Samurai Fly has a songbook that spans the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s and radio hits that you’re hearing today – probably close to 100 songs that must be ready to perform on nothing more than a shout out from the audience, “hey, do you know..?”.
It takes about 10 hours of just the band rehearsing, let alone the 5-10 hours it takes for an individual musician to learn their part, to make a song show-worthy. Then, you have to arrange the stops and starts in each song so that it can ebb and flow within the set list.
Quick math suggests that we’ve got over 1,000 band hours in our song book. Multiply that by 4 guys and you have about 4,000 man hours of effort that walks out on the stage on any particular night.
This is why working musicians are frustrated with the bar scene – it’s almost an insult to be offered any less than $200 a guy to work a gig that starts a couple of hours before and ends about 90 minutes after.
And, when you hear of bands working for free – “just for the exposure” – then you can understand why they’re not well respected amongst gigging musicians – (1) they’re driving the market price of our services down; and (2) they’re eating up what could otherwise be a paid slot for a working band.
Just sayin…