Intro
From a dark closet in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this is “Don’t Remember Me Like This.” I’m Nathaniel Barber. Don’t Remember Me Like This is a homemade, nonfiction podcast and diary thing. Every episode I’ll read a work of nonfiction (and occasionally, some non-non-fiction) prefaced by updates and goings-on from a life observant. All episodes are written, and produced and performed by me (for better or worse). This week I’m reading a nonfiction story titled “My Career in Music Comes to An End.” It was as good an introduction to Portland Oregon as I could have asked for that started out innocently enough.
My Career in Music Comes to an End
I moved to Portland to watch my music career take off. After a couple days getting my legs in a new city, I settled my sights on the Saturday Market downtown as just the place to get started.
But busking at Portland’s Saturday Market turned out to be a hilariously bureaucratic process. You can’t just show up. You can’t just bring an instrument and start playing. There’s a process. There’s a labyrinthine network of applications and scheduling for a surprisingly limited number of perches daring performers can reserve on the market’s webpage.
Depending on the perch, the reservations were booked out anywhere from a week to months in advance.
To be considered for what promised to be a tightly-regulated appearance at one of these highly sought-after (yet humiliating) spots, an applicant was required to submit several sample files of their work—as many as possible—by way of a submission form on an obnoxiously unhelpful and buggy landing page.
I was only able to submit my “portfolio” (a series of recordings) after numerous attempts. Then, crickets. There was a nail-biting period of consideration during which, supposedly, some anonymous judge was combing my application for who knows what. Maybe they wanted to confirm I wasn’t a predator?
And I get it, the arbiters of the Market’s atmosphere were tasked with creating a bubble of consumerism that was fun and comfortable and easy and probably aimed at white folks ages 35-72 with a weakness for homemade soap, essential oils, and cutting boards cut in the shape of Oregon. The last thing they needed was some awful jerk showing up with a kazoo and no pants, or worse, a utilikilt, to scare away the spenders.
Still, the possibility that my application would be turned down—and a possible prohibition from playing at the Saturday Market—was astonishingly humbling. I mean, what if they said no?
The eventual approval of my application (finally!) arrived with both relief and terror. I was not terrified to play music in public, though I should have been. Rather, I was terrified because this dumbass application process was the first indication of just how difficult it was going to be to launch a musical career in Portland.
My first of only two appearances at the Saturday Market was a two-hour spot on the very (very) fringes of the Market proper. I’d not been able to secure a street corner closer to the action. Although, I suspected, they were never really available to anyone other than the close friends/family of whoever was running the show.
I was committed to playing acoustic, in part because it sounded better and was more fitting for the 20 or so songs I’d brought to play. More to the point, there weren't any outlets to power an amplifier. But playing acoustic, though rich and intimate, was no match for the sounds of the city. I could have been playing commercial jingles, and nobody would’ve noticed.
The foot traffic on my lonely corner was a weird, brackish mix between market goers and random passersby who, at times, recoiled in shock to behold a grown man playing a guitar just on the sidewalk there. Some people stopped to listen for a spell, which was weirder than I thought it’d be. They had to crane in to actually hear the music over the din of the city. Others seemed openly confused as to why I’d chosen to sequester myself on this castaway corner, far from the crowds.
One man stopped to loiter suspiciously close by. He was missing a shoe and was hungrily eyeing my guitar case which I’d left open and garnished with a couple dollar bills (in case people didn’t get the idea). He did not appear to be interested in the music. Rather, he seemed to be doing addition, adding up the few bills in the case and weighing their value against the risk of a grab-and-dash.
I was playing Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town,” low and tenderly, as the song demanded. But I was coiled tight as a snake.
Thankfully, the man shrugged and limped on toward the market.
That was when I noticed another couple standing there. The woman was familiar. Debbie, a coworker. We’d only met in passing and shared scant brief conversations. She liked talking about her boyfriend. He was a musician who rode a motorcycle. She LOVED to go on rides through the west hills on the back of his bike. This, I presumed, was the man standing next to her with his thumbs hung on his belt buckle. They were both pretending not to laugh.
On the last, solemn chord, I looked up to applause which, though earnest and encouraging, was sad and mocking.
Debbie asked, “I didn’t know you play music.”
I demurred, “I’m not sure you can call this music, and this corner is…”
Debbie’s gentleman spoke up, “What are you doing all the way out here? You might do better over there?” He pointed to the Market.
Nodding, I said, “It’s a long story.”
His name was Mark. He had a steel-grip handshake but it was overly eager, so he’d only grasped my fingers, shaking my hand like a glove.
I said, “Can we try that one again?”
“What?” he said.
“The handshake. You only got my fingertips. And a weird shake is always a bummer.”
He looked at Debbie, is this jerk for real? Tentatively, he held out his hand. The second go-around was way better. The webbing between our thumbs and index fingers scissored nicely and, though he was still trying to break every bone in my strumming hand, it was a solid connection. 10/10.
He laughed, “Now that we got that out of the way…”
I noted that Debbie had mentioned he was a musician as well.
“Actually,” he said, running his ringed fingers through his hair, “I’m the lead guitarist for [I forget the band’s name].”
“Ah,” I said. “Okay. So, you play in the band then?”
Just then, Mark suddenly realized something. He snapped his fingers and elbowed Debbie, “You’re not doing anything tonight are you? You should join us!”
Debbie pulled on Mark's arm. She looked at him puzzled, horrified.
“Oh, come on,” said Mark. “It’ll be tops. You can use my wristband and we’ll get you into all the shows.” He pointed at the guitar hanging around my neck like an albatross. “You like music, yes? I can introduce you around to some folks. Getting started in this town is all about the people you know. So, you have to join us tonight!”
Debbie explained, there was some kind of festival going on, like those terrible gatherings out in the desert. But instead of several stages where bands battled to be heard over each other, these shows took place at separate venues around town. Because Mark’s band was playing one of the shows, and that he was a real who’s-who in the local scene, he’d received several bracelets so he and friends could get into any show they wanted.
It did not sound like a terrible idea.
But I said, “I have to work tonight.”
Mark pressed, “You should skip!” He nudged Debbie again, “You guys work together right? You called in “sick” just the other day. Yes, you should be “sick” today and join us tonight.”
Debbie blushed and smiled apologetically, since I was the one who’d covered her shift.
“Anyway, we’ll be going until morning. So, join us after work. Or earlier if you can’t get out of your shift.”
That evening, at the front desk, I was kicking myself for not taking up Mark on his terrible offer. Awkward as it would have been, at least I’d be getting out there and meeting new people, people who, as Mark boasted, were real heavyweights in the Portland scene.
Instead, I tried concentrating on how I’d made the right decision—passing on the opportunity to hang with an alpha male and his always-tired girlfriend who clearly wasn’t pumped to hang with her new coworker, and several other randos.
And the way he ran his hand through his hair while he spoke. Who did that?
And the way he said “actually.”
“Actually, I’m the lead guitarist.”
To this day, I have a hard time with the word, “actually.” Whatever comes after an “actually,” is probably terrible.
“Actually, I studied in Paris for two years.”
The only time actually doesn’t make me want to actually barf is when it’s interchangeable with “literally.”
“That person is actually dead right now.”
By the time I thoroughly convinced myself I’d made the right decision to work instead of going out, Trish, our supervisor, appeared at the front desk. She looked out over the empty lobby and noted the obvious: it was a very slow night. And she said we didn’t need so many people on the clock sitting around, doing nothing.
“When you have time to lean,” she called out, her hands perched resolute at her hips. “You have time to clean.”
I poked my head from underneath one of the service kiosks. I’d just finished organizing the cables for a desk that nobody was going to look under and invited Trish to look under the desk, at the zip-tied rattail of cords, trained along the crevasse to the power strip below.
Trish said, “Fine.”
She continued, “You can draw straws. You decide who goes home early.”
And before I could jump right out of my pants, I called dibs. Seconds later, I was pedaling breathlessly downtown.
I was off work two and a half hours ahead of schedule! It was times like these that the world smelled a little sweeter, even if it still reeked like a days-dead labrador retriever that’d been pulled from the Willamette. It was a world that I would have otherwise missed. The gamey, summer-baked river air ran over my skin like warm butter.
Mark shouted when he saw me walk in the bar, “EXCELLEEEENNNT!” and he surprised me with a massive, breath-taking hug. “I knew you’d come! Hey guys,” he shouted to a leathery group of grumpy tightpants crouched around a table in the back. “Hey come check out this fucker’s handshake!”
Right away it became apparent I’d been invited along to add to Mark’s entourage. We followed Mark from venue to venue, crisscrossing downtown at a breakneck pace that had less to do with seeing any actual performances and more to do with being seen at every spot in one night.
On the bright side, I was lucky to have been treated to such an economical introduction to the city, especially since I knew nothing about any of the venues we were visiting, or anything about downtown for that matter. Mark was more than happy to fill me in. He knew everybody who was anybody, every sound guy and bouncer downtown.
We didn’t show up to a show, we arrived. But just as I was getting into a show, Mark or one of his many friends would locate me in the crowd. “Come on! We’re headed to Satyricon!”
I had to shout in their ear, “What’s a Satyricon?”
They shouted back, “It’s a bar!”
Fifteen minutes later, someone else found me trying to catch the bartender at the Satyricon.
“You’ll never get a beer here. Not in a million years!” they shouted.
“Okay!”
“Come on,” they shouted. “We’re going to the Wonder Ballroom!”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a ballroom!”
This went on and on.
Eventually I just stopped asking where we were going and just went along. There was only one or two moments of rest. The team—we felt like a team now, comrades—regrouped and strategized the remainder of the evening. I attempted to make fun but polite small talk, noting that the only thing could make the night more rock-n-roll would be doing cocaine in the bathroom.
Mark grabbed my shirt and said close, “Wait, what?!”
He seemed genuinely concerned.
I joked, “We should do some coke in the bathroom.”
Surprised and worried, Mark looked left, then right, then said low, “Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “I only brought a gram to share!!”
I met his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.
He said, “How do you share just a gram with all these people!”
Next, Mark was leading us to another venue called Magic Garden. My feet were throbbing, killing me. But I dared not say anything. Besides, wearing bike shoes was my fault. I could have rode home and dressed more appropriately, but nooo. I’d been clownishly click-clacking along the whole night like a show pony.
The first thing I noticed about the Magic Garden was the stage. It was about the size of a postage stamp. I thought this was hilarious and wanted to share the joke with one of my new friends. I asked, if the band played right in the crowd?
“What?!” he shouted.
“That stage! Can it even fit a drum set?”
He looked at the stage, then back to me. “I mean,” I said. “Where does the rest of the band play?”
Finally he got the joke, which I didn’t know was a joke. But we laughed together anyway. We laughed and laughed. I was excited to have made a new friend so easily! He told me I was hilarious, and I couldn’t help but agree.
We were standing in line at the bar. I noticed a woman walking around talking to people. She was wearing a sheer bra. A very sheer bra, and a dumpy pair of lacy undies.
I tugged at my friend’s sleeve. “Is this a thing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he said.
I didn’t have time to explain how, just two days earlier I’d met a friend at a bar close to my apartment. And sitting just behind us was a man wearing only socks and shoes. He was buck naked and sitting on a barstool in nothing but his bare ass. It was hilarious! Mysteriously, nobody told him to put on clothes, not even when he got up to play a lively game of pool. This went on for hours.
“I mean,” I said. “Is this like, a Portland thing?”
My new friend looked at the woman in her underwear and then at me, puzzled. “I think panties are a pretty universal thing by now?”
The bartender was looking at me, she said, “What!”
I took my beer to a place far away from the crush of people surrounding the tiny stage. I found a nook way back by the cash machine. At least the bar was tiny. “Far away” from the stage was still very close, once the band showed up that is.
Eventually, the woman in underthings found me. She said, “And how are you tonight?”
Not knowing what to say, I said, “Thanks!”
Suddenly, there was music. There was no band, just an incredible sound system and a puny light show. The woman stepped up to the tiny stage, whipping the crowd of mostly men into a frenzy.
I caught eyes with my friend across the bar. He mouthed, THERE IS NO BAND.
So now, the tiny stage made a lot more sense.
I was embarrassed and I wanted to leave. But I’d just bought an overpriced beer. And more to the point, I felt like I should ask Mark for permission to leave, or at least thank him for the bracelet and to get his phone number.
On the stage, the shear bra and the dumpy drawers were flung away.
Sitting close to the bar, I watched an old man wearing army fatigues. He was folding immaculate figurines out of dollar bills. From what I could tell, he folded a crane, a swan, a sparrow. A lot of birds. From time to time he’d look up, but he wasn’t watching the show, he was watching his impossibly thick fingers origami a giraffe out of a one dollar bill. He placed the giraffe on the stage, and to the thrumming music, the giraffe was delicately pinched and carried away in the woman’s buttocks.
In front of me—on the floor in front of the cash machine—I saw there was a pile of cash.
It looked like a lot of money! Did anyone else see? No, all eyes were on the stage. I looked again. It was a huge wad of money just sitting on the floor in front of me.
I tried to act casual, and drink my beer casually, nodding my head along with the music.
I looked again. The money was still there on the floor. A man came from the bar, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He stepped right onto the pile of cash as he tapped a cigarette against his thumb knuckle, pushing the door outside.
Without thinking, I placed my beer on top of the cash machine and took a long, dramatic yawn, stretching to the ceiling. (If strip-club yoga was a thing, Portland would be the place.) I took another sweeping stretch down to the floor and scooped up the pile of money and, continuing the motion, slithered outside into the cool summer air.
Probably, I’d just burned my one contact in the local scene, and the trek across town on hamburger feet was slow going. But it was some consolation to be on my own again, and with my pockets stuffed full of cash. When I was far enough from the Magic Garden, I stopped to count the money. Rather than hundreds and hundreds of dollars (what I was hoping for) the stack of bills turned out to be all ones.
My next shift at the Saturday Market began at 8am the next morning—Sunday. Hardly any of the Market had been set up by then. There were no shoppers. There was nobody, just a scramble of groggy vendors who all looked like they’d had the same night I had. Top-heavy and puffy, they were all setting up shop for the day.
Still, obediently, I dared not venture from my far-flung corner, blocks away from what would, hours later, be a lazy but busy Sunday marketplace.
One man did stop, however. He was actually listening to me play. He recognized the song. He laughed a little and snapped his fingers, dancing along to the melody. Then, he was dancing a little too close, and I noticed he wasn’t dancing. He was pretending to dance, with his eyes locked on the open guitar case and the few scattered dollar bills.
He was wearing only one shoe.
Epilogue
Thank you for joining me for this episode of “Don’t Remember Me Like This.”
I should mention, I never really had any promise as a professional musician. I’m not being facetious or overly humble. It’s the truth.
Though I was committed, and spent a great deal of time working to that end, it took me way too long to realize that a career in music had little to do with actually playing music and more about creative strategies for self promotion and catering to the inner politics of an insular community of gatekeepers who’d often regard a new musician not as one of their own or someone who might add a new flavor or fresh air to a local scene, but as a thief or, at best, an opportunist who was trying to angle-in on someone else’s hard-fought slice of the pie.
It’s not as if the entertainment industry was unique in this regard from any other marketplace. I found manufacturing, food service, construction, office work, customer service, hospitality, and marketing all have similarly intricate networks of intrigue and politics of merit. It’s just that I eventually found the levers and mechanics of the entertainment industry to be uniquely intolerable, to the point that gaining any real purchase in the hustle was, for me, a non-reality.
I just wanted to play music and make connections with my audience. But to play music to an audience, you couldn’t just go out and play to the people and build your fan base from there. I mean, some musicians have been able to do that and, for them, mazel tov. But for the rest of us, to get any venue to consider booking your act, a musician had to demonstrate “draw.” You had to convince either a booking agent or a bartender, or somebody on the inside that it was worth the venue’s time to book your act. This makes sense from a business perspective. The venue isn’t in the music business for charity. They need to make money. So you can’t just book shows for bands whose only draw is a handful of friends and relatives who refuse to buy drinks at the bar. But the best, and possibly the only way to create draw was to play shows. As many as possible. So which one is it? Play a bunch of show’s to create a following? Or, somehow materialize a committed fanbase from thin air?
I didn’t see a way past this chicken-and-the-egg scenario. Or, I didn’t have the patience for any of it (hence my ill-fated attempt at busking at the Saturday Market). But also, if I’m honest, the music I wrote and performed might not have been very good. So there was that.
I did manage to book a couple shows here and there. One time in Bellingham I’d booked a spot as an opening act for a bigger band. That night, I was meeting my tangential coworkers, musicians in the other bands, and when the lead singer and guitarist from the headlining act proposed that they open for me, I was not only naively flattered but I was all too eager to oblige them.
Stupidly I’d thought this was a promotion, they want to open for us! Also, their drummer had a thing he needed to get to. But, they wanted to open for us! What an honor!
Without consulting anyone in my band, I’d been sweet-talked into taking that night’s headlining spot. It was already 9:30. On a Thursday. And out of three bands, none had yet taken the stage.
The headlining act played our opening set, which was supposed to be a half hour. They played for an hour and a half (¾ of which were rambling guitar solos and drum solos that went on forever and ever).
The second act was a rowdy post-punk outfit that also went long beyond their allotted time. And their bass player repeatedly used my keyboard amplifier as a platform to scramble up and jump off. After each band's set, I didn’t say anything. Had I given each of them a well-deserved piece of my mind, I’d have effectively blacklisted our band from ever playing with them again.
I’m happy to hear this is not the case in every local scene. I have a couple working musician friends here in Saint Paul and they have great things to say about the camaraderie and partnership between musicians here. I’ve heard the music scene here is quite the opposite of Portland’s cliquey, pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you scene.
If you’d like to learn more about me and my work visit me at (you’re already here) where you can either peruse my obnoxiously extensive portfolio of photography or pick up a copy of my book, Luck Favors the Prepared. I highly recommend supporting this podcast, which can be as easy as telling a friend or an enemy about Don’t Remember Me Like This, and giving it the thumbs up wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to help me out financially, you can send me money either at Patreon where you can find me at Don’t Remember Me Like This or direct through my website at nathanielbarber.com. Your generous support helps keep this podcast going. Thank you for listening. Until next time remember, please, don’t remember me like this.
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