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.

A year has passed.

A year has passed since I moved to Santa Cruz, with my eyes wide open. I knew then that it'd be a hard slog, and I haven't seen anything yet that contradicts that assumption. I've had comical musical experiences (see this post) and meaningful ones too, like the Cabrillo Reunion back in October, where most of the 1975 jazz ensemble's members got together with Lile Crews at the helm once again.

Making a living hasn't been easy. I took a part-time job at a struggling music store. I've never been this close to the ground in retail. Always I had the advantage of being detached from the customer by a distributor, importer or wholesaler when I ventured into the music trades.

Sue's been marvelously supportive. In the last year, I landed a couple gigs–one for my big band even–through her kind offices. But it's time to get serious on a number of levels, including hastening the divorce and getting rent checks in on time, as she's struggling too.

So I've decided that I'm going to redouble my efforts to get my various bands hired. I already built a website called fennomusic.com that's still got a few glaring deficiencies, although the structure and look are just about right.

It's been a long haul from the time I decided to set up my big band once again, through my ship contracts, to the heart attack in 2008, through my marriage ending, leaving Austin, and here in Santa Cruz, where I had to step on the first rung of a ladder that I'd pretty much climbed 35+ years ago, where people play for free nowadays and restaurants expect not to pay musicians for making music.

I'm also going to try a little writing again. I wrote this book for Peachpit Press in 1998. Unfortunately the product was pulled off the market the very week the book was released, the reason being that Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and decided to reallocate the software development, canceling titles that were under the Claris banner. (Not that I'm pissed at his memory, because at the time I was mopping up Apple shares with my 401(K) rollover account. If he hadn't closed that unprofitable appendage of Filemaker along with about a million other details, I'd have a lot less in that account than I do now.)

What has me intrigued is Apple's new textbook initiative and the tool they released for authoring textbooks. For free. Unlike when I wrote and produced my last book, which I did the prepress production on as well, there will be no copy editing through MS Word (ugh!) files passed back and forth among several editors, page proofs generated in Quark ExPress, and then off to some RR Donelley plant in northwest Ohio. Just my iMac and maybe an iPad to test pages.

There are several things I feel I know enough about to be able to produce a text aimed at a very tight market segment. More on this later.

Then there's the issue of the royalties. If I remember correctly I made less than 2 bucks on each book sold. Cover price was $16.95 if I remember right. They sold a lot of them eventually, but the take per book was less than stellar. I was green behind the ears, though, it being my first book.

That's what I don't understand about pundits bloviating about Apple's cut of a finished textbook in the iTunes store. Seventy percent of a book going to the author sounds pretty good to me!

Whether that's good enough to get me going and sustain me through the process, well, that's another matter.

I'm also thinking Sue, who just earned a French Wine Expert shingle from the French Wine Institute, and who just returned from an almost mythical tour of Burgundy with a group of admitted partisans, has a book in her waiting to gently be extracted. The Women Vintners of Burgundy, perhaps? Or something a bit more general?

Again, more as it develops.

Meanwhile, I'm playing almost every night of the week somewhere in Santa Cruz, usually for free or a cut of the tip jar. I'm writing some charts for Dan Young's Pleasure Point Horns which we're about to unleash on an indifferent universe. I'm doing my best to get a saxophone quartet off the ground. And I'm thinking about hiring an organizer. I'm wondering when we can do a reunion of Sofrito.

Two Summer Camps

Just about forty years ago, in the hot southern California summer of 1970, I had my one and only experience with summer camp. I was nineteen and the world was seemingly falling apart. Personally, I had spent a year at UC Santa Cruz, wondering if I really had what it takes to major in music. My family was adrift somewhere in Ohio, having left me high and dry when I was a senior in high school. My beautiful college campus had turned upside down after May 4, 1970. Classes were mostly suspended. Some were just cancelled. I had been doing my best as an emancipated minor to keep my life on the other side of the line with respect to the draft, and so, seeing so many of my high school buddies sucked into the jungles of Vietnam, I went into the summer wondering what was next for me.

One thing was certain, though. I had to work. And work meant getting out of Santa Cruz and heading south for Santa Ana. But on my way out of Santa Cruz I pulled a brochure off the bulletin board at the Music Board of Studies for the Stan Kenton Camp at the University of Redlands.

I worked for six weeks leading trucks all night at the remains of the Santa Ana Army Air Corps base in Costa Mesa. That was enough to sustain me through the summer and pay for camp, which I’d registered for at the beginning of my short career loading trucks.

When the camp was about to start, I loaded everything into my 1964 Plymouth Valiant and headed into the smog belt for Redlands. I remember auditioning for Mike Vacarro, who placed me in Mike Vax’s band, which had the advantage of a real live arranger (whose name I cannot remember, but who rehearsed the band). My roommate was a genial baritone player who became a band director in Fresno. Improv class was taught by Dan Haerle, who was at Monterey Peninsula College at the time and soon moved to North Texas. One of the funnier highlights for me was being singled out (with the Porcaro brothers and a couple others) as a second generation jazz musician at the camp. We were interviewed and photographed and at some point an article appeared in some publication or other.

The camp revolved around Stan and the band, of course. We all wanted to get on that bus and to work for him, doing one-nighters without complaint. (If we only knew how hard you had to work for the pittance that it paid!) It was a pretty good version of the band, and students of the genre will note that the Live at Redlands album was recorded there, Wally Heider officiating. (I lent some labor to Wally, dragging cables.) The album was taped on an 8-track Ampex, the glory of the age. Nobody mixed a live big band like Wally, and that album was one of the longest-standing inclusions in my iTunes collection.

I’m sure they don’t remember it, but a couple of the musicians and teachers I dealt with at the camp were pretty encouraging to me about my chances of pursuing a career as a musician, so I was pretty excited when camp broke and I pointed the Valiant toward Santa Cruz.

In the meantime, Cabrillo College, the local junior college in Santa Cruz, was in the process of setting up a Jazz Ensemble. Third year at UCSC I’d start playing second alto at Cabrillo, in the best big band I’ve played in. My senior year I switched over to baritone saxophone in the band. At the end of that year, we opened a show for Stan Kenton’s band at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. Six months later, I was on the Kenton band, playing baritone.

I’m getting ready to go to another camp, 40 years almost to the day after the Redlands Kenton Camp.



The California Brazil Camp was co-founded more than 10 years ago by Dennis Broughton, who was the conga drummer/percussionist in the Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble, and one of the founding members of Sofrito, the legends of salsa music in Santa Cruz. I played in the first and third iterations of Sofrito, and wrote most of the horn charts.

Dennis’s idea was to set up a Brazilian immersion camp in the coastal foothills of northern California for dancers and musicians. And the idea seems to be working. The camp has spread to Brazil itself, in February, 2010, where one of the teachers was no less than Hermeto Pascoal.

The California Camp is no slouch either. Teaching staff includes Guinga, the Carioca dentist-composer, Marcos Silva, Cliff Korman, Michael Spiro (another founding member of Sofrito), Chico Pinheiro, and lots more.

Learning Brazilian music is a humbling thing for me. And so far, every person who has crossed my path has been generous and encouraging, in fact a lot like the the big band guys from 40+ years ago. But the essential element is to mantain beginner’s mind going into the Brazil Camp experience. These guys are the real deal, and to come on like I actually know something would somehow be inappropriate. I can read whatever is thrown at me, and that’s an advantage. I plan on bringing a assortment of horns to make myself useful.



I’ve got a sleeping bag and a tent and I’m borrowing Adam Ray’s “extra” SUV to get from Oakland to Cazadero. Oh, that’s another thing: Unlike Redlands 40 years ago, where we occupied concrete-block low-slung dorm rooms, California Brazil Camp is held in a towering redwood forest, much like UCSC. While campers can sleep 4 to a tent, my sleep habits may lead me to use my own compact tent. I’ll be the one in the tent playing Scrabble on his iPhone, something I never imagined when I went to Redlands to absorb Kenton’s music.

So come on, fill me up, Brazilian music! I’ll be all ears.

When My Horns Were Stolen

There was a time when all the musicians who played softball in Santa Cruz rose as one to my aid. Between the first version of Sofrito and the second, after I’d gone to New York with drummer Jim Baum and came back to town, after I’d played alto, baritone, flute, clarinet and bass clarinet with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, I was in town to play a few tentative gigs with what became Sofrito once again, transformed.

My entire net worth (expressed in woodwind instruments) could fit into the back seat of my 1964 Dodge Dart, and that’s where it was when, after one of those gigs, I arrived at the house the girl who became the mother of my children. I may have locked the doors of the Dart. Her west side house was plenty quiet at 1 in the morning when I arrived.

We were pretty deep into softball then, as I’ve described elsewhere, playing long ball on the short-porch fields of Branciforte Park as many afternoons as not and taking in an Oakland A’s game once every couple weeks.

While the blissful ignorance of all people who trust human nature to be a benign force in the universe, there was my Dart, loaded up with expensive woodwinds, most of them Selmer Paris. Like an idiot, I compounded my stupidity by bringing in my flute, an Armstrong worth maybe $80.

Some time in the night, the car’s contents were removed. I knew that the car’s locks could be easily picked. I was blindly trusting the universe to protect me from villains. Someone with other ideas strolled by in the wee hours.

When I woke up at the crack of noon, I discovered the deed. There was no broken glass, but none would have been required, because any 1964 Dodge Dart could be unlocked with a coat hanger. My horns were gone.

So I called my home team. We had a meeting, dividing the city up into sectors, some heading for the music dealers, some for the pawn shops, some for the schools. Soon we received information about a guy in town who was bragging about coming into some woodwind instruments suddenly. It’s hard to imagine back then that this whole thing was co-ordinated without the benefit of cel phones, which at the time were toys of the idle rich.

The sun went down, and the softball gang had grown militant. They were going to track this guy down if it took all night. Sadly, there was no progress until early the next morning, when my once and future wife went off to Cabrillo, the local junior college and, finding a message chalked to one of the boards of the music department, called the guy’s number and recovered every one of my horns.

So I guess we were not all that successful in our plans to enforce simple justice. The guy left town, and the goods were recovered by Sue Slater and Holly Ray, not by the softball guys with the testosterone pumping.

No matter. We had a potluck at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center to celebrate the oddest thing, the coming together of forces for good in Santa Cruz, where it was at times impossible to get people to see mutual interest in anything. We played music that night, and it was good.

Treasured friends who took part in this mobilization included Joyce Cooper, Sue Slater, Peter Burchard (then known as Peter Ashley), Steve Bennett back when he still flew single-engine planes, Olaf Schiappicase, Dennis Broughton, and many, many others.

David O'Connor: Still the Funniest Guy I Know.

From Historical Artifacts

David and I played together on Sofrito, the band that introduced salsa music to hippie culture in Santa Cruz, California. This was back in 1977. David had gotten off the road with Leonard Cohen (and before that Buffie St. Marie), and I was between road adventures with Stan Kenton and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Dave had been working with the rhythm section which had been added to the drums. The drummers consisted of Dennis Broughton, Michael Spiro, and Raul Rivera, who sang and started it all. I used to say that Raul had done the equivalent of parachuting into the Amazon and setting up a Gilbert & Sullivan troupe made entirely of native peoples. The band grew outward from several dance classes at UCSC which the three drummers had played for. The drums were always the core of the band, and they worked at it, doing Latin rhythms for the dance classes.

Raul never imagined himself as a teacher, I’m sure. He had a shady past that included stays in the grey bar hotel on charges stemming from addiction. But what he did was remarkable because he taught the genuine thing to a couple white kids from the suburbs and made them a cohesive salsa drum section. And then they went out looking for a band.

Once they had their grooves down--the afinque--the guitar (David) and the bass (Fritz) were added. Fritz had to learn that in most situations he wouldn’t be playing on beat one of the measure. It was hard to convert jazz guys to this way of thinking, I found out later, but Fritz had no problem with it.

So then they were ready for horns, and that meant someone had to write the charts, and someone mentioned me, and one thing led to another . . .

We started one off night at the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, a club owned by a one-armed framing carpenter who had a successful business but needed a place to drink. I’m afraid we violated the first rule of working in a club, because we didn’t know that he wanted to be left alone to quietly drink his beer. The problem was we packed the place, from the very beginning. We instantly got moved over to weekends, then Fridays and Saturdays, then we added Wednesdays. I remember one night dividing the money up at the pool table and O’Connor asking as his wad was passed to him, “Any of you boys want to play a little poker?”

Soon we were on the cover of the local alternative paper. We started to cross over into local rock star status. Still, we played places like the Crow’s Nest at the harbor, which meant no dancing and a very small stage, and low wages but a great dinner for each band member. For me, as I lived on Sixth Street, it meant I could walk to work.

Sofrito suffered a collapse when Raul let his demons get ahold of him, but it was too late: Salsa was out of the bag in Santa Cruz. We were too happening. The band splintered into several bands and a softball team as well. We made regular pilgrimages to Oakland to root for the then-hapless A’s. Cornelius Bumpus, one of the guys we ran with regularly, got an unbelievable gig that he deserved from the Doobie Brothers.

I left Santa Cruz in 1979, convinced that the remote location and easy lifestyle of Santa Cruz were messing for my chances at a gig.

A couple years later I heard that David O’Connor suffered a stroke. But I heard he was fighting back, that it took him five years of therapy to be able to play guitar again. He had married, but his wife stuck with him, against the odds stacked against his recovery as a musician in a remote corner of Northern California without health insurance.

I started talking to David again last month. His speech can be halting at times, but he’s still the funniest guy I know. He’s got a website with mp3 samples, and he’s doing pretty well with the wedding business, a furrow that my brother and I plow as well in Austin.

It’s funny when you talk to a guy from the remote past who naturally feels like he’s taking up the conversation when you last spoke. That’s what it’s been like talking to Dave. I look forward to talking again.