“That’s why I wanted you in the band, so you’d stop mopin’ around and feelin’ sorry for yourself”
“What band?”
“I always think there’s a band, kid”
~ The Music Man
I do not remember a time when music was not a part of my life. When people ask me why I’m in the arts, I’ve always laughed it off and said I didn’t really have a choice – it’s in my blood. What do you expect when my Mum brought me home from the hospital for the first time to a 12 piece orchestra rehearsing in the living room? Hey, the guys had to practice somewhere!
As a side note – Mum insists that’s why I can sleep through anything.
But for most of my life, it’s been the same group of people. The same 12 musicians coming in and out of my house, in and out of my life; many of them had been friends of the family since before I was even a glimmer in my Mum’s eye. Many knew me before I was born. It was a well-known fact that if I were ever to have a date, the poor boy wouldn’t have just had to face down my Dad, he would have had to pass the judgement of all my “aunts and uncles”.
It was my Father who taught me the true meaning of professionalism; it was the band that provided me with the backdrop to see it in action.
It was from that example that I learned how to be a “band daughter” (which is – I imagine – remarkably similar to being a “band girlfriend” or, in my Mum’s case of course a “band wife”), forever part of the group, involved – sometimes intrinsically – in its workings; always one of them in so many ways. But not one of them. Not for the big stuff. Not for the business stuff. Always knowing that intrinsic crucial line between when you were allowed in and when you weren’t. But still, my earliest memories involve sorting music and reading set lists, manning CD tables and playing mascot in a flapper dress, sitting in a smoky bar trying not to fall asleep between sets, running ice water back and forth to the stage. New Year’s Eve was a work night until I was 22; it never occurred to me that it could be otherwise. I treasure those memories dearly. There’s a reason I know how to look after musicians, and why I adopt bands, I have – after all – been doing it most of my life.
My parents never thought I listened to any of it, it’s only recently really that they’ve realized just how much I observed and absorbed simply by watching them. All of them.
I begged to sing with the band when I was a teenager; looking back now I know I would never have had the reading chops for it, even if I did have the voice. The Broadcaster’s charts were almost solid black; you had to be able to read like a hawk to make your way through them. But I wanted it; I wanted to jump that line from support team to team member. But Dad – bless his heart – wouldn’t give me the nod without my putting in the work. I would have had to audition, and I think deep down I knew I wasn’t good enough for it, and I was scared, so I never did. They let me sing a handful of times, and those remain some of my proudest moments despite every other credit on my CV.
So I remained a band daughter, and in my own way, carry on the legacy I didn’t even know I had been taught. Drawing on those memories, painting with them, playing with them.
But there comes a time when eras come to their natural close and the people involved move on. When those people who have always been a part of your life no longer are; and when that last band meeting comes, you’re not a part of it. Because as much as “your boys” are a part of your life, and you are a part of theirs, as much as you think their thoughts and feel their woes, you are not one of them.
And in some cases you are millions of miles away, in a strange country and the part of you that will always always be a ‘band daughter’ feels terribly, painfully helpless…
When I heard my Father’s orchestra had folded I wept. For a longer time than I perhaps expected. Not only because my heart goes out to my Dad at such a time, that something that has been so dear to him for so long should simply fade away – as too many things to these days; but because of everything those twelve people have made me, everything their presence in my life gave me. Gave my family. For twenty years the band was our support structure, our social life…a crucial living part of who we were.
And now they’re gone.
And I find that that’s really not all right with me. Even though I have no say in it whatsoever.
There will come a time I’m sure when whole generations don’t know what it’s like to stand on a dance floor and let real music wash over you. When there will be no young woman who stops in her tracks at a double high C and thinks to herself “that’s my Dad”, no little girls getting paper cuts while sorting sheet music, or falling asleep in their mother’s laps waiting for horns to be packed and gear to be stowed. I want to believe that time isn’t coming, but the practical girl in me looks at the world and realizes that it very well might be…
But for now, there are still some who don’t care if we play in pick-up bands that get no work at all, or trios that get a gig every night of the week. And we will fight for that. Somehow. Against tracking, against synthesization, against all of it.
And whatever happens, I will always find myself standing proud as a “band kid”