"Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead."

I recently had quite a few responses via e-mail on a post that I wrote awhile back entitled, Where Did Our Love Go ?
I decided to answer you with this...( don't worry it ain't bad!!!)

For quite sometime now my band the Carpenter Ants have had a regular gig on Wednesday nights at the Empty Glass In Charleston. Well, for a good period of time now there has hardly been anyone out on Wednesdays, and it gets increasingly harder to justify taking any money from the club to pay us, so what I do from week to week is play it by ear. If there are alot people in the club and they seem to be spending money, we will play and I will ask for a reasonable amount of money; if there aren't many people there then I try to be reasonable in the clubs favor. The Empty Glass has been home base for us since I've been in the band, which is now 12 years.
I have to be realistic about some things though...right now in this country the economy is not so great, people everywhere are suffering in more ways than one.
I'm just a musician, and not to sneeze on that fact, but the arts in general suffer when the economy is this bad. Who the heck wants to make the choice of buying entertainment when gas costs an arm and a leg, when food prices are through the roof. I don't want think about a band when I gotta put my child through college, and I'm robbing Peter to pay Paul...it's absolute HELL being in the position that I'm in, why? Because this is my dream that's why, the only thing that I've ever truly wanted to do was to be on a stage playing music for the masses, to paraphrase the words of Billy Joel's "Piano Man," "I hoped it would be me they'd be comin' to see, to forget about life for awhile."
But the fact is that with all the talent that I think that I have, I'm here and I'm struggling to get heard, so it's left up to me if I care as much as I say that I do to keep plugging away at this rock in my path to not give up hope, and to "keep on tryin' 'til I reach my highest ground,"(Stevie Wonder, "Higher Ground" from Innervisions 1974.)
Yes, I know that's not the answer you may have been hoping for but the most important thing is to believe in yourself and tell yourself always and often... "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

This post is dedicated to all musicians who are really busting their rear ends trying to get their music out to the public...please please don't give up hope, your time is coming, grit your teeth and hang in there.
This post is also dedicated to everybody who is trying to live through the dregs of this economy. We will see tomorrow.

Support Live music today, tomorrow and always.