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Last Call

You book the dream gig, the day finally comes, and you crush the performance. Then what?

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.

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Steve Albini in the control room at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Photo by Kevin Tiongson

Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.

“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”

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A positive attitude won’t fix your problems, but accepting things as they are is a good start.

I did not enjoy the transition from childhood to adulthood. Going from a loving, nurturing home to an indifferent and, at times, seemingly cruel real world was not a good fit for me. My freshman year in college, I was adrift, scared, and, occasionally, what I now recognize as clinically depressed. Out of desperation, I took a philosophy course to get some answers. There, I read Nietzsche’s book, The Gay Science (perhaps the greatest title ever), and learned the phrase amor fati, which is Latin for “love of one’s fate.”

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Jared James Nichols performs with John Bohlinger at the “Rock to Remember” concert live at Nashville’s Gibson Garage in February 2023.

I was hired to lead the house band for a benefit to raise funds for veterans battling PTSD. Jared James Nichols, Kirk Fletcher, Dave Mustaine, and others joined the cause, and here’s how it went.

Often with multi-act shows, limited budget, space, and inputs on the mix necessitate that some acts share a house band. Because I’ve been slugging it out for 30-plus years in Nashville, I occasionally get hired to lead it. A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get the call to lead for “Rock to Remember,” a concert/live auction collab between Guitars for Vets (an organization that provides guitars to veterans struggling with PTSD) and Gibson Gives.

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In 1967, Richard Head bought his dream guitar for $350 and went on a decades-long musical journey with his prized possession. Now, he’s selling it to raise money for injured veterans.

In Joe Bonamassa’s latest Rig Rundown, filmed in early 2022, Bonamassa showed us a beautiful, faded sunburst 1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard with a history. This guitar was slated to be sold for charity, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit organization that builds specially adapted custom homes and donates them to severely injured post-9/11 veterans. (HFOT has built 350 homes to date, with another 71 projects underway nationwide.)

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