Daniel Jones
Daniel Jones Interview
Daniel Jones is an Austin based musician who is primarily a drummer. He is a longtime friend of my dad’s. After my dad ran into him on a walk, it led to me and Daniel meeting and then having this discussion. I clarified with him that he fits the term “working musician”, though he is not able to do music full-time for his career. He has had and continues to have numerous gigs working with many artists/bands both as a live and studio musician. In our discussion we focused on the subjects of pursuing a passion and career in the music industry regardless of how difficult it can be, and how struggles with mental health play their role in his music career.
Was it a part of your plan to be a working musician?
DANIEL
Yes ever since I went to music school in Hollywood in 1996. Yeah I wanted to be a rock star more or less.
Regarding these gigs that you find, you had said that you were playing for country bands and whatnot. What is the process for you of getting gigs?
Daniel Jones:
Well, I mean, it's all networking. The Internet is a really big change from pre-Internet. There's an Austin TX musicians page on Facebook and you can go in there. It seems that a lot of it has to do with just being seen. What I mean by that is my friend will be at a gig where he's a bass player and you'll see a musician he knows they'll go ‘hey dude I need a bass player Thursday’, and then he's got work because he's out on the scene a lot. It's mainly through the Internet as an independent musician that you are going to solicit gigs, and then after you do that you kind of get in the loop of people. People call you back, I have one or two studios that I work for that call me. It's all a matter of just, I hate to use the term as it’s kind of cheesy, but it's literally making the scene.
I am not a content creator so I'm a freelance musician. It's not like I am playing my own music.
How stable are these gigs typically? Does it vary?
Daniel Jones:
I played in the White Horse [a venue/ bar in Austin] every Saturday for over a decade, so that's been a real steady gig. It was every week at 8:00 PM on Saturday night, a prime slot. But they just cut our gigs in half so I’m there every other Saturday night. So, being a freelance musician is no good when you talk about stability of work. It's no different than my buddy who's a home builder.
You can have a one off where someone hires you for one show or they can hire you for three shows; or you get in kind of a roster. There's this band where I'm like their third drummer on the list because their regular drummer plays with another band and that's his priority gig. So it's all a hustle in that sense and just like any other job.
Let's say you're the bass player for a band that’s gone through several bass players. Imagine you play for them for two years and then they go off to make a new record and then they say to their bass player ‘hey we're off the road here for a year because I'm going to make a record so I don't need you anymore’ or ‘I can't retain you’. If you're really lucky or you're super high up you'll get put on retainer. What I mean by that is when I went to music school I learned that Michael Jackson's drummer is a guy named Jonathan Moffett. He was on retainer at 80 grand a month so you know that Michael Jackson was his priority since he was his employee.
Interesting
Daniel Jones:
I mean it functions just like a freelance painter. You go to a job if you're doing individual jobs but you can land a band. Let's say for example the Deftones’ drummer Cunningham retired from the Deftones. Being the Deftones’ drummer would be my dream gig. He's a founding member but let's just say he goes away so the Deftones are gonna hire a drummer, so that would be great to get that gig. Let's say they hire me and they go ‘hey we're gonna take you on this run of 10 shows or three shows or 30 shows and we'll see how it goes on that, and if those work out then we’ll retain you full time’. You could be put on retainer or it could be by keep basis but retainer gigs that's the tip of the top. You're talking Clapton, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Taylor Swift- at this level I'm kind of dating myself but I'm trying to think of popular people today. Whoever the top charting people are right now they have drummers on retainer.
So being on retainer’s basically being hired. Does that mean like being in a band, basically?
Daniel Jones:
Even though Jonathan Moffett the drummer for Michael Jackson was on retainer with him, he’s not going to make any money off of songwriting royalties. It's all live performance and recording, if recording is included in that. When they play a Michael Jackson song on the radio he makes a penny or whatever but the drummer probably gets nothing. Retainer means you work for somebody.
I know the drummer for Korn, his name is Ray Luzier. He was a teacher at a school I went to. He's in Korn now, he was on retainer but now they've invited him into the band. That means he participates in all of the risk and reward of the band. He's part of making the music. I'm sure the band pays him well because the band is very well paying.
Have you ever been on retainer in these bands, like the one you said you've had the long time gig that you were in?
Daniel Jones:
Yes I have been on retainer before. It's for a very small amount but when I play the regular gig at the White Horse I get paid per gig since there's not enough gigs to to reserve my labor. I used to be in a band with a guy named Josh Grider and I was in his band for maybe two years and that was about 2007 and he paid me 350 bucks a week flat and so anytime I got another gig or someone offered me a gig I had to call Josh. I've been on retainer in a band before only once.
So, with most of these gigs that you do, is the pay from them typically worth it or or is it hard to make money from what you're doing? There are a lot more resources like you were saying to get gigs through the Internet, but is it hard to make money from what you're doing?
Daniel Jones:
Well yes, it's hard to make money in music. I think that quite honestly taught me Sebastien, it's reminded me to be thankful right now. I mean I am struggling as everything's hand to mouth, it's always been that way. But I am still with the amount of money I make playing music which is probably around $1,500 bucks a month or $1000 something like that. I'm still in the 1%. I am in the 1% of musicians making money.
Really.
Daniel Jones:
Oh yeah. If you played the gig at armadillo world headquarters in 1980 or 1975 the average pay was $100. When I play at the White Horse or any of these other gigs around town the average pay in 2024 is $100. So really it hasn't changed. It is fascinating as that's from my level but like I said I'm in the 1%. You're either gonna be hustling or you're gonna project into a new level where you are making royalties off of creating content. There's very few musicians I know that only play music. Everybody's got side work. I'm on a construction site right now. I'm in my car but I’m working on a house.
Basically what you're saying is if you're only gonna play music in your career and you're not gonna create your own music, be a songwriter, and/or sell merchandise and stuff like that to sell records. If you're not going to have that source of income, you have to have other jobs to to really sustain yourself. Is that what you're saying?
Daniel Jones:
Yes, for the most part. If you were just going to be a performer, like a side man or a side person, if you're gonna do that then yeah. Most of the people I know that play music as a side player/ as a sideman, their work is ad hoc. I'll give you a perfect example because I understand the questions you're asking Sebastien and this will kind of give you a real window of what it looks like. When I first moved to Austin in 1997 the guy that I’m working for on this house right now, the home builder, was my guitar player. The band we know named Pushmonkey had just on Friday night opened up for Kiss at The Summit in Houston that was a 17,000 seat auditorium and they opened up for Kiss and we're driving down a road in Austin and there's the guitar player for Pushmonkey washing cars at a used car lot on Monday morning. The gig was that weekend Friday or Saturday and then Monday morning he's out washing cars and he had just opened for Kiss. Pushmonkey, I'm going to guess they made 250 bucks or 500 bucks, I mean the numbers are negligible.
Metallica gets a lot of flak for being a cheesy band or a sell out, but one of the things that Metallica is known for is that they handpick their openers and they pay them very well.
I know a girl that was in a band called My Jerusalem. She was the bass player and they were opening up for [a famous Americana band]. My Jerusalem were paid $250 a night with them.
I'm guessing that's not good.
Daniel Jones:
Well, consider that Metallica pays its openers $10,000 when they’re playing to 50,000 people and [a famous Americana band] are paying their openers $2,000. You would think that opening for [the famous Americana band] in a five piece band on the road would get you-God you would hope at least $750 a night.
I'm gonna guess that the [well-known Americana band] played a 1,500 seat auditorium. They're gonna probably make $100,000 that night or something like that as a total unit so $250 a night for their opener is just ridiculous.
The headliner should definitely share their profits with their opener fairly.
I opened up for [a famous country singer] one time for that guy that had me on retainer, it was the largest show I've ever played. It was in front of 12,000 people. I don't even know what Josh made but that's none of my business. I do know that in that arena [the headliner] took a third of the merch sales of the band I was in. T-shirts, stickers, and everything and I know that we played in Las Cruces, New Mexico at a 12,000 seat basketball arena. I do know that her guarantee for that show was $650,000 and she took a third of the openers' merch. When you deal with the red dirt scene, which is kind of the Texas country scene, a lot of what pays the band's gas and hotel rooms is the merch T-shirts, hats, and koozies.
For a super successful artist to take a third of the profits from the opener’s merch seems scandalous to me.
Daniel Jones:
They take a limo to the show. They walk in, sing, without stopping walk out, get in a limo back to their plane. That's what I'm saying, when you're in the music industry and you're on the outside-you're way outside. But, once you get on the inside, you're in. As far as kind of breaking your bands, that's super, super rare.
What do you think are some of the things preventing some artists or or performers from breaking through? What are some of the reasons as to why you think it's rare from your experience? Do you find that there's some gatekeeping?
Daniel Jones:
One thing I've noticed in the music industry is there's so much turnover in the administrative part of the business. They break relationships. The perfect example is my White Horse gig. We had a handshake deal with the owner of the White Horse that he planned every Saturday night for the dancers and that lasted for 11 years. Well they brought in a new booker and what does the new booker do? He wants new artists, so they change up the roster. You've tried to create these relationships and you have and those relationships go away because our reps are constantly turning over. I'm not gonna say there's no lasting relationships in the music industry, but the industry is not known for having lasting relationships.
I've never signed a contract or anything but the music industry is totally ad hoc and for someone to break in. The first thing that comes to mind is Einstein's quote “perseverance is the greater part of genius” and so people that make it in this industry stay. And the reason why I say that is because I remember hearing an interview with an A&R rep one time and that and this artist asked them ‘you know if they get older everybody kind of goes away’. What's going on in the end is people just fall out of the industry over time. If you're gonna play music, music comes before everything because you're not gonna make any money.
If you're getting into music to make money [as a musician] you're an idiot. You gotta be kidding me, this is not a place to come make money. Although 50 Cent would look at me and laugh, so would Dr. Dre.
Do you think that there's just so much competition that it's hard to make money or breakthrough?
Daniel Jones:
Yes it is a gamble, yes it is a risk. But what you're really trying to do in art is make great art. You want money to come out of that, but the focus and intent has to be the art. Unless you want to be a Milli Vanilli and in that case you're going to lose your soul. Regarding getting a record made, and this is so appropriate and accurate to me, in the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (not the art of war) he equates the creative process to a hunt. Now let's say you want to go hunt a Mountain Lion in Colorado. You don't get the Mountain Lion mounted on your mantle automatically, all the work is front loaded. You have to buy the tickets, you need your weapons to hunt the animal, you have to go there and you have to walk out in the woods, and you have to hunt it. What I'm saying is you don't know if you'll get anything but you have to try.
So when you make a record, you just have to make the best record you can and you just have to let it go. But you don't get all the accolades before you make the record. That's a walk in the dark. I mean it's pretty common for musicians to have an existential crisis before they finish their record because you put all this work into it. You [don’t] know if it's good or not. It's like looking at yourself in the mirror. Are you attractive? You can't answer that.
Don’t take me the wrong way when I say this, but how has fear played its part in your experience of sharing your own music and dealing with the music industry? I can relate to having fear in sharing my own art.
Daniel Jones:
I'm still dealing with that. I mean I'm 52 and I'm just now realizing I would say in the past year or so that I'm just petrified. Something my dad said to me once it really got to me before he died. I don't know why I always remember this, but he said to me “Son, you think failure is scary? Try success.” I think I'm afraid because I was never trained to not be afraid or how to move through my fear or how to address my inner world. I think that I want it too bad still. I think that when I'm talking about my fear, it just seems so daunting of course to get your record [out].
It’s no different than standing on the edge of a diving board. If you stand there long enough you can kind of lose track of your feelings. What I mean by that is like when I think about myself it's like ‘what are you afraid of?’ and it's like I've been afraid for so long and it's been so unaddressed for so long that I can't even name my fear. You're kind of overwhelmed by it, so I mean when I talk about being afraid I'll be totally honest with you, God is a very big deal to me. I'm not even saying God is real OK, but this question to me is so massive. You can spend 70% of your life trying to answer that question and it would be worth it.
I'm not going to call myself a spiritual person but I am a seeker, and I'm a confused person at the same time. Sharing myself with people is a scary proposition. I hold my cards tight when I'm around a lot of musicians because they can be hyper ambitious and they will run right over you to get what they need. So I keep all musicians at arms length for better or for worse quite honestly, and that probably hurts my career. But like I said I'm very wary of people.
I absolutely understand that and I relate to that as well. It's not an easy world out there. You could easily be taken advantage of by someone who's more successful than you. They could run right over you or use you and not pay you enough.
Daniel Jones:
I'm not saying my fear is valid. Well, I'm not going to say it's invalid either, but I'm just saying that [regarding the] panic attacks that I had last year, I just have to address it, because I want to get a nice sleep and being afraid just sucks dude. It just wears you out, it shrinks you, and it makes you unable to live.
Thanks so much for interviewing me, because I learned so much about me when you ask about me.
I'm so glad, of course man.