I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

By Peter Nevland - Dec 22 , 2008

If you ever start following one of your dreams, it’s a good thing to remember that you have no idea what you’re doing. You may make a plan, chart out your course, or have a feeling of how it’s going to work out, but nothing will prepare you for what happens when you actually do something.

After the success of the festival, we started playing more band shows around Austin, publicizing them with some really ugly, photoshopped fliers and emails I sent out. Less and less people attended our shows, even though the band got tighter, we played new songs, and I started writing stories to go along with my emailed show announcements. When we started recording the CD, we had hoped to finish in a month. The actual process took more like ten. It didn’t take long for Roy to talk to me.

“When are you going to be done with your CD?”

“I’m hoping just a couple months, but I don’t know.”

“Well, I keep telling people about you, but I don’t have anything to show them,” he told me. “Why don’t you just go into my studio and record some of your pieces without any accompaniment. We’ll mix them and put a CD together. I’ll pay for it.”

Three hours after my brother had unlocked the door to the studio on a Friday night, we had recorded the fourteen tracks that made up my first CD, “Peter Nevland.” Roy printed them up like he said and passed one out to the more than 100 people who came for his first Wizard Academy reunion. He introduced me as the next Jack Kerouac, and I performed to roars of approval on a crisp, autumn evening. The hour and a half I spent autographing CDs for people wanting to document history was like a Crazyland adventure for my brain.

The next morning I awoke in my bed wearing the same underwear and smelling like I normally do when I get up. No paparazzi waited outside to snap photos. Record companies weren’t after me for my signature on a million-dollar contract. Nothing seemed to have changed.

More gigs with the band followed. Most of them found us rocking to small crowds in clubs and coffee houses around Austin, but we also drove to Dallas, playing at a club called “the Door” and being featured at an art festival in Port Arthur, TX. “The Door” moved us from playing their main stage to a cinder block box with terrible acoustics and paid us virtually no money, while the festival in Port Arthur paid us a guarantee of $500 and had us play in a cool theater. It didn’t take long for me to cement in my brain which type of venue was the better option.

I had expected us to quickly become popular in Austin and in the music scene, in general, but the best financial success we had was due to relationships with people who’d seen me perform by myself. They would ask how much money we needed for Peter Nevland and the Neverland Band to come play an event. Clubs just paid you by how many people came in the door, if they were that generous. Out of the people I mustered up my courage to invite, 1/3 to 1/5 that said they would come actually did.

If it was tough to make money, it was even tougher to get press attention. The Austin Chronicle didn’t give any notice to what we thought was genre breaking music. Radio stations didn’t know how to classify our music and didn’t think that people would instantly catch on to our eclectic rock and supersonic words. Call me naïve, but I didn’t connect the dots to figure out that it took more than dropping off a press kit or calling once on the phone to get entertainment people to go on a date with my art.

In March, 2002, I was fed up with playing by the rules. South by SouthWest had rejected our application for their music festival. None of the journalists I’d tried to contact had responded. Venues still offered us support slots on Tuesday or Wednesday nights. If what I had could truly change the world, it didn’t need a festival or venue to legitimize it. It was time to take my performance to the streets.

You may be cringing with pain or lauding my bravery, but Friday nights at 10pm on the corner of San Jacinto and 6th Street in Austin, TX, became my stage. SxSW was a great start for that sort of thing with all the people there and the street blocked off. I even announced it to my email list and got some friends to come watch as a starter crowd. I tasted relative success. A crowd gathered. People came and went. I lost my voice. Thom “the World Poet” joined in and rescued me while someone got me some water and food to save my throat. People cheered. That first night made me feel like a world conqueror.

The weeks following found me on 6th Street every Friday night from 10 to midnight. I discovered that the influence of alcohol-filled bodies spilling out of clubs diminished my effectiveness when the clock struck 12. Less and less people came with me to watch, and the crowds got smaller, but I continued to see art change people’s lives. If only for a few minutes people resonated with something I said and wanted to connect. I don’t know which made more impact, my performance or the conversation afterward.

“You need to be in New York,” Roy Williams told me.

“Yeah, I could just see a journalist for The New York Times or some entertainment guru discovering you in Times Square,” his friend, Dean Rotbart added.

In April I boarded a plane bound for New York with my brother. The plan was for me to perform in Times Square and other places around the city to try and get a break. Every time I started, it took at least a half an hour to psych myself over the border separating normal Peter from Street Performer Peter. Believe it or not, the Naked Cowboy gave me inspiration. If he could handle standing for hours in his boots, white bikini and cowboy hat, I could spew poetry.

Even when I got my mojo working, reactions were mild. Most people had things to do and seemed to put me in the category of “crazy person who wants money.” Dave would give my CDs away and hold a sign proclaiming my presence, but that didn’t change things. He probably had more courage than I did. Once, when I felt overwhelmed and spent, he started performing my own pieces to get me going. Despite my embarrassment, it worked, and I got started.

A couple opportunities presented the illusion of an open door. We got invited to attend the Letterman Show, a taping of some stupid MTV program and went to the hallowed Nuyorican Poetry Slam. After offering my skills as a performer, the Letterman Show put us in the farthest seat from the stage. MTV let me perform for the audience during the commercial break, but then turned off the mic before I even finished. At the poetry slam I didn’t even get out of the first round due to a low score from one judge. I chalked it up to having picked the wrong pieces. Dave chalked it up to the stupidity of the crowd. Thank God for a brother who believed in me more than I did.

The New York Stock Exchange performance proved no more fruitful. Although a bunch of people liked what I did, it didn’t blow anyone away. We forgot to bring CDs to give away with my card. I can’t remember hardly any of the people we met that night. Dave ended up getting almost as much notoriety as I did from a picture of him that prominently displayed his near nakedness on the back of the magazine in the hand of every attendee. We headed home with little more than the memories of our adventures, people’s smiles and a little kid mistaking me for Shaggy, from Scooby Doo, in the subway.

In May, 2002, we finally released the first Peter Nevland and the Neverland Band CD, Late Bloomer. I took out an ad in a music magazine, paid for a week of high visibility placement in Waterloo Records and made more ugly fliers. 112 CDs flew out of our hands in a month and a half, which is great if you’re selling them to your friends. It’s less than stellar for a man who dreams of starting a movement. No radio stations played our songs. Journalists remained silent as to the existence of Spoken Groove.

Tiny little angels didn’t fly in to make things better. No one offered to push the “easy” button. Motorola still signed the checks that supported my performance habit. $8700 of my own money had poured through my pockets, and only about $1000 had come back as income by the time I left Motorola to pursue performing as a full-time career. The lack of instant success jabbed at my feelings, wrestled with my resolve, and forced me to find my success in the faces who watched me perform. Despite having no idea how to navigate the path to make my dreams real, an insistent whisper kept urging me forward, even when nothing made sense.