About a year ago the band Psychobabble took their chances in Spokane, Washington and recently Robert Irving, Psychobabble's singer and bass player returned bearing hard luck stories and broken dreams of rock stardom. Robert may have returned without a band, but his experiences made him wiser and all the more hungry to make it to the top in a business that eats young talent as a light between meal snack.
I had a chance to talk with him about the trials and trouble of rising to the top in the dog eat dog world of rock and roll.
New Lemming(NL): What made you decide to move to Spokane?
Robert: We wanted to get as much exposure as we could and try to get some record label interest. Although Spokane is a little out of the way to do that, you can still drive to Seattle of Portland, and there are a whole series of colleges in that area: where lots of people come from all over the place and then take off again, so they're really good places to play. That's why we were down there, basically, to try and see where we could go with it. Try to have some fun and tour around, play lots of gigs and then see if we could make a living doing it, which is very difficult.
NL: So, what happened?
Robert: We went down there and played a whole bunch of gigs, lots and lots of gigs, we gigged all the time. We worked shitty little odd jobs so that we could quit instantly and go wherever we needed to go to play gigs. We needed to be able to bail out at a moment's notice.
We were constantly playing. That caused everybody to burn out. We were down there two weeks before we had our first gig, after that we played at least every weekend. Sometimes we were playing three or four times a week We did that for six months straight. Then we took some small breaks. We just kept hammering away. We played all these college towns all over the area, we played the shit out of ourselves (laughs). Then we got picked up by this little independent label called Abode of Souls.
NL: What is an independent label?
Robert: It's just a small recording studio that somebody might have in their basement. Mostly that's what it is. A label like Sub-Pop is not really an independent label, a real one has creative control over what they're doing. At some point Sub-Pop was independent. As you get bigger you get in a situation where you are no longer independent, in the sense that you are answering to somebody else. Basically anyone who actually makes a product and sells it themselves is an independent label.
This one was someone that we knew and was a prominent musician in the area and he had professional high-quality recording equipment, an ADAT recorder and a 32-track mixing board, drum mikes, and the whole nine yards. It was pretty much an underground label, lots of bands that haven't made it yet.
He was another stepping stone. He'll get bands that aren't signed and try to promote them to the next step, which is to get picked up by a mid-level independent label, like Les Claypools' Interscope or SST, labels that could promote 50,000 to 100,000 tapes a year in record sales.
They would get these ground level bands and make a recording that was high-quality and use it as a demo that could be shipped off to labels. That's as far as we got before the pressure of trying to bust ass to make it, got to us.
You really have to stay committed for a long time if you want to make it and you have to really want that lifestyle, too. Which I not exactly conducive to doing anything else. You play a lot and don't get much sleep. There is lots of partying, which is fun for a while, but after you do it for a year and a half, you really have to decide what it is you want to do. If you play all the time and you don't get anywhere with it, it's not necessarily that you're a bad band, there are just so many good bands out there.
NL: Did you make any money while you were doing that?
Robert: Sometimes you would. You'd make pretty good money when you played frat party/college gig things. We played a couple parties where we got paid four hundred dollars, which is pretty good for three people.
NL: At what point are you able to live off of being a musician?
Robert: When you are starting out as an original band, I think the only time you can do that is after you work for six months at a slave job and have saved up enough at each gig to make it to the next one and buy ramen in between. That's the key.
NL: Do you think you need to sell out to make it?
Robert: I'm sure there are some people out there who have. You get stiffed all the time playing clubs. They'll tell you that you wil get a certain percentage of the door and they'll guarantee you an amount. You'll pack the place in, and at the end of the night they'll give you the minimum they told you they would pay you. You know that they make way more on the door.
The typical one is that the bar owner will leave and be nowhere to be found and a waitress will be there with a note saying pay them fifty bucks and she'll say "I don't know anything about it." Of the sneaky tactics we saw, that's the standard. They'll try and pawn you off with the fifty and send you on your way. You need to have someone who's an hard ass to tell them "I'm going to stay here and burn this place to the ground unless you get the owner on the phone right now or give us some money." You have to be a bastard, they're banking on you not being one. Most people aren't for the first several months of playing music.
NL: How often did that happen to you?
Robert: Less and less as we became more skilled at it. They know right away whether you know what you're doing of not. You can go in there and tell them "This is the scoop, I want this much cut at the door, I want my person at the door, I'm selling my shirts, plus here's my minimum." You lay that down on them and hand them a contract, and they know you're not kidding.
NL: It's really that viscous?
Robert: It can be, you have to be prepared to do that. Sometimes there are some really cool people. The thing is when you're just starting out you don't have a big say in what goes on because your trying to get a following and you're not going to get a big draw. They play on that hard core. If you start playing in a circuit of clubs and they know you're a new band they'll start you out as an opening band, they'll keep trying to pay you less than you're worth even after you start pulling in big crowds.
NL: They'll see how far they can go with you?
Robert: That's their job, bar owners are notoriously chap. That's the only way they can continue to make money at the business they're doing. They have to be hard asses too, they deal with drunks all the time. Entertainment for them is extras.
There was one good bar we played at in Montana, it was in Missoula, called Jays Upstairs. We walked in there and the first thing we saw was the 4'11" woman wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and a cowboy dress and we thought "Oh god, we're doomed." I though we were in a cowboy bar. We went to go downstairs and we were all fairly weird looking. George had his hair dyed blue. We walked through downstairs Jays and it was all cowboys with spurs, I'm not kidding it was real shit-kicking cowboys. They looked over and saw all of us and I think somebody said "Well, Lester, I think there might be a fight."
I thought, "GOD DAMN, I'm sure of it!" I could hear something about "Look at all those homosexuals." We walked through there, George looked pretty weird , and we sure didn't look like cowboys. It was bizarre, so we were freaking out. We thought we're in cow country and we'll get killed. We went upstairs and there was this girl in this cowboy suit and she had a nose ring and she said "Howdy, partner, I welcome you to Missoula! Have a drink" They instantly slammed us with shots. We proceeded to drink like fish. They had their people haul all of our equipment upstairs. It was weird, they were pretending to be cowboys, but they were really punk rock weirdoes. It turned out the owners were part of this Earth-First/Green fringe group, they invited us to ride out on horses with them the next day, and chain ourselves to strategic trees in this clear-cut.
NL: So, what are your plans now?
Robert: I'm going to keep playing music and if I come up with some thing I really like, then I plan on making recordings and sending them to every label I can.
NL: Are you happy being back in Fairbanks?
Robert: Up here working I can make better money than I can down in the states. I would just as soon live up here where I like it. I grew up here and I like Alaska. This is the real world to me and everything else is strange. So I think I want to base it out of here, what every happen. With the Internet, I think you can. Today's global network means you don't need to be in the ratrace to be able to contribute to it.
NL: What advice would you give to people trying to start careers as musicians?
Robert: Really, I don't know anything because I didn't succeed, aside from having a good time. Still if you want to try doing what I did, research your area before you go. It's nearly impossible to get gigs as an unknown band in Seattle, Portland, or San Francisco. Bands like Sonic Tractorhead went to Seattle and never got any gigs and eventually split up. If you go to not as big cities, which are not on the big circuit. You can get gigs, establish yourself and build up your resume. When we first started soliciting gigs in Portland, by the time we actually got them, we had played in Spokane and the surrounding areas a whole bunch. We had a long list of clubs that could verify we brought in people and we did a good job, we had a tape and a promo package. You gotta have something to show the club owners. Almost certainly within the first week, if you're a good band, you're gonna have people come up and offer to help you with your equipment, take them up. You need buddies to help you out.