In my "yoot", I was heavily involved in music and gigging, in bands doing original material and in top-forty club bands. Early on, I discovered that making a pact with the drummer for dealing with equipment load-up would probably save both our lives. I helped him with his gear, and he helped with mine (I'm a keyboard player). Personally, I think I got the better part of that deal -- drums are actually pretty light by comparison to keyboard gear. . .
I spent almost two years with a band doing original stuff, touring and doing recording. We even cut a 45 that got some amount of radio play on the local indy stations. We were so farking cool. . .
I think that working with the band in
a genuine recording studio and seeing how things were done had a substantial impact on where I've ultimately wound up. Touring was actually pretty sucky -- half the time we were living out of the guitar player's van (four guys sleeping in a van sucks on a very fundamental level), and we made enough to eat and buy gas. The drummer had his own van, so all the equipment went into that. But at my young age, it was an "adventure", with enough scary edges and positive reinforcement to make it pretty cool. My memories of it are fonder than the reality warranted.
For about a year and a half, I made my living with a top-forty band, and we were gigging six nights a week. We had hooked up with a real hotdog booking agent, and we had as much work as we could choke down. My life went upside down, and I was going to bed at 3am or 4am and getting up around noon. It was a bizarre change of pace, but it was a living and I paid for food, gas and a roof out of it, frequently with enough left over for drugs and chicks
Looking back on that, I suppose those years were some of the best years of my life in terms of living and novelty, but it's not what I want now. I still regard myself as a "professional" musician, but I rarely play gigs anymore and have about the same attitude about doing that stuff as Greg_L. I like recording, and in the same way that a painter paints because "they have to", I write and record because it's something I need/want to do. Gigging every once in a while is OK, but I'd rather be tucked into my little rat-hole of a studio for 5 hours. . .
My day gig is occasionally demanding enough that I have to turn complete attention to that end of my life (I'm self-employed, so if I stop treading water, the business sinks). I haven't even unlocked the studio door for the past three weeks, but when I finally go back in, I will have been away from the stuff I was tracking long enough to have acquired a little objectivity -- so maybe that's a silver lining, in its own way.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, The music business has changed radically, and I don't think that anyone really knows where it's going to wind up. The internet has changed marketing and access, computers and digital technology have changed the recording process, and
the money in music frequently comes from different directions now. I like that I don't have to produce, musically, in order to make money -- money is a second or third consideration for me; perhaps not even that much.
I would really rather be doing what I'm doing now than most "live" work, but I completely understand if someone's motivation for playing and writing is live performance. There are plenty of people for whom the call of the stage is as strong for them as the call of the studio is for me. . .