Musicians are always chasing the one big gig. But what happens after it’s over?
Being a professional musician is one of the few scenarios where an adult builds an entire life around an interest that grabbed their attention when they were children. Ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, and they usually answer with their fantasy job: professional athlete, cowboy, movie star, princess, president, astronaut. Time usually reveals that many of these career paths are not likely to work, so most of us silence that childish dream and stumble into something that pays the bills. But plenty of musicians never quite make the leap to practicality.
The other night, I played a club with my longtime friend and bandmate Andy Hull—a great musician, great drummer, great guy. On a break, we were doing what musicians do: talking about music and dream gigs. Andy said that when he saw a Genesis concert as a teen, he thought, “That’s the life for me. I would love to be in the Chester Thompson seat, part of a great band playing in front of 80,000 people.” Then he added, “But that’s probably not going to happen, and that’s okay. I’ve got a beautiful life.”
I responded, “Andy, you’ve been on a bunch of big tours. When you’re not on the road, you’re making records. And for the record, you and I played Nissan Stadium together last winter. It was packed with something like 82,000 people, plus another five million watching on TV. Great money, great gig, great band. If our 16-year-old selves could see that, we would feel like the luckiest kids in the world.” Andy’s reply dropped off: “Ya, but….” Then we laughed and got back on stage, and sloshed through another night of live music.
“Everyone who attains a hard-earned goal knows the hollowness you feel after the after-after party, when the congratulations, back-slapping, and basking in the glory end.”
The conversation reminded me of a poignant scene from Pixar’s 2020 movie, Soul. The main character, voiced by Jamie Foxx, is Joe Gardner, a 45-year-old middle school music teacher from New York who dreams of becoming a jazz pianist. He gets his chance when a former student, now a big-time jazz drummer, lines up a last-minute audition for the piano slot for top-tier saxophonist Dorothea Williams. Joe nails the audition, gets the gig, and then promptly falls to his death through an open manhole. Joe is not ready to leave this world with his lifelong ambition nearly consummated, so his ghost-like soul works and schemes a way back into his body to play the gig.
That night, after much cunning, effort, and breaking the rules of mortality, the dream gig is everything Joe hoped for. A lifetime of preparation pays off: Joe plays great, the band loves him, the audience is into it, his mom finally supports his music career, and his dream is realized. As the band leaves the venue after the gig, Joe asks Dorothea, “So, uh, what happens next?” Dorothea replies, “We come back tomorrow night and do it all again.”
Joe looks confused, deflated, and empty. He explains to Dorothea, “It’s just that I’ve been waiting for this day my whole entire life. I thought it would feel … different.”
Dorothea tells Joe a metaphorical story about a fish who swims up to an older fish and says, “I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.”
The older fish replies, “The ocean? That’s what you’re in right now.”
“This?” says the young fish, perplexed. “This is water; what I want is the ocean.”
Dorothea gives Joe a knowing look, then speeds off in a cab.
Everyone who attains a hard-earned goal knows the hollowness you feel after the after-after party, when the congratulations, back-slapping, and basking in the glory end. When you’re alone with your thoughts, you realize that your achievement doesn’t make you feel any different. You’re wondering, “What’s next? Is that all there is?”
When you put all your focus on the outcome, you can attach an unattainable illusion of fulfillment, happiness, perfection to it. The seemingly successful unhappy person is often stuck in a cycle of searching for external things, accomplishments, and/or material objects, to fulfill and complete them. Sadly, they often miss the best part: the journey.
This drive is totally understandable. Professional musicians know that at times, you are motivated by fear: fear of poverty, fear of failure, fear of abandoning your dreams and losing this sense of who you think you should be. Honestly, this fear is a good motivator to improve your skills and hunt for the best work scenario. Those who don’t have those fears usually don’t survive the industry. I think this is the natural wiring of humans. Our knuckle-dragging ancestors were less likely to survive unless they did worry how they were going to eat and not be eaten. But while vigilance and hard work are good things, you gotta know when to turn it off and not become attached to your vision of what life should be.
I have a tendency to live thinking, “Everything will be cool when I have the killer gig, have more money, have more free time, have a 1958 Gibson goldtop Les Paul,” etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. It’s like I’m waiting to live until my conditions are met. But the old fish knows that you’re swimming in what you are looking for.
When so many cultures converge, creativity is bound to flourish.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any that some of the most groundbreaking styles of music have emerged from unique metropolises where people, cultures, and ideas collide and intermingle. There’s nothing groundbreaking in this. It’s exactly what we humans have done ever since we became human, or perhaps even before. Thus, every culture, person, and music on Earth is actually a remix of something much earlier. As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun, but some things are certainly unique: the balti gosht (curry) from India, the guaguancó (dance) from Cuba, and epics of the Sahel from West Africa. There have always been regions known for attracting peoples from all over, and without fail these “melting pots” became perfect environments for new and exciting sounds.
I was born and raised in such a place—London. Even in terms of melting pots, it is somewhat special. The U.K. has been a major player in a number of transformative musical movements, particularly throughout the 20th century. The thing that makes it special is the way that this place has transformed whatever arrived at its shores. In every case, from reggae to drum and bass, rock ’n’ roll to prog rock, and hip-hop to grime, cities like London have smashed together the disparate sounds of their constituent parts in some of the most unpredictable ways.
The London that I grew up in was a place where one could find a little of every place that the British colonized. Ironically, the thing that made the U.K. such a great place for culture is that for around 500 years the British tried their very best to dominate and homogenize everywhere else, annexing peoples where possible and displacing where not. Inevitably, just like the capital of the Roman Empire, London ended up becoming a metropolis where people from throughout the empire came together. The Brits achieved the exact opposite of homogenization.
From reggae to drum and bass, rock ’n’ roll to prog rock, and hip-hop to grime, cities like London have smashed together the disparate sounds of their constituent parts in some of the most unpredictable ways.
Thus, my East London community featured traditions from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Barbados … and that was just my street! (My home was one of three Trinidadian households on that street.) This is all to give you some idea of the level of integration. If you imagine growing up with so many cultures co-existing together, then you can understand why re-mixing became so second nature. What do you get when you cross Chicago house, Kingston dub, New York hip-hop, and Indian bhangra? Jungle aka drum and bass!
A typical Friday night for 25-year-old me might have included going to hear some music at the Blue Note, packed with an audience that was beyond excited to check out the “Jungle Beat” set, featuring Talvin Singh, a young Indian tabla genius educated in the Indian Carnatic tradition; Squarepusher, a young bass virtuoso who sounds a bit like Jaco, but also chops up James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” into microscopic pieces, rearranged on the fly into densely configured 180-plus-bpm drum patterns, which seem to go on forever and never really repeat; and a young, quirky Icelandic vocal gymnast who was somewhat unknown at the time named Björk.
On a Saturday night, I may have gone out to see the Jazz Warriors, a 20-piece big band that featured some of the hottest names in British jazz, such as saxophonist Steve Williamson, drummer Mark Mondesir, bassist Gary Crosby, pianist Julian Joseph, marimba player Orphy Robinson, and singer Cleveland Watkis. The Jazz Warriors were a collective of world-class, young, Black British jazz musicians, who came up with their own unique mix by blending bebop, reggae, funk, Afrobeat, and more.
Sunday night I may have spent onstage at the Jazz Cafe with my own band, Quite Sane, which featured members from South Africa, Mauritius, Jamaica, Zimbabwe, St. Kitts, and, of course, Trinidad and Tobago. Though this band was influenced by jazz, and in particular the M-Base I heard coming out of New York while growing up, we were also very influenced by hip-hop (Public Enemy, Mobb Deep, A Tribe Called Quest, etc.), as well as by Parliament-Funkadelic, Chaka Khan, Cecil Taylor, Miriam Makeba, Beenie Man, Fela Kuti, the Jazz Warriors, and even Igor Stravinsky! Want to know what this crazy mix sounded like? Check out our 2002 release, The Child of Troubled Times.
The thriving U.K. scene still continues to churn out a dizzying number of sub-genres (grime, AB-groove, broken beat, acid jazz, nu-jazz), and artists (Sons of Kemet, Soweto Kinch, Sona Jobarteh, James Blake, Lion Babe, Stormzy), who are the product of combined elements from all over. Who knows what will come next?
A lucky 7-year-old builds the guitar of his dreams with his father during the pandemic … with knobs that go to 11!
Name: Scott and Aksel McDermott
Location: New York, New York
Guitar: The Akselerator
Back when things were locked down for Covid in 2020, my then 7-year-old son Aksel found an old Epiphone SG in the back of a closet that I’d bought 25 years ago but never learned to play. He took to it immediately. A weekly lesson soon started at the Williamsburg School of Music when things opened up a little and he was hooked. However, after sitting for so long, the SG needed to go in for a tune-up eventually. With nothing to play for a few days, we started talking about building a simple string between two nails on a board stretched over a Coke bottle contraption, as a fun little project. But it’s only rock ’n’ roll if it’s electric. Suddenly we were researching pickup-wiring schemes and the difference between a single-coil and a humbucker, etc. It quickly became clear: Why don’t we just build a real guitar?
And so, it began. I guess kind of like the Suzuki method, but with a few more RPMs. We set about building his dream guitar with as many design elements that a 7-year-old would want while at the same time trying to avoid anything that would be cringeworthy later in life.
The Akselerator Build
The design is based on an Explorer but with an extra lightning-bolt notch cut at the base. Besides being badass, the Explorer shape is a great option for kids because they can reach over the smaller body shape above the pickups easily. It can be tricky for him to get his arm around larger guitars or acoustics. We started with two blocks of black limba for both the body and the neck from BYOGuitar. We decided to burn a basswood top sheet using the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban technique, which we’d seen on an architecture show. It worked well, and we found a great clear coat solution that soaked in just enough to make the charcoal stable and not come off on your hands but didn’t make it look like a shiny candy apple, either.
Here's a look at the character created by the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban technique.
I have some experience in woodworking but have never built a guitar before. A friend who has a full woodshop in his basement let us come over on and off for six months to work on the project. With the help of many YouTube videos and countless StewMac specialty tools, we were able to build the “Akselerator.” We put the same burned finish on the headstock and inlayed Aksel’s personal logo in brass on it. This also matches the brass-wire thunderbolt inlays in the ebony fretboard. The pickups are a Gibson ’57 Classic Plus in the neck and a Gibson Burstbucker in the bridge. It has glow-in-the-dark side dots, a magnetically attached back plate, Hipshot locking tuners, and knobs that go to 11. For when you’re on 10, but just need a little more!
Scott and Aksel McDermott pose with their 6-string creation.
The Akselerator came together well and sounds fantastic. Aksel plays it every day at home and uses it as his show guitar whenever he plays a gig. (He’s now in a band with a fellow 3rd-grade drummer friend.) I’m his roadie/security for the Akselerator, so that it makes it home without getting damaged by little sticky fingers. The project was an extraordinarily positive experience for both of us on many levels. Aksel learned all about guitars, inside and out, how to use all kinds of tools and techniques, had lots of shop time, and now has a one-of-a-kind custom axe to shred on and melt faces with for years to come!
Send your guitar story to submissions@premierguitar.com.
Double A Band Plays Jimi Hendrix Purple Haze at St. Vitus Bar
Aksel McDermott puts his stamp on a Jimi Hendrix classic at iconic local venue Saint Vitus n Greenpoint, Brooklyn.