make stuff for its competition, so I did my best to ask the check-out gal if the company she worked for had any association with TJ's.

So I bought my gel, six bottles of vitamin-enhanced orange and carrot juice, Eurodont mouthwash, a chocolate bar, and those prunes--just under ten Euros. I was lax in my booze purchasing, but I felt like the Swedish passengers on the ferries deserved no competition from me. Tomorrow we start a two-day in Copenhagen. This almost felt as good as when I found a current New Yorker in Helsinki at the legendary Stockman department store. Even though it was 6.9 Euros I had to have it.

Anyway, this place is Aldi Markt. They have stores all over Germany and a certain division of their company will be opening 700 stores in the states this year. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the stores will be in central Texas.

Peter, wish you were here to help with the translating!

The other thing happening this day was a big sailing festival with Tall Ships everywhere. I took some shots outside the ship when I was walking around.

That’s the bow of the Star on the upper right.

Why you should go to those class reunions

Last week I spent mostly nursing a shoulder injury. I couldn't raise my right arm to save my life, but then again what saxophone player needs that arm to rise beyond his or her belt anyway?

With that in mind, I've been less than forthcoming about last weekend, which was the weekend we were admonished by the UCSC Alumni Association to return to our "Happy Place," and hopefully drop some excess cash on the various care and feeding operations that UCSC offers.

So there we were, having lunch in the College V Dining Hall once again, and the lunch reminded me that it wasn't just my Happy Place, it was my only place.

How I dreaded that weekend! I just seemed to play the same tape of my failures over and over again, sure that I'd deposit them into a wheelbarrow and push them up the hill to the world's most beautiful college campus, where I was in the founding class on the west side of campus, just isolated enough that we back in 1969 felt in some way special. Back then just getting into UCSC was an accomplishment.

I foolishly applied to just UCSC back when I was getting my high school done. While others were welcomed by the giant bosom of such places as Cal State Fullerton, I heard only the siren call of UCSC. It proved to be a tricky process. Ernestine Anderson helped me through the minefield that was the UC system, showing me how to declare myself an emancipated minor, as my mother had gone off on an ill-fated sobriety mission with her sad husband to his ancestral home in the midwest. My test scores were enough to qualify me for a California State Scholarship, which meant I could attend any college or university in the state without a worry about paying the tuition bill. (Soon thereafter UC adopted something they called something else, but was clearly tuition. Quarterly total was $229.50.)

Now the context you have to understand all this in is this: Kids my age were needed by the Army to carry rifles in our glorious was of liberation of the Vietnamese people from their native oppressors, the Vietnamese people. The more options you had, the better.

My options were: (1) being accepted by the one UC campus that had thousands of qualified applicants at that time or (2) hotfooting it north to Canada when my draft notice arrived.

To hedge my bets, I applied as an EOP student, thinking my last name could be misinterpreted from "occupant  of the fens and bogs" to something Spanish.

Anyway, all that's ancient history, and as with so much of ancient history there's an element of twisted irony afoot, as I ultimately rejected my student deferment but my birthday was picked over #300 in the lottery in my junior year.

So I cleaned myself up and went up the hill with my invisible wheelbarrow full of failure. When I arrived, I found that everyone had their wheelbarrows, but nobody cared to talk about them.

Whew! What a relief.

There were Janet Rocklin Katz (whose perfect pitch I benefited from in Music 10), Richard Opper (on the back of whose Honda 350 I rode to the Altamont concert of destiny), Gail Harper ("no pictures please"), David Beryessa (without the overcoat), Deb Barlow (art exhibit of her dense and lively layered acrylics), and this person, Roma Sprung:

Roma was what we College V students were supposed to be back then, a bright biology student with a passion for music. And now she's the perfect example of a College V graduate, an internist who still retains her passion for music, diversifying from being a section violinist to also playing classical guitar. Her passion for music still burns within her, tempered by her role as a healer. All I've got to say to Roma, Dr. Roma, is bravo. You turned out well.

So many were absent from this special weekend that I don't wish to speculate, other than to say that the woman who came up to me at the 20th and said she had some work for me, Marjorie Baer, is no longer with us. How she figured out that I could rub some sentences together to get a result, I'll never know. I miss you, Margie.

Off to ice the shoulder.