🎸For the People issue, we spoke with local rocker Izzy Reidy about the realities of being a touring and working musician in the COVID-19 era. | ✍️ pmontoro | 📸 Carolina Sanchez👇
. He’s lived in Chicago on and off for around 12 years and teaches guitar, bass, and ukulele in public schools through Music House. He joined the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers in spring 2020, becoming part of its steering committee and abolition subcommittee, and in fall 2020 he helped launch UMAW’s Chicago chapter with Monoculture multi-instrumentalist Olan Mijana and Izzy True bandmate Curtis Oren.
A lot of people don’t even get to the point of touring, because they’ve encountered that reality beforehand and it’s not workable for them. It’s like, “Holy shit, I’ve built my life in such a way that there’s nothing for me.” So a lot of people had to contend with that really directly after the pandemic hit. There’s no safety net.
We wanted to get more information to people about how a deal for a show works, and what the different deals at the different venues are, and create a standard. One benefit of being a musician is you can be like, “Hey, fuck this place, we don’t want to play here because they don’t pay people,” and fans will respond to that. They won’t go. That was kind of the idea, in terms of direct strategy.
For the vast majority of people who tour, it’s a net loss every time. You make your money playing shows, but if you’re a smaller band, you’re lucky if you get 100 bucks a night from the venue. That’s, like,Honestly, we make most of our money selling merch on tour. At the level that I’m touring now, we’re getting more money. But I’ve been touring since the week I turned 18, and I’m 30 now.
You’re driving, like, three to six hours every day. And then on top of that, now we’re scheduling in, OK, we’re gonna get a COVID PCR test every other day. Buying rapid tests is an expense now, and buying high-quality masks. Then if one of us gets COVID, we’re going home. So all that lost income, all that lost work, and nothing on the other side of it.
To me the issue is, how do we give artists the time and space to make art? We have the resources and the technology. So I guess what I’m saying is . . . massive global wealth distribution?
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