“Maybe you can make a cereal that brushes your teeth while you eat it, and maybe that would be a great idea. . . .” He paused and rubbed his chin. “But what aisle do you put it in? See, you’re losing from the beginning.”
That was a Bay Area music producer’s colorful way of dismissing my group’s first album, The Glass Room. Legends & Deeds—guitar ace Mike Bautista, ’01, singer Ned Tozun, ’01, drummer Dan Mandell, ’02, and me on electric bass—writes songs in several styles, from folk to salsa. And apparently, an eclectic rock band is about as marketable as a tooth-brushing cereal.
Fortunately, there’s more to being in a band than trying to make money. That lesson has never been more clear to me than during a show we played last year in downtown Palo Alto.
We arrived at the small plaza in front of the Burger King on University Avenue at about 1 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. The restaurant manager climbed up on the roof and waved to us to throw him our extension cord. “So people don’t trip,” he said. It made sense to me. We ran the cord through the trees to our amps and plugged in.
As we continued setting up, people started coming up to us.
“What kind of music do you play? When are you starting?”
“Rock ’n’ roll, and very soon,” I answered. A few of them seemed pleased.
During a set break, a barefoot, middle-aged man approached me. He had an unbuttoned shirt, a jungle of gray chest hair and a cigarette in his mouth. “Most of the bands that come play here are punk bands; they play that real heavy stuff I can’t even understand, makes you wanna go out and kill somebody,” he said. “But you guys play the stuff I like. John and Paul would be proud.”
I think he was talking about our rendition of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” although we play more than one Beatles song. I remembered seeing this guy in the Burger King plaza before, and from his looks I assumed he spent a good deal of time there or at another streetside locale. But what really struck me was that after shaking my hand, he fumbled around in his pocket, pulled out an old, crinkled dollar bill and threw it into our open guitar case.
Later, we played our version of the classic song “Stand by Me.” From the moment I started the bass line until the last chord, a tattered veteran named Charlie waltzed around the plaza in his equally tattered denim jacket and POW-MIA cap. To see the grin on his face as we played was worth all the time it took to set up the instruments and cords and plugs and amps. At the end of the song, he, too, pulled a dollar out of his pocket and added it to our collection.
We made a few bucks that day. Enough for a couple of Whoppers, at least. It surprised us, because we had only put out the guitar case so that people could take our free stickers and maybe sign up for our mailing list. I felt guilty taking money from people who didn’t seem to have much to spare, who needed money themselves and weren’t ashamed to ask you for it (the first time I met Charlie, I gave him a dollar after listening to his story about how he got his war wound). Then it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t feel that way.
Sometimes, when you give a person a dollar, it’s because you feel obligated in some way or you don’t want them to hassle you anymore. Like when you leave a dollar tip for a lousy waiter, or just want Charlie to end his tale before he gets to the part where he ended up in a knife fight with Ho Chi Minh. Those dollars in the guitar case, however, I knew we had truly earned. We had reached a few people down deep, and lifted them up. And that sort of thing is hard to feel when you’re playing a show at a bar or a club—or when a producer is telling you that you’ll never get a recording contract.
Josh Kienitz, ’02, is earning a bachelor’s in psychology and a master’s in education. He is from Lima, Ohio.
