Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

  But beyond the modicum of talent required (if it exists, it can be nurtured with practice) to get your foot into the door of this dirty game, the bottom line here, like most anywhere else, is work. There are many, many talented musicians out there just waiting to be discovered; thousands of players with far more natural musical talent in their pinky fingers than me or any of my band members. But the overwhelmingly vast majority of them will never even come minutely close to being professional musicians for a few simple reasons (and right about now some people are going to start to really hate me as they read this, but it is the indisputable truth):

  Most wannabe pro-musicians are simply not strong enough to put up with all the sniping bullshit that is thrown at you when you have the audacity to publicly perform music you wrote yourself, much less even attempt to make a living from it (or any sort of art for that matter, as some reviews of this book will surely attest). They do not possess a thick enough skin to handle the constant rejection, criticism, and never-ending underhanded attempts by everyone and their crooked uncle to rip off what little bit of money they do manage to make. They do not have the will to stand up for themselves and ignore those who cry “greedy wanna-be rockstar pig!” when they ask for enough money to at least fill the van’s gas tank to get to the next town; because unlike the fantasy land that the current generation of spoiled brat Internet critics seem to live in (“Music should be freeeeee, maaaaaaan!”), for those of us living in the real world and not at Mom’s house, gasoline, equipment, and uhm, food actually costs money. And even if they happen to have the cojones to deal with all the creeps, critics, jerks (and of course the worst of them all, the family members) who have never picked up an instrument but are all too happy to tell you how you are wasting your time, most folks simply are not willing to suffer long enough, not ready to be broke for the years and years it takes 99 percent of us to finally be able to support ourselves at a mere sustenance level. I don’t blame them. Who in their right mind would waste years of their lives on a ridiculous dream with no immediate returns, ending in decades long bouts of self-loathing, financial disgrace, and smug familial I-told-you-so’s for the overwhelming majority of those who are foolhardy enough to try and pursue that dream? Many times over the years I have wondered, What in the hell am I doing? This will never work! I must be crazy.

  You can’t sit around and dream your way into a career in the music business, anymore than I can dream my way into being a professional skateboarder. If that worked, I would have been a highly paid world record holding pro-skater at age fourteen, surrounded constantly by a bevy of adoring Hawaiian Tropic bikini models. Instead, I’m a forty-something dude who still likes riding around on my skateboard for fun; in fact I love it. Always have. But even as a kid I didn’t love it enough to do what it took to get really, really good. I know a few who did though—some of them have skeletons made mostly out of metal and weird synthetics now.

  As Marilyn Monroe reportedly once said—“I wasn’t the prettiest, I wasn’t the most talented. I simply wanted it more than anyone else.”

  Suppose you do want it badly enough, then what? It’s time to start living the dream, right? The reality for most people who pay the bills with music is not what you see on television. I make a more than comfortable living, and I haven’t worried about where my next meal is going to come from in a long time, but MTV won’t be calling me to show off my two bedroom house on Cribs anytime soon, that’s for sure. I have never owned a brand-new car in my life (I have owned four total, and three of them were beaters that I drove until they just wouldn’t drive anymore. Currently, I’m quite happy with my used Toyota truck, thank you very much. There is no Ferrari in my nonexistent garage), and most of the clothes I buy come from the Army Navy surplus store on the south side of Richmond. The cost of living in Richmond is quite reasonable compared to cities like NYC or LA, where famous musicians are supposed to go live their fabulous lives in opulent splendor amongst the beautiful people. My overhead is relatively low, I save my money, and my band is established well enough, with a large enough and dedicated long-term fan base, that I’m not particularly worried about getting on decent tours and selling enough t-shirts to make the mortgage payment (by the way, that is where most of your revenue lies—merchandise. Virtually no one makes money from record sales, because they don’t really exist anymore. Just a fact). I don’t work a straight job anymore, and if I’m smart, I won’t have to. I am the happy exception to the rule, though. Many of my friends in established bands with fairly large fan bases are what I call “semi-professional” musicians, because when they aren’t on the road, they are slinging drinks at the local watering hole to make that rent check. Signing autographs one week, the next carrying out the bar trash at the end of their ten-hour shift. This is reality.

  There is no retirement plan in this business, no 401(k) waiting for you when you finally can’t drag your not-so-cute-anymore aching frame onto the stage. There is no company health insurance (most of my professional musician friends can’t afford health insurance, but hey—that’s America, right?). There are no paid vacations, and when you’re touring (once again, where you make that rent money from merch sales), there are no personal leave or sick days. No one cares if you feel terrible. No one cares if you have strep throat. No one cares if your migraine is killing you. No one cares that you are losing your mind because your wife has just left you via text message for Clarence, the thirty-eight-year-old bag boy at the grocery store who “understands her” (yes, this happened. Not to me, but it happened. Clarence, you motherfucker). No one cares.

  The promoter has given your booking agent (who takes a percentage of every show you play, by the way) an advance and doesn’t want to go broke over one canceled show. Your crew, who works twice as hard as you for none of the glory, needs to get paid, and paid on time because they have rent and child support and hospital bills and their daughter needs to get glasses. Gas has to be put into whatever vehicle you are carrying your dog-and-pony show around the country in, and since the teleporter doesn’t exist yet, your driver needs some moolah. Your fans have waited months to see you do your thing, paid their hard-earned money for a ticket, and they expect to be entertained. They deserve it, too, because as I said, we are very, very blessed to be doing this for a living.

  Without the fans, I would still make music. I did it long before anyone but my friends and family knew my name, and if no one ever heard another song I wrote ever again, I would still be kicking out the jams, because that is what I love to do. It is as much a part of my life as reading books, which I simply cannot live without. So I would still be writing songs, but I would be writing when and if I had the spare time and energy to do so at the end of a long day working my straight job, and my focus on the music would not, by circumstance, be so absolute. I believe my art would suffer. My fans have allowed me to live a life I never dreamed of as a younger man, and for that I owe them. So when you’re on tour and you don’t feel so hot, if you have any sort of integrity or respect for the people who got you to where you are, you do your damn job. Shut up, rub some dirt on it, get your ass onstage, and give the people what they paid for. No excuses. No one cares.

  Most band guys I know suffer from a variety of ailments and/or chronic pain of some sort, generally due to repetitive motion injuries and bad decisions made while exhausted and/or intoxicated. Compressed vertebrae, pinched nerves, bone spurs, tendinitis, hair-line fractures, weird skin conditions from being immersed in the rolling germ factory that is a tour bus—it’s endless. Spend enough time around a few touring musicians and sooner or later you will hear the creaks and groans as they sit down to compare their list of bodily complaints and swap remedies. It’s like sitting with a group of twenty-to-forty-somethings who have been zapped prematurely into a backstage senior citizen’s home for aging rockers.

  It takes a different breed of human to try to do this stuff for a living (and by different, I mean completely lacking in common sense). You have to be a little cracked to even t
ry to make it in the high weirdness that is the music business. It gets even weirder once you attain a little popularity, and people start assuming they know you. Suddenly there is a multitude of mewling milk-toothed experts holding forth on all sorts of things about you, your personality, and your personal life; things these people who have never met you have no way of knowing besides what they can gather from that hallowed and infallible source of all information in this “information” age, the Internet. Thousands of them will anonymously either praise or condemn you, depending on what the almighty hive mind has pronounced within the last five minutes.

  If this being a professional musician thing is so darn hellish and impossible to attain, as I may be leading you to believe with all this talk of doom and gloom, then why in the world did I bother to try in the first place? Why do I still do it now?

  Because I love it.

  And I love it because truth be told, at its absolute best it is a dream come true. There is nothing in the world like the feeling of listening to a song, a song you spent weeks and weeks writing and arguing with your bandmates over, finally recording it and getting it just right after three weeks of ripping your vocal chords apart, then hearing that song blasting out through a PA louder than a 747 jet engine, hearing that song that you know in your guts kicks ass rip in perfect time out of you and your bandmates, watching it smack the waiting audience in the face, and then hearing that song roar back at you on the voices of a few thousand people who have taken that song, that thing you created, and loved it enough to take it into their heart and soul and make it a part of their own lives, giving that damn song a whole new meaning and a life of its own.

  It’s a massive energy exchange, an amazing, sublime, and holy experience of pure communication. When it’s happening, you can feel every single molecule in your body vibrating in perfect harmony with the universe. I wish that every single person on this planet could have that experience. If everyone could feel it, just once, I think the world would be a better place, and we would understand that everyone in fact is the same, equal in the eyes of God, and that every voice on this planet deserves to be heard, that everyone’s song deserves to be sung. I wish this could happen for everyone, because I truly do believe in the intrinsically equal value of every human life on this whirling green and blue spaceship we travel through the cosmos in.

  But all hippy-dippy crap aside, almost none of the thousands upon thousands of kids with an instrument and a dream will ever make it out of the basement and onto a stage in a professional capacity to attain that feeling. Because they aren’t strong enough in their convictions, don’t have enough will power to follow those convictions, and most importantly, aren’t willing to suffer long enough and work hard enough until the process of living those convictions finally, finally pays off. They just don’t want it badly enough. The numbers never lie. Sorry, kid.

  Somewhere though, through the magic of time and space travel that the holy act of writing and reading provides, I can actually feel the burning eyes of a few kids on this page, eyes that blaze with malice and determination, eyes trying their best to sear a hole through this page and into my head for daring to try to tell them that they have no hope of living this dream I’ve done my best to write out of their hands. When they are done reading this and cursing me for being a patronizing rockstar son of a bitch, they will throw this book across the room and into the poster covered practice space wall, they will pick up their instrument or their notebook and pen, and they will get to work. They will not listen to any of the voices that tell them they can’t do it, least of all my sardonic croaking. Not ever.

  These are the ones I will see down the line somewhere, on tour, and they will rock my socks completely off. They can even tell me to kiss it, because I obviously didn’t know who I was dealing with. I know they are out there, and I can feel them coming my way even as I write this. I know this because I was one of them. We can smell our own kind.

  I’m looking forward to it, kid. Now get back to work.

  But I was explaining my dubious status as a rockstar, and its effect on my life. I previously mentioned one of the greatest gifts and curses of our current age, the Internet, specifically its hive mind aspect. The hive mind is a vast and interconnected global game of he said/she said, with virtually no rules of accountability, no reliable yardstick by which the truth may be measured, not to mention any sort of arbiter of good taste.

  Following my arrest and eventual release, I cracked open my laptop and read a large amount of incorrect information concerning myself and my situation, information that spread at the speed of wifi on wings of speculation. I didn’t really bother to try to correct the many falsehoods concerning my legal situation that peppered the Internet, because to do so would have been an exercise in futility. The hive mind is much too big and far too stupid to take correction. Its very nature prevents the existence of veracity on a global scale within its confines. Too many screaming chefs, not enough sweaty line cooks. But this is my book, not the Internet, so I can speak factually here, with no one contradicting me or adding their two unsolicited counterfeit cents; at least not until some asshole with no writing talent of their own “remixes” it. Here are a few facts about me, ones you may take to the bank, no matter what anyone else says. If you bother reading the rest of this book, you’ll know a few more as well, because I am writing this, me, good ol’ Uncle Randy, not a ghost writer, not a co-author, and certainly not a giant digital conglomeration of slobbering critics and jabbering pundits. Just me, and I reckon I should know a few things about me after more than forty years of being me, so here they are:

  1. I was born February 21, 1971, in Fort Meade, Maryland, United States of America.

  2. Except for the first two years of my existence, I have lived in the Southeastern United States of America (AKA Dixie), primarily in Virginia and North Carolina.

  3. I am happily married to an awesome woman as of this writing (assuming the wife doesn’t get fed up and split before this goes to print).

  4. My band, lamb of god, formed in the winter of 1994 in Richmond, VA. I joined the band in the late summer of 1995, and since 2004 lamb of god has been my primary source of income, and for the most part I love my job.

  5. I am a rampaging alcoholic who drank insane, mind-blowing amounts of booze for twenty-two years until I sobered up at the youthful age of thirty-nine in 2010.

  Those things are facts, but all they really let you know is that I’m a married Southerner with a cool job and a drinking problem that should have killed me but didn’t. At the base of it, that’s all there truly is to know about me, but I guess that wouldn’t make for a very interesting book (and my publishers would probably be a little pissed if I submitted a one sentence manuscript). How did I get to where I am today in my field? Besides the obvious stuff I’ve already laid out (being stubborn/foolish enough to stick with this band thing until it actual worked), why do I get to travel the world and play music for a living when almost everybody else who wants to doesn’t? Since false modesty is almost as great a sin as hubris to me, and many times more annoying, I’ll lay it out right now—there are a couple of things that I am very, very good at. In fact, I’m one of the best in the business. My unique proficiencies?

  1. I’m really good at screaming rhythmically like some sort of terribly wounded, very angry mountain ape, and I can do this night after night without losing my voice.

  2. I’m extremely good at convincing large crowds of sweaty, hairy people who are packed in some dingy venue like furry sardines in a concrete tin, to do things that most normal folks find distasteful, such as flinging their bodies around in an extremely violent-looking manner, wrecking into each other for a solid hour so hard that it hurts to move the next day and their bodies are covered in bruises, all the while screaming at them in the above mentioned mountain ape voice.

  Not a very impressive skill set I know; in fact it seems ludicrous even by my low standards, but I actually make decent money doing these things. I travel the worl
d, getting paid to go jump around and holler like a buffoon in exotic places most folks will only dream of ever seeing. It’s really quite astounding to me, every single time I think about it. I still can’t believe people all over the globe look forward to me and my band coming to their countries and doing our ridiculous hirsute song and dance. Amazing.

  But I still don’t consider myself a rockstar, at least not a real rockstar. Real rockstars are filthy rich, have legions of beautiful women or men (or both) throwing themselves at them, and can’t walk down the street without getting hassled to death. Real rockstars get invited to weird stuff like fashion week parties in Milan and the White House. Neither the President nor anyone with a last name like Gaultier has called yet, so while I am quite well-known in the genre of music I play, I am not a real rockstar.

  I prefer the term budget rockstar. A budget rockstar resembles a real rockstar in many superficial ways, and many budget rockstars try their best to maintain the appearance that they swim in the same pool as the big boys and girls, but there are some very big, often insurmountable differences. A budget rockstar cannot afford to blow his extra cash on diamond-plated teeth, a garage full of Porches and Lamborghinis (we would never even qualify for financing for a set of tires), or obscure impressionist art from Micronesia. A budget rockstar will probably never meet, and definitely will never date, a super model. A budget rockstar will never own a private jet or yacht, nor be accepted into some weird club for enthusiasts of said luxury vehicles. A budget rockstar will never utter the words “Hold on a sec, Preston—my house keeper in Malibu is on the other line.”