I am a musician, and a struggling one at that. But who of us is not?! For about ten years I have been playing gigs, since I was a teenager. They have ranged from singing in the corners of half full restaurants to playing on big stages at large festivals, and everything in between.
Like most musically inclined teenagers, I searched out my peers. I found like minded souls with fantasies of rock and roll glory and who owned some cheap instruments. We started by practicing covers, something we could all agree on… Green Day. As soon as we could fumble our way through some pop punk classics we began making our first regrettable stabs at song writing. Usually these would take place in a friend’s garage while their parents were out.
I made it to my first real stage when I was 17. It was a Monday night in November and the venue was the now defunct Eamonn Doran’s of Temple Bar. We opened the show, there were probably about 15 people that constituted the audience (including the bar staff). It was perfect, I was hooked.
By the time I was 19, I was running around Dublin venues with an acoustic guitar on my own. I was taken under the wing of a hero of mine who was and is a great singer/songwriter and performer. I found myself being the warm up act at his weekly folk and blues session in a well known Dublin venue every Sunday night; it was EXACTLY where I wanted to be.
Arriving to set up at 7pm and usually leaving at around 3am on the following Monday morning; the evenings’ drinking was only to be interrupted by brief periods of performing live music. I was studiously following the lead set by my chosen mentor. As far as I was concerned, this is how it should be done. Consequently, my first foray into real musicianship was drenched in booze. I gave in to it. I embraced it. Not before long it would become unimaginable to me that one could have ever gotten on a stage sober.
NO 19 YEAR OLD SHOULD LISTEN EXCLUSIVELY TO EARLY TOM WAITS ALBUMS……..
I was the heartbroken-drunken-white-southside-teenage-bluesman from the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. Hopefully it sounded good, although I doubt it did. I got to know more and more musicians and found myself gigging 4 or 5 nights of the week all over Dublin and drinking accordingly.
During this time I was going to college in Dun Laoghaire. One evening I played at a charity gig in the college and in attendance was one of my lecturers who I really looked up to. He was a straight-edge music business guy who used to work for record labels and always had great stories. He watched my set. I was drunk… presumably, very drunk. He told me I needed to get my shit together. He was right and I was ashamed of myself. I had lost what made me get on stage in the first place.
Not long after the gig in college, I gave up my weekly slot in town. I was haemorrhaging money and was being paid in benefits (a few pints, taxis home, and trips to Roma II). At that, the benefits were unreliable. My part time job (in an off licence) made up the difference. Soon after quitting the weekly gig, I stopped getting offers to play other shows around Dublin.
So, my professional drinking/music career trundled onward. New bands formed and dissipated. College, emigration and real life took us all elsewhere. I moved away myself after college and I didn’t play a gig for a couple of years. After I eventually returned to Ireland I was asked to support a friend’s band at their album fundraiser. It was the first time I played a gig sober since I was 17. My legs were shaking… Really shaking… I didn’t know that knees could actually uncontrollably knock together like they do in cartoons, but it turns out that they can!
It was more difficult than getting on stage for the first time. But I started playing again, with new bands and didn’t drink before/during gigs anymore. My knees never knocked again and I played better than I ever did before.
These days I don’t drink at all and I do not intend to drink ever again. It has been almost been a year since I fully quit drinking. There have been a lot of firsts in that year.
Drinking can find its way in to so many parts of a person’s life, so much so that is difficult to imagine life without it. For me it was when I got back to music without drinking that I rediscovered what brought me to it as a kid.
Alcohol had nothing to do with what led me to buying my first guitar and dragging it around the city on buses and spending whole weekends in freezing garages trying to convince my friends to cover old blues songs. It is a shame that that it became such an obstacle to me fulfilling my passion for music and thankfully it is not anymore.