Managers- story for australian musician magazine

article for australian musician magazine

THIS IS AN ARTICLE I WROTE FOR THE CURRENT ISSUE OF AUSTRALIAN MUSICIAN MAGAZINE WHICH CAN BE FOUND IN ALL MUSIC GEAR STORES AND ELSEWHERE. IT'S THE ISSUE EDITED BY POWDERFINGER.


We’re amongst friends here so I feel I should speak my mind. I mean you must be some kind of a musician to be here among these pages. All the ads for equipment and the reviews of them as well. If a civilian is in here, you must have taken a wrong turn! Fuck off!
So my language is not tempered here for people who dont know anything. I don’t mean to go back to the beginning and hold anybodys hand. I don’t have to explain that its mainly rock n roll music here and that pretty much began with Black American musicians in the late 1940s. Around the time that Leo Fender and Les Paul started fooling around in their garages and made some foxy looking banjos that let amphetamine fuelled ex GI's and hooch puffing ,shade tree mechanics , pill popping delinquents and horned prison escapees make loud , brutish sounds on the guitar, as opposed to people having to go to music school etc.. Etc... We all know that shit!
I would expect no favours if my eyes wandered into a magazine concerning houseplants or computer games. I would expect to toss the mag aside pretty quickly as it was written ina foreign tongue!
So here is some straight talk.
Managers are never there when you most need them. When you are cold are just starting to push your little canoe out into the river.
When you least need them, they appear like flies on sherbet. Alright, shit! When you are hot and everything is going your way and all doors are opening for you.When you are reeking of spondoolix!
My advice , if you have a manager, is to sack them. Immediately. You can hire them back at your leisure and convenience. Its good just to give them a flash of reality that you are the dog and they are the tail. I mean that you are doing the wagging around here.
If they are any good there will be s oft knocking on the door in a while.
Actually, at that starting point, its good for you to learn how to front your music. I mean you have to be committed to what you're doing. No one else is gonna get in there. The business is not really a business. Its got a little bit of social cachet. Truth be told, the straight world mocks the music scene. It thinks it knows the score. All those ads with references to “trashing hotel rooms” and politicians getting the “rock star treatment”. Most people would faint of they got a whiff of “musicians treatment”. They couldn’t hack it for a day.
Let them think what they like. Its best if people think you’re dumb.
Its not 1963 anymore anyway. Everybody has to front themselves. Whats the matter with that? Carry your amp and make sure you get paid.
Sack that manager though.
Also, never give anything near 100% to the audience or a writer or a tv camera . Give it to your bandmates or to a recording. The audience is lazy , stupid and fickle. They dont know shit from Adam. Keep yourself and your music under your control. I mean the core of it. the source, At a certain point, if it gets to be a crowd situation and everybody wants a piece of it and are pushing even you aside, well, thats the sort of situation that everybody is thinking of. That is a happening, a car crash, thats what you want isn’t it? Then everybodys gonna take what they want and you’ll never get any of it back.
In the meantime, get rid of that goddam manager and keep it all cold. Straight from the fridge, you with me?