[Harp-L] The struggles with innovation

[walter gloshinski <waltertore@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Most hear(pun) know I make up my words and music as I go along.  I have been doing this since I could talk my mother tells me.  When I started playing music this is what I did. It came naturally so why would I struggle to learn "real songs" when making them up was so easy and fun?   Well once I started playing with others this idea did not work at all.  I got real confused, hurt, but wanted to play so bad I tried to conform. I was amazed at how narrow minded most musicians were with how a performance was suppose to be. I always thought art (being an outsider to it) was about new ideas and embracing them.
Long story short, once the music got grooving I would go off on spontobeat. I got fired from several bands and just started doing my own thing with guys that dug it.  At the same time I hid all this from the music business because once I mentioned my concept to record labels, agents, club managers, magazines, newspapers, radio, tv, they walked away.   
I recorded my first record in Belguim. It was also the first time I played guitar and harp in a band context.  I had a slick demo tape that had a great guitarist on it and I just sang and blew harp.  In the Belgian studio I just had my bassist and a Belgian drummer(spoke no english) I had just met.  They asked me why I wasn't playing any fancy lead guitar and why was I keeping the beats so similar?  I said I wasn't into the flashy stuff anymore.  So we made the record in 1 hour and when I went on tour with it the company asked why I wasn't singing the songs.  That is when I told the truth that I made them all up at the recording and do that everytime I play.  They dropped me.  I owned the rights to the songs and pressed my own lp and sold them off the stage with the truth printed on the back.  
So, there is some backround for you with the evolution of spontobeat and the commercial music world.  Once I had gone public it felt great.  Sometimes I think it felt like people that go public with such things that are against societies norm. I had been hiding this for years so now I was a house on fire to be honest with my approach. I felt like a cage door was opened and I could walk in the world like everyone else.  Yet to my suprise I was greeted with nothing but the normal responses that I heard when going under the disguise of doing the conventional rehearse and repeat music approach.  I would announce what I did before a set and when that didn't seem to make any difference, I made a 3'x5' sign made that said something like this:
walter is making up all the words and music you are listening to as he goes along. He and the band has no idea of what is going to come out of his mouth or instruments. He can't do any covers songs not even his own. This is called Spontobeat.
Even with that, I regularly got these 2 comments between sets from audience members:
*Can you play such and such a song
*what songs are you playing next set
*I will pay you x amount to play such and such a song
*I want to hire you to play my party but you will have to play such and such songs
These were common ones from industry people:
*I own such and such label and want to sign you but you will have to write songs and repeat them
*I am too old to promote your concept. If I was younger I would make you famous
*We will sign you but you will have to keep spontobeat for the encore song only
*we can't list you in the band listing of the newspapers under spontobeat because no one else is doing it. So where do we put it - rock, blues, country, jazz.....
*If you were an old black guy we could sell this....
*You can't make a record a day
*stick to your approach and you will remain forever unknown. Do what we say and you will make a good living playing music
 
It has been a very lonely road to say the least. The deeper I get into Spontobeat the more exciting it gets. I feel my music has never sounded better yet I am at an all time low with gigs.  When I was keeping my approach a secret I was gigging 100- 200 gigs a year.   Our culture wants to put everything in a box, label it, and know what is in it for eternity.  There is no box for spontobeat so it is ignored.  I often wonder why our species is afraid of new ideas?  Instead marketing guys are paid big bucks and tons of energy is spent everyday by artists trying to come up with some kind of catch phrase that will set them apart from the masses because what they do is so similar to the masses.  I dream of all this energy being spent to follow the road of passion blindly.......... 
 
Thanks to everyone hear(pun again) for giving my approach some acknowledgement.  One can go insane if kept in isolation and I am pretty isolated.   I hope someday someone sees my approach as unique and worth sharing with the word because I do miss playing live to good audiences. Until then the net is my connection for now.  I don't want to go nuts!   Walter