“Don’t believe it until you see it.”
My mom’s been preaching that motto ...
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“Don’t believe it until you see it.”
My mom’s been preaching that motto to me since I was young. She was right.
I never really knew what she meant though, until I moved out to the Big Apple with Break of Reality and got exposed to the music industry, and just how strange the industry is.
As mentioned in previous blogs, our street / park performing allowed us to meet all sorts of people, including producers, record executives, and managers for major companies. They would see us performing for large crowds and immediately see potential, or at least dollar signs. “Here is my card - let’s talk!”
“Maybe THIS is it”, we thought.
Nope.
I can’t tell you how many cups of coffee we had with industry reps, and how almost each meeting left us feeling emptier than the one before.
Many of these reps were flat out weird, more exaggerated than any music industry character in any movie. I smelled something, and it wasn’t pretty.
Each one talked an unbelievable talk, and tried to make us feel like we were lost without their help. Each rep thought they knew what was best for Break of Reality, and was pushing the group to go in different directions, such as:
“A Broadway Show with talking cellos!”
“A stage show with dancing acrobats at Disney World!”
Or the dreaded “Consider changing your sound to easy listening…”
They tried to feed us a large amount of you know what. We heard every line in the book. “You guys are the next Beethoven.” That one makes me pretty sick.
This is a good one, from a potential manager: "What's Myspace [http://www.myspace.com/breakofreality?"
Haha…
No.
Although we weren’t quite sure what we wanted, we knew it wasn’t “talking cellos”, rocking out with Mickey Mouse, or being managed by someone who didn’t know what a social networking site was.
More importantly, we never met an industry insider who was as excited about BoR as we were. Our fans were the only ones who really understood what we were doing.
We were keeping instrumental music alive and relevant, whether playing in the parks, subways, schools, or music venues. That was our mission, and it still is today.
The Joshua Bell Article
During our subway days, The Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?hpid=artslot wrote a very interesting article about Joshua Bell [http://www.joshuabell.com, who is one of the world’s most famous classical violinists. The article was about a social experiment Bell attempted at the Metro Station in D.C. Bell decided to do what we were doing: busk in the subways.
Being THE violinist of our generation, it is easy to assume that Bell’s playing attracted swarms of people.
Not the case. Not the case at all.
On January 12th, 2008, Joshua Bell (incognito) performed classical music in the subways of D.C., and made a total of $32.17. He never built much of a crowd, and was practically ignored for his entire performance.
I’m sure this speaks volumes about classical music in our society, (a subject for another blog in another life), but it brought something to our attention: In the most humbling way, we realized that in the land of subway musicians, we had a leg up on Joshua Bell.
(In the land of concert halls, however, he makes about $20,000 more a performance than we do, haha). But still, we were glad to hear we were doing something that the world’s greatest violinist couldn’t do: make an instant musical connection with real people.
The press in NYC began taking notice of what we were doing as well.
For example, Steve Smith [http://www.nightafternight.com/about.html, a columnist for Time Out New York [http://www.timeout.com/newyork, met us while we were performing in the subways. He enjoyed our performance and always agreed to publish our “real” performances in Time Out New York [http://www.timeout.com/newyork:
"Break of Reality puts the classical in classic rock, with is heavy, exotic original compositions and instrumental arrangements of hard-rock standards. If you're one of the many commuters who's seen this group in the Times Square subway station, you already know its secret weapon: It plays with genuine technique and solid intonation, but rocks out like it means it."
- Time Out New York (August 23-29, 2007, Issue 621, page 120)
We were also featured in The New York Post [http://www.nypost.com, The New York Press [http://www.nypress.com, and the Baruch College Newspaper [http://media.www.theticker.org/media/storage/paper909/news/2008/05/05/Arts/Break.Of.Reality.Breaks.Boundaries-3364336.shtml.
With the press on our side, we had already begun booking real gigs, and our fans came out to support us, one subway commuter at a time.
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Next week on BOR Blog: Photos, Videos, and memories from “real” NYC performances! Want to see BOR’s Cello-Over-The-Head stunt? Stop by next week!
