The Art of Artistic Survival

By Peter Nevland - Jan 19 , 2009

The Art of Artistic Survival

My head sank backstage at Dallas’ Club Galaxy in November, 2003, just before our featured performance. A decent-sized crowd of two hundred, most of whom had never heard of us, awaited the arrival of “Spoken Groove.” None of them dismayed me as much as the $3700 promotional failure that would soon hit my bank account.

“So are you going to keep doing this now that you have nothing to fall back on and you don’t know where your next meal will come from?” a quiet voice asked in my thoughts.

I took a deep breath, seeing no way out. “You’re not telling me to do anything else.”

Everyone marvels at performances they see on stage and tales of life on the road. Very few people consider the money and wise decisions it takes to maintain a career as a full-time artist. The pressure to produce work that’s popular can easily smother the sense of joy in artistic discovery. Every new creation demands money up front. No artist possesses this mastery of creative life in a structured world when they begin. Those who survive the collision never escape the wrestling match between dreaming big and living small.

Working at Motorola for three years had left me with a pretty good financial picture in the autumn of 2002. I had no school or credit card debt. My car was paid off. A good chunk of saved up money sat happily in my savings account and the stock market. I had lived well below my means, spending $500 a month for rent and utilities. Besides food, the biggest personal expense I faced was my auto insurance.

The light from my performance money didn’t shine as brightly. I had posted a net loss of $7000 during my engineering days from the promotion of shows and my first two CDs. We had no financial backing, and our unique sound and performance style made us an unlikely candidate for record companies to sign. At the conclusion of our first tour, we barely broke even. I covered it with the money Motorola had paid me upon departure.

Shows kept rolling in. Our network of friends and supporters continued to grow. Whenever audiences saw us perform, no matter how small, they told us how moved they were and did everything they could to find us new opportunities. We were the honored guests in their homes. Kids sent me emails telling me how we’d inspired them to write, play music, or follow their dreams. Other artists marveled at our originality and bold way of living. If we just kept performing and recording, God would bring someone to recognize our profit potential and unlock the doors to merchandise distribution and media exposure, right?

I quickly got to work recording once we’d returned from the little tour that included our first festival performance. Three weeks on the road had netted a mere $300 in performance money and $776 in CD sales, but my intuitive nose whiffed something good in the air. We needed an acoustic CD featuring the magic combination of Paul’s guitar and my animated voice to sell at our Acoustic Spoken Groove shows. We also needed a recording capturing the raw rock n’ roll of the full band. But then my performance by itself needed a CD to stand on its own. I decided to make all three at once.

Creative production consumed me. I booked shows during the day, did graphic design at night and squeezed in recording sessions, performances, a full-band tour, t-shirt production, a part-time editing job, and hanging out with friends wherever I could. Promotion barely happened.
One email announced the arrival of the first of my three CDs, “Just My Mouth.” Five copies sold at its CD release in Dallas, mostly to my family. Two emails mentioned the release of “Acoustic Spoken Groove,” the Peter Nevland and Paul Finley album. We sold 4 CDs at our sparsely attended premier.

Something needed to change for the epically titled, “Birth of the Spoken Groove” album. It deserved a crazy crowd of screaming rockers to welcome its arrival. I rented an old theater, printed tickets, did promotional performances, filled out the night with slam poets and another band, negotiated free subs from Jimmy John’s, asked people to donate money to pay the performers, hired a video crew, made special release CDs and sent free copies to all the radio stations, newspapers, and magazines I knew. The theater held 300 people. Maybe 35 showed up. I lost $1700 on that show. I couldn’t bring myself to mention it to my email list.

Everyone who actually had attended loved the show. One of them even offered to pay for a completely new recording that could capture the power of what he’d heard when we played live. It softened the blow of my loss, but didn’t remove my questions of why people wouldn’t flock to hear our groundbreaking genre of art. I asked the question of what I was doing wrong, but should have been asking myself why I was trying to do so much.

The next day Paul and I launched off on a two-month tour that took us from Florida, up the East Coast to Canada, and back down through the Midwest to a mammoth show I booked for Dallas. My hopes sprouted confident wings as we approached Galaxy Club in Dallas, the last stop of our tour. We’d basked in the glow of smiling new friends and experienced enough adventures to last a lifetime while getting a taste of real financial profit. A net of $7000 in performance money and $3500 in merchandise sales is no small accomplishment for an independent band made of two single guys. I’d lined up an impressive array of performers with a built-in crowd for a backbone. All we needed was 600 people.

When the show started, I noticed that someone had stolen my favorite blue t-shirt from backstage. Trying to forget my disappointment, my eyes assessed the size of the crowd. I had made the mistake of guaranteeing Galaxy Club a specific number of paying customers at the door and a certain amount of sales at the bar to book the event. To top it off, I had guaranteed all the other performers $100 each. The 200 people who had attended weren’t nearly enough for me to break even. I was losing way more than a cool thrift store shirt.

Somehow, I managed a performance with the knowledge that I had completely wiped out my financial gain from the tour. I absorbed the entire loss myself, shielding Paul from my mistake. It took every last stock investment and savings dollar to pay it off. Factoring in the money to produce our CDs, all the promotional expenses, and every other cost, I posted an $8500 loss for all of 2003. The next morning tears dripped off my face as I stood in front of a struggling church, telling them the story of my failure and my unwavering desire not to give up. It happened to be the planned topic of the pastor’s sermon.

Despite the inspirational and spiritual success that my troubles brought, it didn’t stop me from resolving never again to combine my skills as a performer and event organizer with the duties and risk of a promoter. I suck when it comes to getting people to come to my own shows. It requires the talents of a personality I can’t conjure on my own. My creativity still erupts with dreams that require stepping out onto the invisible bridges of faith. But I’ve learned to live small, to value my own survival, so that more faces will be beaming in the long run than I could ever inspire in one single day.