"Fifty Thousand Dollars?!"
Okay, first a bit of backstory: The Milwaukee band The Promise Ring was a bit of a hot item in the '90s, getting featured in Spin and otherwise serving as a standard-bearer for the genre dubbed "emo" -- for lack of a better definition, rock that wears its heart on its sleeve. (Jimmy Eat World has been called emo, while Dashboard Confessional brings it a ways over the top.)
Around that time, my friend Nathan was at some party or other, and he ran into a guy who unleashed an unsolicited tirade against The Promise Ring -- which was, a presumable byproduct of having attracted attention outside Wisconsin, a bunch of pitiful corporate lapdog sellouts. "Did you know," the guy asked Nathan, "that those guys made fifty thousand dollars last year?" This was, of course, an appallingly ostentatious sum of money for four guys to collectively make in a year of appearing in magazines, releasing an album, and touring the country.
Nathan and I always used to laugh about that -- the idea that successful musicians are constantly at risk of "selling out" every time they entertain the idea of signing with a major label or getting their music on a TV commercial, when most of them make less money than the average sandwich-assembler at Subway. A member of The Promise Ring makes $12,500 in a year, and that makes him a sellout? I'm thrilled when my favorite bands get Gap ads or TV themes, because it means they're far less likely to become customer-service reps somewhere.
A few years back, I ran into singer Davey von Bohlen and drummer Dan Didier, who've since disbanded The Promise Ring and formed Maritime (which played here last night). I told them Nathan's story, and they laughed heartily before Davey said, "The awesome thing about that is that we never made that much money in a year. I have no idea where that guy even heard that."
Food for thought the next time you're debating whether to drop $10 for a T-shirt at a rock show.
12:23 PM ET | 03-17-2007 | permalink
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