"What I Learned About Small Business Playing In a Rock And Roll Band!"
The flares were wide, the platforms were high and BIG hair was mandatory!
Not many people know I left school at 15 to play in a rock and roll band.
Actually it was a 70’s glitter band but as my dear friend Lynne always says “Why ruin a good story with the truth”. But I did leave school at 15 and I made a full time living playing music until I was 24.
It’s amazing what I learnt about running a business during those 9 years as a professional musician.
Bands are incredibly interesting beasts. The glitz and glamour on the stage is only a small part of what goes on. Like any small business it’s about how many come through the door and then managing behind the scenes so you can pay your bills.
These are the top ten business rules of rock and roll that I’ve never forgotten.
1. Introverts CAN Rock!
I was a classic introvert as a child (actually still am). I spent a lot of time practicing and playing music alone when most others were outside playing team sports. All those hours of isolated practice paid off one day when I was invited to come along and sit in with a real band.
I rocked up and endured hours of the boys placing a long stream of song sheets in front of me. By the end of the day I had rocketed myself into the band on the strength of being able to play Crocodile Rock, at full speed, without stopping once.
So with a fair dose of naïve innocence this was the start of my journey into rock and roll. The band had an average age of 14.
2. Invest Back Into your Business
We played in our small rural town and gained quite a reputation for being able to entertain big crowds at weddings, balls and sports clubs. As the years went by we just kept ploughing our hard earned cash into more and more sophisticated equipment and we played and practiced and practiced and played.
Eventually we got so good we were offered the residency at a local bar where we began to draw record crowds and again got a huge following.
3. Your Luck Can Change Overnight When You Are 100% Focused
The band was now highly dedicated and had an average age of 19. In a very exciting coup we backed a local singer, now living in the big smoke, who had made good with his music career having several hits in New Zealand. His manager accompanied him that night. By the end of the last set we had new management and an offer to take up the residency at his nightclub in “the big smoke”.
This was a massive opportunity and another gigantic leap of naïve faith was taken as the band gave up the safety of our small town and sailed for Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. We became the resident band at Slack Alice, the only night club in the greater Wellington area licensed to sell alcohol.
4. You Can Find Support in Unlikely Places
Well, can you imagine four young country bumpkins let loose in a big city, suddenly launched at warp speed into a seedy night time world that belonged to hookers, drug dealers, pimps, gender benders, mongrel mob, cabbies, hairdressers, characters from the underworld and the drunken patrons of every bar in the city and beyond. It’s just lucky I don’t have an addictive personality because it was all on offer in those days and I came out the other end relativity unscathed.
These turned out to be some of the nicest people on the planet and I always felt safe because they knew I was out of my depth and they took me under their colourful wings and protected me.
5. Any News is Good News
It was the days of cavernous licensed live music venues and when they shut for the night, everyone, including the bands would rock on down to Slack Alice where the disco dance floor was lighting up and the strains of Disco Inferno would belt out through the DJ’s massive speakers. We played from 10pm to 3am often backing visiting artists and hosting some of the major touring bands of the time.
They were heady days when the Bee Gees ruled the airwaves and John Travolta taught a generation how to walk.
The club was owned by a flamboyant entertainment celebrity Phil Warren, whose claim to fame was promoting some of the biggest acts to come through New Zealand. He was also well ahead of his time being the infamous caustic judge on TV talent shows in the late 60’s. We were petrified of him and his visits were always well anticipated and everyone was on their best behaviour.
How do you think we felt the morning we awoke to find the newspaper headlines blaring all over the city “Disco Kids Drinks Spiked”. The story had little substance but we were front page news. We all thought we were on the first ferry back home. But in true Phil style his response was one of glee.
His words are still etched into my brain “ANY NEWS IS GOOD NEWS”.
If Phil knew anything it was the power of free PR. He was delighted when his prediction of full houses for weeks came true on the strength of some reporter finding a couple of kids who drank too much and ended up in the emergency ward. Thousands of advertising dollars couldn’t have promoted as well as the morning papers did that day.
Free PR is your friend and even if it’s not such a great story, people forget the story but they remember you.
6. Don’t Spend Ninety Nine Cents to Make a Dollar and 10% of Nothing is Still Nothing!
These were Phil’s two favourite sayings. What they meant was
1. you need to keep track of your marketing costs.
2. you need to be bringing in a lot of money to make a profit, because profit is a percentage of what you charge.
(The word he used wasn’t “nothing”. I’ll leave that to your imagination and remember there is only one language spoken in rock and roll and that is bad language!)
Phil knew it can be tempting to spend huge amounts of money trying to promote yourself and get bums on seats but at the end of the day all that promotion must pay for itself and still make a profit.
Whenever we were on tour the first thing he made us do when we pulled into a town was to be speaking to the local newspaper. Second thing was to go around to the local radio station for an interview. I remember one announcer asking me “what did one girl do with three blokes after the show”. Lucky it wasn’t live to air because I was totally speechless!
You are much better using free PR and guerrilla marketing techniques that are low or no cost to you.
7. Always know where your white dot is!
One very memorable career highlight for us was the night we were engaged to back a young singer who was doing very well in the charts with his band.
He was opening for Marcia Hines (now of Australian Idol fame) in a packed theatre venue. The song of the moment was Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen. It had a great little guitar riff that started the song and we had Gaz, the nicest man in rock and roll, playing guitar with us that night.
To make sure he started on the right fret Gaz had stuck a little white dot in the appropriate place.
Well, his big solo chance came and Gaz stepped out into the spot light and started to play.
We were sitting behind him poised to start, quietly knowing in our guts that something wasn’t quite right. It was hard to tell what was wrong. We soon found out when the band joined in. Gaz was in the wrong key!
His white dot had come off and in the dark he couldn’t see properly and had hoped he’d got the right spot. To make matters worse the band realised the error and changed to his key right about the same time that he worked out where he needed to be and moved back into the right key.
There was no recovery and he had to step up to the mike and fess up and start again. If it had been anyone else he would have got booed off but Mr Nice won on the day.
So lots of lessons in our first and last big theatre show:
8. The truth will set you free
9. Nice guys DO win out.
10. On big occasions when it really counts - super clue your white dot on!
(Several of the rock and roll theories form part of the 16 Week Full Practice Building System - no spiked drinks though!) |
