Goodies and Baddies

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When I was a kid, life was simple. I was a child of the 50’s so it was cowboys and indians and cops and robbers that we played. You were either a goodie or a baddie. I liked it that way. You knew where you stood. Of course everyone wanted to be a goodie, but there were always some kids who were baddies, no matter what. I can still remember the fear that was engendered when being chased by the baddies and the sense of delight when you got one over on one of them. Recently, I was pondering the whole Wall Street thing and what it’s like for me in the world of rock & roll business. Well, it can be similar to those childhood games. I often find that waking up in the morning with an acute sense of fear, is a good mechanism for survival. (Not all the time, but you get the idea).

I met a guy in Austria a couple of weeks ago. He kinda looked like a baddie but I struggled to get past that. Turns out that he wanted to be our booking agent and had come up with a credible open - air show for us to play on, and, in return, let me know that he had been researching our tour schedule and said that he believed he could do better. I said I was very happy with my business relationships in Britain, the States and Germany, but would be most interested in exploiting other areas like the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Former Soviet Union, where there is a big interest in rock. He agreed.

Now bare in mind, it’s taken 40 years to hone down a good group of agents; we’ve had some amazingly rough characters with names like Cookie who had a scar from a knife fight the whole length of his face. We worked for a German outfit with a female punk commandant tour manager who you did NOT mess with. Another European agent was a Serb by the name of Dragan, with some scary mates. We’ve seen ‘em all…. clowns, buffoons and rogues, even one young US agent, nice guy, who had a company by the name of Pooch Booking, which he ran out of the back of his mom’s hairdressing salon. We’d turn up at these venues to find 6 support acts, all no doubt paying for the privilege to play with us.

Anyway, getting back to this German guy. It turns out he’s actually from Luxembourg; he talks the talk and walks the walk, sidling up to me (they always sidle) but it turns out that his real interest is in making a play for the German market. He told me how he would be aggressive in his booking style and he used words like ‘transparent’ and ‘pro-active’. I said that I was extremely happy with our people but would be interested in exploring these emerging markets, in which to expose the band. But this week, I find out that he now (surprise, surprise) represents another band with the name WA as part of its schtick. He’s had this in mind all along, if I did not jump ship from our German agents – sussing me out, so to speak.

Well, just like Wall Street, I guess. It’s a free market economy. More music for fans. I still like playing and working with the goodies though, ya know. As my old mum says; If you lay down with dogs, you get fleas. Sometimes it’s not all about making the most money, playing the biggest venues and so on. It’s often about the road less traveled, hanging out with some good people, earning a crust and doing a good job and sleeping well at night without flea bites.

~ A.P.