Boy Wonder: Professional Musician 108

Day 107 - June 26th 2009

I woke up like any other morning and turned on my TV to be reminded what happened yesterday. Michael Jackson had died of a cardiac arrest yesterday. I spent most of the morning watching old videos on the various MTV channels and watching MSNBC, apparently there was an environmental bill that hit the congress floor today but they didn’t talk about it much.

As I was watching the endless retrospectives on Michael Jackson’s life I began to think about the whole concept of fame. I’ve spent the majority of my life chasing and be around people chasing fame. Fame brings attention, it brings money, it brings power, a lot of people in the entertainment industry want to be famous, even half of the people that say they don’t care about it. We all want to be able to share our art with as many people as possible. If you connect with enough people they fall in love with you and respect you for what you do. The put you on their shoulders before taking you over to a pedestal and standing you right on top of it.

Then something weird happens. People love what you do so much they think they love you and wanna know everything about you. Your face sells magazines so people follow you around and take pictures of you. Then it gets really weird the people that put you on the pedestal in the first place decide that you’ve become to high and mighty up there and decide they want to knock you off. They don’t really know anything about you so they make stuff up and they dog you until you fall off and in some cases it seems it can kill you.
It sort makes you re-think this whole rock-star thing, are all of us aspiring performers all masochists or something? Is this really what we want?

I got a txt from Kelvin, Austin (Absolute Zeros Guitarist) was leaving, moving to Washington soon and we were gonna have a drink or two in his honor. I also got a call from Zach that they were going to a show. I hit Fergies to meet with the Zeros first, heard nothing but Michael comin out of the stereo speakers. I had a few drinks with those guys before heading to another bar. The bar was empty and not really jumping all that much so I got a call from Zach and made my way over to Lickety Split.

Tom Malin was playing at Lickety. He sent me an email saying that I could sit in with them if I ever showed up to a show. So I had a few drinks with Zach, Rob and Rel and played The Way You make Me Feel, the bar loved it I did some promo for my show there next month as well as my World Café Live Show July 23rd. I hopped in Rob’s car and he drove me home shortly after.

I know I have the Kid’s concert tomorrow and I gotta jump on getting some Boy Wonder travel things in place so I can see if I can’t get to these other markets before I’m old and grey. Either way I need to get some sleep. Big days ahead. Still trippin over MJ’s death.