There are three rules you need to remember. Forget sleep. Forget sanity. And forget it.

It's not that people don't become rock stars. Happens all the time. Happens pretty frequently these days, what with the record industry looking for the next Big Thing and being constantly astonished by things like grunge, ska, and swing. I work on both sides of the fence, as both a musician and as a member of the music media, and as far as I can tell the only difference between someone in the biz and your average fan is that the average fan knows just as much (or more) but isn't getting paid for it.

But becoming a rock star is unlikely, and getting less likely every day. There are so many bands these days in the U.S. alone that there just aren't enough people buying records to make them all multi-millionaires. Anyone who does time as a performing musician finds their illusions shattered pretty quickly. These days, I'm not interested in being a rock star, though if it happened it would indubitably be a hell of a ride. But I would like to make a living. It can be done, without a band ever becoming more than a local legend. There are bands doing it here in Seattle, one of the three most difficult local music scenes to break into in the country (the other two being New York and L.A.).

It's a difficult career path, no question. But it can be rewarding even if you're not making a living.

Diary of a Gig

Your average gig starts sometime between nine and ten p.m., depending on how many bands there are that night. The work, however, begins weeks or months beforehand, with whoever does the booking for the band getting on the phone and calling clubs, sometimes the same club several times in a single week. Some bands hire a booking agent for this purpose, but if the band is like ours and makes very little money off of live shows, the band does the booking itself. Our guitarist, who's the most outgoing of us, calls. And calls. And calls. Sometimes he leaves messages, just as a courtesy, but clubs rarely return phone calls from bands unless the band is well known. After all, there are plenty of other bands where that one came from, and maybe one of them will call when there's actually someone there to answer the phone. On such fortunate coincidences are many evening lineups built.

Once the date is booked, there are two things to do: promote it, and practice. Again, unless a band is a high-profile act or is playing in a major club that has its own promotional budget, promoting the show is the band's job. For us, it means making up a flyer (done by our guitarist with some clever use of Photoshop), making copies, and plastering those copies everywhere we can think of: bulletin boards, shop windows, coffeeshop walls. We hand them to people on the street and leave them on restaurant tables after meals. Meanwhile every other band is doing the same thing, and relatively few people pay attention to ours. There's so much live music happening on any given night, and so much of it sucks, that bands have a hard time getting noticed above the noise. (At the same time, people complain that there's nothing to do in this town, but--oh, don't get me started.)

At last, show night! All of us have day jobs; we meet after those day jobs at our rehearsal studio around seven. We break down--take my drum kit apart, pack up guitars and amps and cables and spare power strips and anything else we might conceivably need, up to and including wire cutters and duct tape--and roll everything out to the loading bay. We've done this so often now that we can get all the equipment packed and loaded in under 20 minutes if necessary. My personal benchmark for success is when I can pay someone else to haul my drums around every night.

And we're off. We drive to wherever we're playing that night, unload, talk to whoever's there to deal with the band (often the bartender), stash our gear somewhere out of the way, and somewhere in all of this find time to eat. By now it's usually around eight. The other bands may or may not have arrived. More often than you might expect, we discover that one or more bands have canceled (we had one band cancel a show with us because two of their members were in jail, one for heroin possession), and/or been replaced with someone else.

We don't usually play first these days; having been around for over two years, we're old-timers on a scene that, no matter where in the country you are, is very fluid and full of bands dissolving into and precipitating out of the great morass of freelance musicians. So we sit through the opening sets, which generally aren't bad but rarely sound much like us. It's a fairly usual situation for a band that's determined not to sound like the Verve.

And then we play. Usually for half an hour to 45 minutes, and even on nights when things go badly, there's really nothing like it. One advantage of having played together three nights a week for two years is that we are a very tight band. If you can manage that, you've won half the battle; even if the audience doesn't care for the kind of music you play, if they can at least tap their feet to it, it ups the chances that they'll stick around and buy another beer. Which makes the club owner happy; alcohol sales are how clubs make their money.

There's really nothing like being on stage. It's why we put up with all the rest of it, the unreturned phone calls and flyer papering and giving up an entire evening to play for less than an hour. You can play the same song every night for a year in rehearsal (and believe me, we've done it) and be thoroughly sick of it, but play it live and suddenly it takes on new life. Of course it's even better if you have people cheering for you, but I consider it a win if I don't have to dodge flying beer bottles. Once the show's over, our work isn't. We break everything down again and load it up, drive back to the studio and drop everything off. Typically we get home after midnight on a gig night, and if it's a weekday, we've all got to get up the next morning and go to work. Sooner or later every musician asks if it's worth it; if committing all that time is worth the reward of being on stage. For us, it is. For musicians who make a living at it, there's the financial incentive to consider-we know bands who make upwards of $1000 for a single night's work. But if you're not getting paid (much), and have a family or a high-stress job, you may be constantly re-evaluating your situation-and we've known musicians like that too.

In the Studio

Sometime last spring we decided we needed a new recording. Our demo tape was over a year old; we didn't even play all of the songs on it live anymore. After much discussion, we decided we could only afford enough time to record an EP, if the studio didn't cost too much. As it turned out, we found a place where we could record on weekends, and in about 16 hours we got four songs down on tape. The room and the engineer went for around $25 an hour, not a bad rate at all for a recording studio, which means a total of about $400. Not much, compared to the $10,000 recording budgets of some major-label acts, but to be honest, you don't need that much money to make a good recording, not these days. The technology keeps getting cheaper and more efficient; some bands even buy their own CD burners and press their own CDs.

Nowhere more than the recording studio does the saying "You can't polish a turd" apply. If the band sucks, no amount of fiddling or processing or gating or compressing or turning this gain up and that effect down will fix it. Your raw material has to be good. The engineer's job is to show off that raw material to its best advantage. Once he's done, you take it to a mastering place, and then you get it pressed. We ran off a thousand copies, complete with cover art and shrink wrap. Total cost, including recording time: around $2500. You can do it for even less than that if you really shop around and are well-rehearsed and focused when you go into the studio. Nothing is more motivating than knowing that you're paying for every minute you spend in there.

Having a recording is worthwhile, too. Even if it doesn't sell particularly well-and if you're us, you're selling that recording at shows and maybe on consignment at local stores-you can say you've done it. That's worth something further down the line, because it says to whoever you're trying to sell the band to that you're serious enough about your endeavor to drop a respectable chunk of cash into it. The fact that we took 50 copies to our CD release party and sold 49 was pretty damn cool, too.

Selling Points

The hottest thing to be right now in the music business is a female drummer. I know this from personal experience. Good drummers, male or female, are hard to find; while most drummers I've seen are fairly decent, most would-be musicians choose something more glamourous, like, say, guitar, or vocals (even if they can't sing). If you're a woman playing drums these days, you're enough of a novelty to attract attention, and a familiar enough sight that the booking agent probably won't be staring at your chest whenever he talks to you. Or at least he'll be circumspect about it.

I used my gender as a selling point when I got to Seattle and began advertising my availability in local music rags around the region. It didn't necessarily mean that better bands called me--I got some pretty odd calls that month--but it did mean that I got more calls. It meant I got to pick and choose, and I've been happy enough with my choice, and they're happy enough with me, that we've all been playing together for over two years.

Even in a politically correct city like Seattle, women in the music biz still have some of the usual bull to deal with. These days it's more tiresome than dangerous, and I've seen more than one male audience member or fellow musician change his attitude from isn't-she-cute to wow-she's-good. If I've learned anything from all of that, it's that the best strategy for women musicians is to be as good as you can be. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good strategy for musicians in general. What a concept!

And it's great fun when a guy in a bar asks you if you work out.

Losing Illusions

Most of us, at one time or another, fantasize about being rock stars. It's sort of like fantasizing about being an astronaut, or possibly President. I knew plenty of fellow would-be rock stars in high school and even in college. Of those I'm still in touch with, none of them are playing music anymore.

Some of us let those fantasies go. Others of us modify them, especially when we realize how difficult it is to essentially hold down a second job that isn't initially pulling in any money, eats up a lot of free time, causes you to get home at two in the morning on a work night, and means that you see the inside of a lot of really sleazy dives. (Of those we've habitually played in, one closed down because the building was condemned. Another burned down in an electrical fire. This is the fate of dives; soon others will open to replace them.)

What it comes down to is whether it's worth it. I know that even if I never made money at it, I'd still be playing music. Music is something I can't not do. There are lots of people like me, which is why there are so many bands playing all-original music and getting paid peanuts for it. Some of those bands get to a point where they're making a living even if they aren't well-known on a national level. That's a more readily achievable goal than being a rock star, which in any case requires you to sell your soul to a record company and talk to people like Rolling Stone. I suspect that it's also more fun.