Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
I think it’s important how you roll up to the gig … we’ve been going around in a van and trailer for many years … I’m on my 6th or 7th van … 15 seater airport vans, a bunch of conversion vans … some pretty nice rides, and I’ve become a bit of an aficionado … I could bore you all day talking about vans!
I can barely remember a run of shows with no breakdowns … it just seemed like part of the sport … the connection to the trailer lights was always a pretty good bet to try to shut us down …
t all runs together but I remember once being on the side of the highway in Alabama and the flatbed guy comes to get us and he must have heard we were a band, and a captive one, and 7 of us pile into his truck and he has a case of Busch beer and he pulls out his guitar and he won’t take us to get fixed until we’ve played 6 or 7 Bob Seger songs with him … then the mechanic was closed so we had to stay in town and he came to the hotel in the morning and started picking that guitar again and it’s 5 more songs and he brought weed and more beer and we just figured, ok, we live here now with this guy and there’s no way out of it! It was a long couple of days …
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
We used to stop in the morning at the Denny’s for a quick breakfast until it dawned on me over the years that some eggs and coffee for 6 or 7 guys took, like, 4-5 hours and cost, like, $5,000 … Never underestimate the free hotel breakfast, although I personally am almost never awake for that and if I am then it’s been a long night … backstage catering is wonderful when it happens but you can’t count on that for the whole day …
We like to find the great BBQ place in town whenever possible … and if you want fast and nobody gets hurt, the Subway won’t do you wrong …
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I break a lot of strings … but I don’t play guitar, so as you can imagine, this really tends to aggravate the guitar players in the band …
Where do you rehearse?
I have a great little rehearsal / recording space in the woods in Connecticut … I get a lot of critter visitors, usually the deer, who I love, or a bird family building a nest on the porch, but one time I had a deadline for some piece of music that I had to finish right away and a snake got in somehow … I do not like snakes … he went behind the beer fridge, so I figured, “ok, we gotta share the space today” because I had to get finished … it was a tense afternoon … I’m sure whatever music I made was jumpy and the tempo was too fast because I wanted to get done and out of there … but mostly every day down there is pretty lovely …
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
I bet there were earlier ones, but the first thing I remember that I wrote alone was called “Fine On My Own” … “Look at me, up all night, drinking heavily, look at me, I don’t need you to make me smile, I’m fine on my own, I don’t need you” fun guy, right? I had a lot of those, “you’ll never break my heart” songs … a real tough monkey! Even later, I had a big deal music biz manager I worked with, the late Bud Prager, who used to say to me, “Hey, ease up, give the little girls some hope!” That made me laugh … and it was good advice about letting your emotional guard down …
Describe your first gig.
My folks say that when I was 4 or 5 I used to jump up out of nowhere in restaurants and start to belt out songs … they were probably mortified, although my mom is pretty show bizzy, so I think she probably understood my need to be heard … pretty sure nobody paid me on those, although I was once in the studio audience of a game show in New York City when I was 3 or 4 years old and I got paid a dollar for telling a joke … so that’s when the Show Biz dough really started rolling in …
I remember first actually getting paid playing grammar school and high school dances, when I was probably 14 or 15 … those were VERY exciting, just to get to do it was such a big deal … Someone sent me a picture recently of our crazy little cool band playing at the Saints John and Paul middle school dance in Larchmont, NY … there we are, set up on the gym floor, and right at my feet is a can of Coors beer … oddly, the nuns said nothing … different time!
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
When I was a kid I’d head out to anywhere that I thought might help me to be able to get in a band and sing, and I remember washing dishes at a couple of places in NY (professionally, of course … at home not so much) and just showing up in DC or LA and getting a gig waiting tables, and I actually wore the paper hat of fast food and had a quick stint at the Der Weinerschnitzel in Hermosa Beach, CA (it didn’t go well) … but the scam that I most enjoyed was being a lifeguard … I came home from my first year of college in Miami and had a good tan going and I got myself hired at the local pool and then I got hired away for more money by a fancy beach club and the funny thing is that I’m not a strong swimmer … and I never passed the life-saving test … but the right look can go a long way and those were great jobs … I think that was it for me and the labor force …
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Well, obviously it’s a lot tougher with streaming these days … I used to sell lots of CDs out of the trailer on the road and now some folks don’t know what a CD is … and running around the country with a 6 piece rock band can just be a financial killer, really hard … we are still trying to get back to the kind of offers we were getting right before the pandemic and it’s a slow rebuild even now, but we’ll get there …
Still, as for future income trends, I predict grotesquely enormous show biz cash flowing freely, with fur-lined sinks and air-conditioned suitcases for everyone, the kind of jaw-dropping decadence that would make Elton John look like a scrappy East Village folk singer … that’s my guess as to where I see the financial stuff going … it’s a hunch …
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I think that I should have trusted my own instincts better … I was really lucky to have stumbled into a lot of big deal-ish industry attention really early, and I learned great things from that, that I carry with me today … I had a healthy respect for older accomplished people in this racket, but looking back I think I knew more about who I was and wanted to be than they did, and I would tell anyone starting out that you know more about who you are than you think you do …
Keep your mind open to suggestions but also be who you are as fast as you can, and don’t waste time …
Also, it’s fun … so have FUN … ??