Besides the piano and the trombone, I always loved to sing. I sang in the choir in church. And when I was a teenager, I was able to go up and perform with the Cleveland Orchestral Chorus when they needed young voices. I think I also took a few trombone lessons with one of the fellows in the orchestra. So I had a very high level, conservatory-type, exposure to music from a very young age. And there was never any question in my mind--I was always gonna be a musician. Unfortunately, there seem to have been questions in many others' minds.

But, you know, very few people actually make it in music, at any level. I am not talking big stardom, but very few people actually get paid to do music. The easiest way to get paid to do music is to teach it. But I think the people who are really great teachers do so because that's their calling, and my calling is that I'm a performer. And that's a much tougher way to make it.

I quit school after a year at the University of Akron and two full years at the conservatory at Ohio University because I had taken every basic music course that I'd wanted or needed and I did not want to fulfill any more garbage requirements. So I figured I'd just quit and I did. I was thinking about just concentrating on being a singer. I'd taken some voice lessons, but didn't want to waste my time--I wanted to know if my voice was good enough for me to actually do it. So I called up the head of the voice department at Oberlin College and said who I was and that I wanted to sing and do this with my life, but wanted to know if she thought I had an instrument worth developing or whether I should just go do something else. She said come and sing "The Star Spangled Banner," which I did. And I guess she liked it pretty good because she encouraged me and hooked me up with a voice teacher in Boston.

So for the next couple of years, I was living in Boston taking two voice lessons a week and working as a secretary from nine to five, and not getting any sleep because I was involved in this cult. It was a Buddhist cult in Boston and New York and it was pretty serious. And I don't really want to talk about it.

Around that time, I started doing musicals in Boston, professional musicals. I'd open the paper and go to the cattle calls. I was in Guys and Dolls and Man of La Mancha. That kind of stuff. I got good local reviews and had a lot of fun. But musicals didn't do it for me. It was always the same--the same words, the same tunes. You do seven shows a week and you think: if I have to do this song one more time I'm going to throw up. Of course there are some subtleties in every live performance--some differences--but basically, every show is the same and that's kinda numbing.

I came to New York in 1984. And I went to couple of cattle calls, but in my heart, I knew I didn't want to do any more musicals. And, at the same time, I began pulling away from the cult and I met a fellow who was a guitar player, a rock and roll guitar player, and I started dating him. He was a real good musician. And I started singing back-up with this guy and pretty soon I started to have my own band and my own show here in New York. It was the most fun I'd ever had in music and it just totally focused me.

The most important thing as a band leader is to know the song, know how you want to play it, have charts, have lyric sheets. Do the homework. Make it as easy as possible on your sidemen. And then the other big thing is organizing the line-up--finding the right players and scheduling them. You try to know as many players as possible so that at any given time you can call someone to do the particular show you need to do. The general rule is that everybody is always busy.

In my case, I don't call myself The Janet Burgan Band because it is not The Janet Burgan Band. I don't know who is going to be playing behind me. Whereas the Rolling Stones better be the five Rolling Stones, I frequently play with different people on different days of the same week. Bass players change all the time. Graham Maybe from Joe Jackson's band (right now he's out with They Might Be Giants) has played with me. He's very busy, though. My drummer, Steve Holly, is probably the most famous of us beside Graham. He used to play with Wings and was out with Clapton for many years. Dan Hovey is my guitar player and he's been with me for five or six years, although even he's not always with me because he also has his own band and his own CDs out. A fellow named Lincoln Schlieffer also plays with me. All of these guys are well known among their own peers.

I do everything, even the bookings. I call up clubs and say, "Hi. I'm Janet Burgan. I'm a musician. Who does your bookings? How can I reach them?" That is literally how you get bookings. It's that simple. It seems like the hardest thing in the world when you're dialing the phone. But I learned a long time ago that it pays to be sort of a pest. Not a rude person, just a pest. So I'll just call up and say, "Who does your bookings?" I don't even really say who I am, I don't tell them what I play. Just give me the information.

After that, after you make contact and get them your product, meaning your tape and your head shot, then booking your band is like any other business: it's follow-up. It's more pestering. You send the tape and ask them when they think they might get a chance to listen to it. And then you just keep calling them back until they do. You have to stay on top of all the follow-up stuff. And then you have to maintain your mailing lists--your press mailing list, your club mailing lists and on and on. All the parallel processes go on. Plus you have to learn new songs and practice your instrument.

I keep myself solvent by working as a secretary. There's no solvency involved at this level of playing music. Clubs don't pay. I'm doing many of my gigs free these days. I have to be able to pay my guys at least fifty bucks a man; they got to get drums out of storage or whatever. You gotta make it worth their while.

And the whole reason I have a full-time secretarial job is so that I can do what I want musically, so I don't have to do weddings or bar mitzvahs. I don't have to be a human jukebox. I'm really selfish. I only want to sing the songs I want to sing. And if you go into a suburb-y kind of place where you're playing at dinner, they want you to be able to take requests--and as far as I'm concerned, if it's not on my set list, I don't know it. If I wanted to make a living at this, I would have what is called a club date band, which does weddings, bar mitzvahs, and private parties all over Long Island.

But I don't do that. I do what I want to do. I play the music I want to play. I have a demo tape--and hopefully, one day, I'll have a record contract. But I've contacted all the record contacts that I have. And record companies won't take your material unsolicited because they don't want to get sued. If somebody says, "That was my song" and then Ricki Lee Jones does it--well, that's why there are lawsuits. You have to have someone who knows them present you. And I don't really have someone like that--I don't have an agent. I wish I did. I wish some agent type would come up to me and say, "Oh, you're the next big thing. You'll make me a lot of money. Let me help you." It's tough not having one, and at this point, I'm about ready to look up agents in the phone book and call them up and say "Can I come in and play you a song?" I am about ready to call William Morris and say "I want to talk to one of the music guys." I mean, what have I got to lose? I don't know how else to do it.

Between you, me and the wall, it's very hard to struggle all the time for bookings, and to hassle with all this equipment, and sing your songs and then maybe have somebody ask you to play a Van Morrison cover or something you don't want to play, then you have to worry about everyone getting paid, and then at the end of the night, you walk away with no money. I dare you to do that for even a month.

It would be so nice to get an agent and an established record company behind me. Then I could focus on the music and they would handle distribution. Distribution is it, as everybody knows. Somebody like MCA, Geffen or any of the big boys--they will get you into stores. For God's sake, they have their own stores and the reciprocal movie music thing. They sign somebody to their label and the next thing you know they are singing the theme song on the next James Bond movie. I would not turn that work down. I would just like to give the big time a shot. I'm thirty-seven years old. I think I'm ready for it.

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TO ARCHIVE