It’s not easy staying in the black as an emerging band, trying to put everything you can into your music while still managing to, y’know, keep yourself fed – in fact, it’s bloody hard work.

There are a lot of groups that claim to be “the hardest working band” in whatever city or country they’re from, but Melbourne blues-rockers Smoke Stack Rhino are definitely one outfit who could lay claim to that title. Having entirely self-funded their debut album they’re no strangers to a hard day’s work, so we were keen to find out how emerging bands like SSR go about striking a balance between work and music.

The band let us in on some of the best and worst jobs they’ve had (hint: “shit tanks”), what it means to be a ‘professional’ musician, and when bands should start expecting to get paid – as well as their reaction to the recent assertion by Fairfax that bands should be happy to play for “exposure“.

To hear the fruits of Smoke Stack Rhino’s labour, check out their debut record Love And Other Monsters this Saturday October 29, and catch them launching it that night at The Evelyn Hotel with The Lockhearts and Fulton Street in support.

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Being a musician involves touring and live gigs at unpredictable times – is it tough to find jobs that can support that lifestyle?

Ash King (guitar/vox): If you want a steady full-time wage, yeah! It’s interesting that being a touring musician is seen more as a lifestyle than career. This description certainly fits the bill for most bands touring Australia, which has a limited live music market and challenging distances. Fortunately for us as a blues rock band, we have the flexibility of playing rock gigs alongside all these awesome country blues festivals where bands are valued.

Shane Andison (bass): We currently manage by having reasonably normal jobs actually – when we put together a tour, we take this into account and try to work the dates around weekends, public holidays and other days off that we can grab. It’s all a balancing act!

Are there certain jobs that yourselves or other musicians tend to gravitate towards?

Dave Sirianni (vox): A lot of musicians tend to go with trade jobs, which you can leave or start up easily.

Shane: Guys we see travelling to Europe or other countries and playing will come back and have temporary jobs, or maybe teaching instruments and doing corporate or wedding covers gigs on the side.

What are some of the best and worst jobs the band members have had?

Jem Berg (drums): When I worked with Ash fixing over 2000 alarm clock radios that were defective, straight out of the brand new box they came in. Quality control!

Ash: Working as a labourer led to some strange places, including the Carrum “Treatment” Plant – or, as it was more affectionately know, the “shit farm”. Fortunately I was just demolishing framework away from the poo and (randomly) driving a steamroller, but the labour hire mob I worked for rang me back one day and said, “We’ve got some more work for you… it’s not the most pleasant job…” They wanted somebody to clean the shit tanks! I declined and went back to practicing scales.

Shane: My best job has actually come through playing music – I spent two years in the French Alps, snowboarding during the day and playing in a disco band at night!

Some musicians approach music as a hobby or side-job until they start to see a certain level of success, while others dive into the idea of being professional musicians from the beginning, with other work only ever considered a side job. How do you approach it?

Dave: I’ve always seen music as my career, however, I don’t believe being a ‘professional musician’ should be considered as someone who only plays music for a living – there are so many jobs within the music industry. I have always taught music; I started out as a singing teacher, then went to uni to become a classroom music teacher. I’ve always kept performing, however, on weekends and holidays.

Ash: Yeah, I think certain genres of music allow for different levels of success in terms of a career.

Shane: I think the first description fits us pretty well, currently – we do all have fairly stable jobs that would require a bit of planning before just deciding to up and leave to follow our dreams. You gotta pay the bills somehow!

Jem: Music for me is definitely a hobby – there’s not enough money in it to call it a job. When you play majority of the shows you do out of your own back pocket and barely break even, it’s a hobby.

Should bands aspire to be full-time professional musicians from the start?

Dave: If you have a good support network, and can afford to live off two-minute noodles, then you can try. However, that lifestyle can get pretty old very fast!

Jem: This is a tough question. There are a lot of different variables, but I would suggest discussing with the band members first on how serious they are, and how far they want to take it.

Shane: That’s really up to the individual musician, I think – the difficult bit is that people might not realise just how much time and effort is involved in trying to achieve this before they attempt it. It’s certainly a lot of late nights and hustling to get gigs!

What sort of balance do you guys try to strike between music and other work?

Shane: The balance for me is one of health and mental sanity! It can get pretty tiring working a full day and then heading to rehearsal until 11pm, eating after that and going to bed around midnight, only to get up again in six hours for another day. This then gets worse if you need to rehearse with another band in the same week, and then potentially gig on Friday and/or Saturday night.

Ash: The reality is that you need a day gig that pays the bills. If you’re an indie band like us who self-manage and have full-time jobs, it can be extraordinarily difficult to find time to book shows, promote the band and so on, let alone practice your instruments. The logical solution is a manager, however there are more bands in Melbourne than managers. The demands can also be challenging for partners and loved ones.

What are some of the challenges involved in balancing the two?

Ash: Business generally sees musicians as unreliable. They think “why would we employ someone with long hair who’s going to leave to go on tour, or rock up to work tired or hungover?”. In reality, this perspective should be the other way around. Employers need to value their workers, but especially musicians.

A musician in the workplace is like gold; very few workers have such a unique mix of highly-developed technical, creative and problem-solving skills. Musicians should be seen as assets, not liabilities.

Dave: Finding the time to do both is the biggest challenge, but if you love music, you make time for it wherever you can.

Shane: The playing side of band work is more or less always at night, and my normal job is during the day. I can also be a bit flexible and finish early where required, which is not often anyway as gigs are usually later at night. It can, however, get challenging when we have a release coming up (such as this album) where there is a plethora of work to do apart from the actual playing.

I’m lucky in that I work in advertising/digital marketing currently, so I’m on my computer most of the day, which allows me to help out with the online stuff when others (such as Jem) might not be able to help with this kind of thing, as he’s on a worksite. At the same time, Jem will help out with the live production side of things and other logistics, which means we can evenly delegate tasks to each member and this helps us get more things done.

Jem: We have a rough system where everyone has their own sort of roles they take on to keep the machine turning ie. the bass player does online/digital media, the guitarist does bookings and promo, I book and organise audio visual and rehearsals each week… not sure what the singer does.

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Fairfax recently said that musicians should be happy to play for the ‘exposure’ at corporate gigs like the Night Noodle Market. What are your thoughts on this?

Dave: Not cool. Fairfax paid all other members of the creative team from sound person to web developers; why then are musicians expected to play for “Exposure”? It doesn’t surprise me, though – people undervalue music all the time.

Jem: I think Fairfax and big media have no idea how much it takes [for a band] to put on a show. Exposure is not payment. Exposure does not pay for fuel, food, rehearsal space, instrument maintenance…

Shane: I think it’s absolute crap that musicians or bands are undervalued to the extent that people believe they should be happy to just play for “exposure” – especially at big sponsored events like the Night Noodle Markets, it’s just insane.

At what level of experience should bands start expecting to be paid?

Jem: Bands should get paid regardless, even if it’s something like $50. Something is better than nothing.

Dave: A cover band should always be paid. An original band at the beginning at least deserves a fair door deal, but once the band has “earned their stripes” so to speak, they should be offered a guaranteed payment.

Shane: Maybe when you’re just starting out (ie. in high school), I can understand playing for free to help get experience playing on a stage to a live audience. Anything other than that I feel musicians should at the very least be covered for their time spent – unless you’re playing to an empty room, which in that case I can see the problem with venues trying to pay people.

On a related note, you guys have tried crowd-funding in the past, but chose to self-fund the record. What was the reason for that?

Jem: We tried to see if we could do it all ourselves by gigging as much as possible and saving every cent we got. We did it, and proved that financial backing from punters was not necessary after a lot of hard work.

Dave: You feel a lot more proud of the product if you can say that it was produced from working hard and playing shows.

Ash: I’m not opposed to crowd-funding by any means. The decision to self-fund was more that it was unrealistic to ask punters for money when they didn’t have any indication of our sound. Now that we’ll be more established through the release of our first album, we may revisit crowd-funding as an option to finance a vinyl release.

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