The Push: How to Engineer Your Big Break
As part of our continuing effort to educate and inspire all you rockers out there about the often gritty, sometimes shitty, never pretty reality of the music industry, Sonic Weekly went out and interviewed three bands at very different stages in their careers to find out what, exactly, it takes to survive in this business.
The Bands:
The Newcomer: Red Blanket 
Current Album: “A Southern Manitoba Murder of Crows,” released by C12 Records.
The Workhorse: DeVotchKa 
Current Album: “Curse Your Little Heart,” released by Ace Fu Records.
The Veteran: Veruca Salt 
Current Album: “IV,” released by Sympathy for the Record Industry.
Putting a Band Together
A successful band is kind of like a mullet: all business up front, party in the back. The “it” factor—that magical, elusive combination that produces hit singles and charismatic stage performances—is important, but it can vanish like dust if it doesn’t come with serious musicians that are willing to work. Hard.
Red Blanket, an instrumental thrash-funk outfit from Canada, originally came together as a group of guys who were sick of screwing around in basements with band mates who weren’t ready to commit. “Business is Bidness, and music is no different,” Red Blanket’s Daniel Stewart tells us. “As a professional, you wanna work with other professionals who are gonna benefit each other equally. No point in fucking around with some mook who doesn’t have his shit together.”
Choosing band mates like you might choose business partners isn’t easy, especially when you can’t promise them much but a whole lot of work. For the members of DeVotchka, it was ten years between their start backing a burlesque show and their Grammy nom for work on the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine. The question we had for lead singer Nick Urata was how, exactly, he put his crew together and made them stick? “I like to believe it’s one of those intangible, cosmic events,” he reveals. “That if you start on an artistic path and you are meant to be on it, the right people will show up at the right time.”
If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be—on the surface, not exactly inspiring advice. But if you know the history of DeVotchKa, you know that its members spent years doing everything from busking for rent money, to playing in a Civil War recreationist band, before they finally came together. Translation: cosmic events that are meant to be tend to come about thanks to years of paying your dues.
Playing Shows
For some similarly intangible, cosmic reason, the simple act of getting out there and paying dues can elude the most talented musicians. It’s for this reason that bands who get the recognition aren’t always the most talented, but they are the ones getting out there, busting their asses playing shows and, just as importantly, making connections.
According to the bands we grilled, two types of connections are key to success: other musicians (your competition!) and club owners (possibly some of the biggest hard-asses on earth!) That’s right. In the music business, your natural enemies have got to become your greatest allies.
Networking with Other Musicians
For Veruca Salt—indie rockers who straddle the genre fence with sweet pop hooks and crunch-heavy guitar riffs—the thriving Chicago music scene was the right place to be in the early 90s. “At the time we were coming up, there were a multitude of other amazing bands playing around town constantly,” lead singer Louise Post remembers. “It was like being a part of this beautiful, grand tapestry of music and talent. And as much as we worked in our living rooms for a year-and-a-half before playing a show, once we started, we got noticed and signed really quickly.”
Any opportunity that an up-and-coming band has to play packed venues and get on the list with other popular artists increases their chance of having a producer, agent, or talent scout in the crowd. As the origin story of Veruca Salt proves, you don’t have to be in LA or New York for this to happen, you just need to find a scene and make yourself the center of it.
Making the Club Owners Love You
No matter how hooked up you are, there are still going to be all those nights when you’ve got to go it alone. You’re playing with three other total unknowns to an empty house, and the owner is pissed off. “Thing is,” Red Blanket’s guitarist, Daniel, tells us, “all these guys want you for is to sell drinks. So sell drinks and they’ll be your best friend.”
Believe it or not, having a club owner love you can be your ticket into the big league. Club owners are business people, and they know other business people, like the aforementioned producers, agents, and talent scouts. So you make them money, and they point you out as a moneymaking machine to their buddies. How else do these people turn up at clubs looking for the next big thing? Coincidence? Absolutely not!
Marketing
To get some serious attention, you have to find a way to pack the house even when you’re the only band on the lineup. And that, in turn, means constant promotion, putting up posters, begging friends to come out, and building up a large community online at MySpace (much more effective than a website for an up-and-coming band!). It also means sticking to the basics—playing shows and making music—no matter how much you’re ignored, berated, and generally crushed into a tiny ball of zero self-esteem.
“It was a fluke that they heard our song,” Nick says of DeVotchKa making contact with the producers of Little Miss Sunshine. “But the truth is, it got played because we toured our asses off and kept releasing albums until somebody noticed. It is a huge gamble, but if things aren’t happening for you, you have to find a way to go out and make it happen for yourself.”
Management
Making it happen for yourself is something you might have to do whether or not you can find professional management. Managers are interested in your ability to make them rich, and little else. The unsigned, moneymaking band is a prime target for all kinds of users looking to harness that moneymaking power and leave you in the proverbial lurch. As DevotchKa’s Nick Urata puts it, “People hold artists in high regard but want them to stay in poverty.”
Translation: never get involved based on a promise or a handshake! Get the contract and, as Daniel warns, “Read the fine print!” Even as the guys in Red Blanket coast on the high of releasing their first album, thoughts of time wasted waiting for a producer or manager to come through on a promise are still fresh in their minds.
Overcoming Crushing Disappointment
It’s easy to think that the stars we see tearing up the charts have made it to the top by fluke or without effort. It’s even easier to psyche ourselves out, thinking that a disaster onstage or a letdown in the studio is a career-killer. But as these artists have openly told us, rejection and disappointment are part of the essence of life for a working musician, so you gotta suck it up!
When Red Blanket first started touring, without management and with little idea of how to book venues over long distances, letdowns were the order of the day.
“We were on the road to a show in Saskatchewan, [Canada],” guitarist Daniel recalls of a gig booked nearly five hundred miles from their hometown of Winnipeg. “We got a call that said the promoter didn’t know we were an instrumental band, and thus we were unmarketable. So NO show. Whack.”
DeVotchKa, seasoned touring band that they are, have found themselves nipple to nipple with their share of chest cavity-crushing heartbreakers. “There have been too many,” Nick says, “but it comes with the territory. One Hollywood story comes to mind. We got a booking at the Knitting Factory, which is right on Hollywood Boulevard next to Mann’s Chinese Theatre. It sounded like a great idea but we drew [an audience of] three people and they couldn’t pay us. I was too embarrassed to face my band empty-handed, so I emptied my wallet, all of 8 bucks, and paid the band.”
Rough times. Good thing that once your big break comes, you don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore. Yeah, right. “The stakes get really high really fast,” Louise warns, remembering Veruca Salt’s meteoric rise to gold, “Prior to releasing our first record, we had no idea what good “sales” even were. But when [the second album, (1997)] “Eight Arms to Hold You” didn’t exceed the sales of [the first album, (1994)] “American Thighs,” I think we couldn’t help but perceive it as more of a failure than the overwhelming success that it really was.”
What Louise is talking about here is perception. Perception can be your greatest ally or your biggest enemy in this business. Are you perceived as marketable? Do you have the self-perception required to stay strong? Could what you perceive as failure be a doorway to success?
In retrospect, Nick told us how a story that started out grim for DeVotchKa ended in opportunity. “At the time,” he says of facing his band after the Knitting Factory fiasco, “I made up some story about how the owner loved us and wanted to have us back, but you know what? We did get booked again two years later, and we drew a couple hundred people and two of them were the future directors of Little Miss Sunshine.”
So in the end, DeVotchKa made it back, and launched their careers to the next level. Red Blanket kept chewing up the miles on tour and got their first record deal, and Veruca Salt, who recently released their fourth studio album, survived to rock another day. What all these stories prove is that, in a business where success tonight can mean nothing tomorrow, you need the will and the drive to push on against all odds in order to survive as one of that rare and resilient breed: the working musician.
Check back with Sonic Weekly for more details about how these three bands progressed their careers, and find out more about marketing, management, and what really goes down in the recording studio.
Author's biography:
Anne Stewart is an author, music journalist, and songwriter based out of Victoria, British Columbia. While biding time awaiting the publication of her best-seller and subsequent retirement on a yacht Ken Kesey-style, she writes for multiple online publications and runs her own successful web design firm, Float Solutions.
