Paying the piper: a study of musicians and the music business (original) (raw)
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3 Performing for Pay: The Making and Undoing of the Music Profession
Born in 1930 near Tarbes (Hautes-Pyrénées) in the southwest of France, Claude Duscombs worked as an electrician in a small factory of the Bigorre region. He was also a drummer, starting to play as an autodidact in 1952 when a friend who played the accordion in rural festivals in the area proposed forming a duet. At the time, drums were still something new and a bit exotic in the French countryside. It was the symbol of "jass"-the term used by many said to refer to any lively music with drums. A snare drum, a kick drum, and a cymbal were the basic instruments that started to accompany the accordion in playing popular tunes, traditional songs, polkas, tangos, paso doble, waltzes, or javas (threebeat rhythm) in the musette style. During the 1960s, Duscombs added a hi-hat and a pair of toms to his set and played with local orchestras. The Benny Rolls and then the Blue Stars were mixing musette, typique (mambos and chachas), and some pop hits, mainly from the Beatles. The repertoire had to please more or less everyone since there were no specific venues and no specialized audiences. In the mid-1960s, the Blue Stars performed almost every Friday and Saturday and twice on Sundays (afternoon and night gigs), but the fees were too low to imagine making a decent living with music (see figure 1). Duscombs was a husband, about to become a father, and he could not carry on working all day in the factory as well as playing music three or four times each weekend. He had to choose between the music and his steady daytime job, so he stopped playing in 1968. In the rural area where he lived, there was no real labor market that could have permitted some players to earn a living, even though people in the Bigorre in the 1950s and 1960s never had the occasion to hear and see any other live bands than the local ones. This case shows how experiences of musicians could differ from the dominant "professionals" playing in a symphony orchestra or in studio sessions. That makes tackling the issue of "performing for pay" in Europe during the twentieth century quite a challenge. The variety of inferred social realities during the last century on the continent is so vast between "serious" and "popular" music, between national contexts, and between urban and rural areas as well that it could seem impossible to address this variety in a single chapter. To make the task more achievable, I will refer in the following pages to two basic concepts that allow us to better frame our object of study. In this chapter, I will be talking about "ordinary musicians" working in "art worlds." In the work I
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