It’s not easy making a living as a musician in Los Angeles. Or probably anywhere. In order to bring home the booty we need a reasonable command of our instrument, whatever that instrument is. But there is so much more.
We need bulldog tenacity. Abundant energy helps. And what about all those juicy distractions that seduce us at every turn? Gotta say “no” to them. Over and over again. Because they arrive like a flock of birds.
But if we are lucky we find our “village.” We discover other people who are gliding–or slipping and sliding–down the same road. Or at least on a similar trajectory.
I am talking about “networking” and I’ve been part of a long-standing network of women who play the keyboard for a living. Every year or so we gather the whole bunch of us and catch up on the latest dramas, offer moral support, share news about our new CD or musical or book and oh the gigs–glorious and otherwise. We have among us a jazzer who has been declared a living legend here in Los Angeles and a warrior woman who has taken on the power’s-that-be at the Grammy Awards for dissolving her category of music (Zydeco). We have talented writers, entertainers, teachers, business entrepreneurs. Keyboard players all.
And so it goes one Wednesday when twenty-plus of us pull our chairs around one long table in the food court at the Westfield Mall. There’s sushi to our left, pizza to our right, Vietnamese in front and a whole array of other tummy-warming choices stretching north and south.
I marvel at the conviviality of the whole thing. We are women who work in a field that is highly competitive. The economy has not been kind to artists. Of course we are taking care of ourselves first. That said, one can sense the generosity of spirit that comes through. Like any community, I feel closer to some than others, but that’s okay too because I know how difficult it is to be a woman and a musician in this town and appreciate that we are all working as artists, however that appears and unfolds. We are exploring new paths, reinventing old ones and above all, finding ways to keep doing what we love to do. We know, in our bones, that music is food for the body and heart and soul. Sushi is good, but the right song at the right time can change your life.
The great lyricist, Dorothy Fields, one of the first women to break into the male-bastion of American music, kicked open the door for women songwriters to follow, including the songwriters at our table in the mall. She hit it big in 1928 with her song “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.”
She had to “play” with the big boys and not take their sometimes patronizing and dismissive attitude personally. The “boys” called her the “Fifty-Dollar-A-Night Girl.” I bet Dorothy got a kick out of that and maybe took it as a compliment. In those days, songs had about fifty words. A publisher would give her an assignment to write the lyric for a melody. She’d whip out something amazing that night, bring it back to the publisher the next morning and collect her fifty bucks. She wrote well. And fast.
I think Dorothy was one tough cookie. Today we need to be tough too. But we do have each other.