on 11/10/02 10:14 AM, john schuller at superbadassmofo@hotmail.com wrote:

Now I am one of the first people to get irritated at people that do stupid shit at concerts (Talking, trying to start a mosh pit etc.) But I have a feeling Zorn has put himself as more important than his audience. I have to pay $22 fucking bucks to watch you play for an hour, and your gonna yell at me? Fuck you. Who is the employee in a situation where money is exchanged like that?

John -- You make a good point here, but you might want to take it a step further: You're John Zorn, you've time-consumingly written and arranged a bunch of music, rehearsed the snot out of a group (some of whom are egomaniacal and busting your balls for more money and longer solos) to make it sound good, had to get plane tickets and hotel rooms for a bunch of guys whose attitudes about travel and money range from casual to mind-numbingly greedy, make sure the backline (drumsets, keyboards, amps etc) is exactly what you need etc. Probably a couple hundred hours of work before a note is played in public. You've then spent about eight hours in transit to get to the damn job, taken fifty calls in your hotel room (while you're trying to get a shower), made sure everything is as it should be, soundchecked, grabbed a meal on the fly, and are trying to provide the audience with the best possible performance as per the agreement when they buy a ticket, and ONE LONE ASSHOLE has taken it upon himself to appraise the job as he's doing it? Does a guy who works at Burger King need an "expert" standing over him as he grills a slab of meat and assembles it into a Whopper? If someone hires you to work, and you're ready to do the job, you've earned the right to do it under tolerable circumstances, no matter what the job. That ONE LONE ASSHOLE decides he's going to be a sports commentator for the band and audience doesn't mean his $22 bought him the right to be disrespectful to John's right to take his best shot under the best possible circumstances. John Zorn is not a human jukebox. That idiot has no more right to deliver a blow-by-blow commentary than he has to tell John what tunes to play. It is not the right of the any supervisor to make the task difficult for the employee at hand.

I saw someone with a very similar attitude recently, a bus driver in San Francisco. This guy actually does have a shitty job. Zorn's job? Give me a break. Putting out records. I know he has worked his ass off to get where he is at, and that is fucking cool. I totally respect that. But is it that miserable a job that you have to yell at people in your audience?

Making a good record is insanely hard work, even before you've played a note. Find a time when the musicians, engineer, and studio are all available is contracting work at its most basic, and is no fun. Drawing a score and having it copied into parts -- which then have to be checked for accuracy -- is mind-numbing, specific work. Dealing with musicians' schedules, cover designers, test pressings, proofreading the copy in the CD booklet -- these are all tiring and monotonous (and often expensive) things. The amount of drudgery a composer and/or bandleader goes through in order to hear even a fraction of what he's composed is insane. Parts of this job were as shitty as driving a bus. My dad drove a bus, so I got to see his work up close. Even on the worst days of that job, he got to come home from it and put the day behind him. Composers -- who work in their own minds -- don't have that option. If you want to see how easy it is to make records, come down to my place next time I go to the studio. For your own safety, bring a whip, a chair, a gun, some Valium, Tagamit, and a cell phone. skip h