2pm on a Wednesday and Check Your Ratios
You have to decide how awesome your job is at some point. I’m coming up on a one year anniversary here at Jazz88 and I’m feeling pretty darn good about how things are doing. I’ve basically only had cool jobs in my life. Even my jobs that weren’t “cool” taught me a ton. Let’s go over them. Babysitter, sold baseball cards at the State Fair, sold CDs at Applause and Cheapo, played bass at blues clubs, entered data for Minnesota Department of Health, gift shop employee at Mass MoCa, made salads at Bennington College cafeteria*, worked the door at the 400 Bar, played bass and ran the band Heiruspecs, worked at group homes for boys and men with autism, did observed parenting sessions for parents with limited custodial rights, worked for a lady who wrote ad copy for awhile, Executive Assistant to the President of McNally Smith College of Music, taught at McNally, ran a Trivia company (still co-own it), played bass for Dessa, hosted at the Current, hosted and music directed at Jazz88. I’m sure I missed plenty of things that I made some money at, but I think that is most of my jobs. Here are some ways to measure how cool your job is:
Wednesday at 2pm test
Don’t think about how you describe your job at fancy dinner parties, think about what you’re doing at 2pm on a Wednesday. That’s one of the ways in which I feel I currently have the best job of my career. At 2pm most Wednesdays I am preparing music for future days on Jazz88 by programming music into our database, selecting music from that database or researching music to determine if it will be added into our database. All that work is amazing. Being a touring musician is great, the hours on stage are some of the greatest hours I will ever have in my entire life. But at 2pm sometimes you are staring at the back of your leader’s head in a van with one speaker, but that speaker isn’t even turned on, because your leader is having a long ass conversation with someone from her management team about something that might impact the next 6 months of your life schedule and money wise but you have to pretend like you aren’t listening cause it would be eavesdropping. So make sure your 2pm on a Wednesday or another spot check time is legit.
The Ratio
This dovetails right next into my new rubric for determining how cool a job is. How about you rate how cool what you are doing is across the hours of your job and figure out what the sum total of that across a week is. I feel that every hour I am on the air, sharing amazing music, communicating with an audience about jazz, the worst that can be on a scale of 1-10 is a 6. I’ve never never felt worse than a 6 while getting to be live on the radio. Running a trivia company sounds cool, but a huge amount of the hours I was feverishly trying to find people to run trivia that night, trying to get punk ass bar owners to pay their bills, trying to come up with another question about a word that rhymed with a state. It was a lot. And it was often solitary. I did a lot of work from home or from places that were empty. I am an office guy, I like to see people at work, I couldn’t take a work from home gig. I don’t even think I could take a work from home two days a week job. I like coming into work and shooting the shit. I’d say any hour at the office that isn’t in a meeting, can’t be lower than maybe a 3. Like I’ve never been sitting at my desk at an office or a radio station thinking “this is the absolute worst plane of existence”. Naw. Never that. Touring, what a strange ratio. A couple of the hours on tour are the absolute greatest hours of your life. I remember being in California, lightly drunk, driving in Doomtree’s van, listening to Frank Ocean’s “Swim Good” for the first time and believing we were all going to be famous and also believing that we kind of already were. I remember looking around the van and seeing that everyone was feeling some kind of similar feeling, Ander, who was selling merch was just moving his body in such rhythm, with such confidence, and Dessa, who spent SO MUCH TIME WORKING AND SCHEMING was in the moment, rolling her head back into the sound of the music in a way I never saw her do in the van. And Joey laughing, Dustin listening and driving I believe. On a scale of 1-10 that’s a 200, I haven’t felt that good at a job for years. The only time I get and exceed joy like that is by bodies of water with my children. But I don’t get paid for that. But so many hours on tour are terrible. And sometimes the playing music part is horrible. Sometimes you can hear nothing on stage, so you are just hoping the band sounds good. I remember once loading out of a club in Boise, ID completely by myself, the band had all connected with fun locals, drinking, hanging, selling stuff. I somehow felt we had to load out then and there so I carried all the shit out. It was horrible. I felt like I had been personally wronged in this situation, but at this point, I can’t quite tell why I didn’t just wait for everyone to be ready to load out. Made sense to me at the time. But, can’t really make sense of it right now. I also think small potatoes touring is just a better fit for younger people. There’s a thing about going to New York City at age 25 when you think no one in that city gives a shit about you that feels romantic. It feels completely different to go there at age 40 and wonder why you are skipping out on your kid’s bedtime to serenade 47 paid at the Mercury Lounge. I can think of a lot of 1s and a lot of 10s on the road. And on top of that I think the average rating of being in a van with other people for multiple hours is probably about a 6. It can’t easily get up to an 8, can easily get down to a 1 pretty fast. So check your ratio my friends. Pick a job that is awesome to you!
*The greatest good coldness I ever felt was submerging my hands deep into a HUUUUUUGE pot to clean an industrial amount of lettuce. My arm felt so cold on that hot spring day and I think about it all the time.