Musician Byron Fry Shares His Journey in Music is a Harsh Mistress

 

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Her Wild Technicolor Carnival Ride

 

     Music is a harsh mistress. She gives and She takes, like any other all-powerful force of nature. I’d have it no other way. But if you’re considering a career on Her wild technicolor carnival ride, you should understand that you don’t choose Her, She chooses you. If you feel like you even have a choice, just thank your lucky stars and call it good, because it means that you can do something else for your living and have an actual life, keeping Her at arm’s length as a passionate hobby. She’ll bring a wonderful presence of grace and beauty into your existence, instead of being the sweaty 300-pound leather and vinyl-clad dominatrix hell-bent on your ruin with an iron-spiked whipmace, which is exactly what some gigs can feel like to those of us who never had a choice at all.

 

     And if She does choose you, you really do have zero say-so in the matter. There’s nothing for it but to obediently join the other helpless drooling victims stumbling and lurching along Her road, hands outstretched toward Her promised land—that glimmering distant shore of musical perfection that never gets any closer, whose golden sands no musician has ever trod. Like all my brethren, I’ve longed to squish that sand between my toes my entire life—just one perfect note, that’s all I ask—but it will never know my footprint. Though We The Hapless know exactly who and what we are, we will never know perfection. She dangles it perpetually, tantalizingly near—close enough to see it, smell it, almost taste it—but always just out of reach. What a damned bitch She can be…and what an impossibly lovely goddess.

 

     And we pay a very real price. It’s typically a poverty-laden life, survived by the teeth-gnashing, bare-knuckled determination that gets you through the darkness to those fleeting moments of light and exaltation that She knows you crave, which can’t be experienced any other way. She’ll give you just enough of a win to get you through your next black tunnel to your next shining fix of validation and its glorious electric joy.

 

     You’d better enjoy surfing on the wild waves She throws you into, because your loved ones won’t. I sometimes hear Her cackling laughter from somewhere in another room as my best laid plans go tumbling into the abyss, nonchalantly tipped off the counter by Her cat. You may think that the most important thing one needs to survive on Her road is talent, but that’s just a prerequisite. We’ve all got that around here. What you’ll really need is a deep and unfailing dark, sardonic sense of humor.

 

     To be on Her road is to know harshness, danger, loneliness, challenge and MANY long years of solitary practice. You’ll get used to sewing your arm back on and healing yourself when you need a doctor, giving gear precedence over decent furniture or a decent car, and the concept of a vacation will be completely alien to you. You’ll spend the winter holidays away from your family and miss weddings and funerals. Your loved ones will neither understand nor approve.

 

     But also on Her road you’ll find the understanding and camaraderie of those of your kind, who do get it. Your musical brothers and sisters will be right there with you even during your solitary practice, because we all know what we all go through. We all recognize it in each others’ eyes, and share the great unspoken inside joke, even if we’ve never met before. We understand each other’s struggles, pain and shining golden victories better than our families and spouses do. And that can only be called some kind of great, shared love.

 

     It’s an uncomfortable truth that many of us never find a happy relationship outside of music, because She simply demands too much. Non-musicians can’t wrap their heads around never being able to call in sick or take a vacation, whereas to most musicians, taking sick days and deliberately taking time off work sounds absurd and alien, professionally dangerous and monetarily frivolous.

 

     I missed my daughter’s sweet 16 because I was in the middle of the ocean on a four-month cruise ship gig. I missed being with my two brothers at my Mother’s bedside when she passed. I walked around for 12 years with three undiagnosed fractures in my neck, causing neuropathic mayhem until it got sorted out by three C-spine surgeries and two more procedures down my right arm, all because I hadn’t had access to what society considers “normal” health care. This sounds like griping, but it’s not: I’m elated to even be alive, and to have the lofty honor of being chosen to be a musician. I just want to make it abundantly clear, in case you or a loved one is eyeing this road as a potential path in life: This is a toll road, and the toll is heavy. Choosing this road doesn’t really even compute, because it makes no sense unless you have no choice. And if that’s you, then you already know who you are.

 

     Depending on the gig, while performing our services we may be tolerated or we may be adored, but as soon as the show’s over, when the meet-and-greet is done and we’re on the road to the next venue, we’re undesirables. Most of us spend so much of our lives feeling the disapproval of society and of family, it’s difficult not to buy into it.

 

     Every great musician I’ve ever known has a bit of that scrappy scavenger just under their shiny, professionally silken exterior—superpower-like performance skills not quite concealing a finely-tuned predatory machine, with a slightly hungry air. And no matter how good our year is going, we’re never any farther than the flip of a card from desperate times. That shadowy figure of fate is always lurking there in the corner—just another employee in Her house, and just as subservient to Her whimsy as you or me.

 

     With all that said, the drawbacks and pitfalls of being a musician are offset by heady and powerful experiences and rewards that are simply unobtainable to the non-musician. One night I played a raging, howling guitar solo in front of a thousand people under a total lunar eclipse while sailing past an erupting volcano.

 

     She gives and takes, She cackles and nurtures, She creates and kills, She gives you little moments of exaltation the like of which very few humans ever experience.

 

     And from my perspective at least, Her wild technicolor carnival ride is well worth the cost of admission.

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