Playing Below the Radar

From the US Air In-Flight Magazine, "Attache"—August, 2003

Nashville, Tennessee calls itself Music City, and with good reason: home of country music, the Grand Ole Opry, and some eighty clubs, it's a place where musicians come to record songs, sign major record deals, find success. This past February, however, Darryl Purpose and thousands of musicians like him came to Nashville for a very different kind of success: they came for Folk Alliance.

Folk Alliance is a non-profit organization of about 2200 members that strives to support folk music and the public's access to it. It's a big tent, including acoustic, gospel, blues, bluegrass, folk-rock, traditional, and world music, and it's not your typical Nashville crowd. The 15th annual conference packed into a downtown hotel over three thousand long-haired philosophers, women with guitars, and people of color. Over the course of four days, they attended workshops on everything from visas for foreign musicians to retirement plans.

But they buzzed about the music. >From nine a.m. until four in the morning, bands and solo acts performed on banjos, string basses, even a drum kit made from suitcases and cardboard boxes, both at official performances and at "showcases" in hallways and private rooms. Walls fluttered with posters and fliers announcing some four thousand short performances, from the hip blues of Chris Smither to the Texas twang of Ray Wylie Hubbard to the bluegrass-swing funk of Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem. "Come on in," Arbo called to the crowds gathering in the doorway of her hotel room. "There's beer in the bathtub and room on the bed." They were great---yet they're almost invisible.

Three decades ago, commercial radio stations played much of the music you hear at Folk Alliance. Think Carol King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan.   Neil Young's folkie Harvest was the number-one selling album of 1972. But if any of those icons sprang anew onto the music scene of today, they'd only make the play-lists of a few college, public, and independent stations on the outer fringes of the FM dial.

That's because in the past 30 years, popular music has become corporate business. The big record companies want instant hits, for which they depend on radio. But radio stations, scrambling for ratings, no longer let jockeys spin whatever they like; instead they use tight play-lists programmed into computers. Many stations don't even have on-site DJs; the voices you hear might be pre-recorded at a remote location by a guy in a cubicle who also does shows for five other cities. Radio stations even get paid by record companies, through "record promoters." They insist, of course, that it's not "pay for play." The CEO of a company that owns 1200 radio stations recently told a Congressional investigating committee that promoters paid his stations merely for audience "research."

This lack of access to big record labels and corporate radio stations doesn't mean that this music has disappeared, however; it's just, as Folk Alliance people like to say, "flying below the radar." No more giant tour busses or mega-stadiums for the new Joni Mitchells or Neil Youngs of today. Instead, thousands of them travel the country in coach seats or their own cars, playing coffee houses, small clubs and even "house concerts" in the living rooms of their fans. The life can be hard---long drives, cheap motels, little time with loved ones---but many of these seemingly unknown musicians earn more than doctors and lawyers, and together they add up to a sizable industry.

Take, for instance, Darryl Purpose. He has the voice of James Taylor, the brains of Bob Dylan, and the soul of Willie Nelson. He can be funny and profound, and he can make they eyes of his audiences well up with tears. Thirty years ago, big-name record companies would have chased him. Today, he's driving his own car, booking his own gigs, selling his self-produced CDs after the show. But playing music makes him happier than financial success. He learned this while playing professional blackjack.

Purpose grew up in a working-class household in northwest Los Angeles. He liked to play cards, so when he was 16 his mother put in his Christmas stocking a book she thought he'd like: "Beat the Dealer," by Edward Thorp. It was the first book ever written about card counting, a way to win at blackjack. Says Purpose, "I've since forgiven her."

Purpose graduated from high school and went to a state college, intent on studying classical guitar. But a disease in his joints (since cured) made it too painful for him to play, so after less than a year he dropped out and moved to Las Vegas. For a while he was homeless. Then he sold ballpoint pens over the phone, and blew his paychecks in the casinos. When he was 20, he knocked on the door of a professional gambler and got hired onto a blackjack team.

Unlike roulette, say, blackjack leaves behind a memory in the cards already played. A deck with a lot of high cards creates an advantage for the player, so card counters develop systems to keep track of the cards dealt. It's completely legal, but the casinos do everything they can to prevent it. Because casinos spot card counters by the sudden increases in their bets when they think the deck has a lot of high cards, most professional blackjack players work in teams.

In one scenario a team member, sometimes called a spotter, sits at a table, makes small bets, and counts the cards. When the count looks good, he or she signals with a hand on the neck or a scratch of the nose to someone else playing the part of a high-roller. The high roller comes over, places large bets, and no one suspects. Purpose started out as a spotter, making $25 dollars a day.

Card counting, Purpose says, requires "an innate ability to process lots of mathematical information, percentages, and decisions. You have to be really good at simple math, under pressure." He was. A year later he'd been recruited by Ken Uston, who was the most famous blackjack player in the world.   Eventually he formed his own teams, and even used a small computer he named Thor, strapped to his ankle, that he operated with switches attached to his toes. By the time he was 26, Darryl Purpose was being called the best blackjack player in the world.

Playing blackjack is one of the few highly complex skills in the world where when you get really good at it, people call security. Since casinos fax each other pictures of winning players and refuse to let them play, Purpose became skilled at disguise. At one point he lost a hundred pounds, had a mole removed from his face, permed and dyed his hair, bought brown contacts and makeup, and purchased a $1500 fake goatee. He typically wore a three-piece suit, $300 shoes, and a full-length mink coat. Back in the 1980s, when only a few casinos in the world allowed thousand-dollar bets (they're now common), he broke the record for the biggest jackpot: $150,000 in one sitting. He was flying the world first class, staying at the best hotels, and burning up $100,000 a year.

But then he stopped. Why? "Because at best," Purpose says, "blackjack was just about money. And even though our culture uses money as a measure of success, I discovered that ten thousand dollars in my pocket didn't make me any happier."

After burning through his savings with "the love of my life," Purpose heard about the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament of 1986. On the march, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C, Purpose helped create a band, called Collective Vision. He recalls walking down the strip in Las Vegas, past all the casinos he'd been thrown out of, with a guitar around his neck. He says that march was "probably the single most significant event of my life."

Today, no more limousines, fancy hotels or mink coats. Purpose cruises the country in a 1996 Ranger pickup with 147,000 miles on the odometer. He is no longer making a killing, but he is making a living. When he started out solo, he'd drive 500 miles, sleep in the back of his truck, and play for tips. Five years later, he plays at least ten shows a month for upwards of $500 to crowds of 50 or 300 people, and sells dozens or hundreds of CDs afterwards, netting him about ten dollars per. At the end of the year, he has made as much as some doctors, and it will only get better for him. Greg Brown, another folkie most people have never heard of, probably earns about $5,000 per show and sells tens of thousands of CDs every year.

New technology is essential for this. On his laptop and cell phone, Purpose does all his own booking and arrangements, from wherever he is. "My whole life is in my laptop," he says, seven thousand names in a database, three thousand on email.   And like many musicians nowadays, he also serves as his own record company. Thirty years ago, producing and distributing an album was a cumbersome and expensive process, making record companies with deep wallets and big distributors a virtual necessity. Today any number of duplicating services will take your master tape and turn it into finished CDs for a couple dollars each. The internet then provides a way to promote and sell them.

"It's a really hard life," Purpose says, "but I love playing music for people. That's the greatest reward. And along the way, musicians like me disprove the notion that you must be discovered to make a living. No. You can build it one fan at a time. That's remarkable."

All day long, men and women at Folk Alliance have been coming up to Purpose and giving him hugs. "These are the people," he says, "that make it all possible." The below-the-radar music scene depends on the vast international network represented here, starting with many hundreds of folk DJs, most of them unpaid, who host shows on public, community, and college radio stations. Hundreds more risk their money to produce the concerts and give traveling musicians beds, meals, sometimes whole houses to stay in. Even the managers, publicists, and record company owners could be making a lot more money in other fields or styles of music.

"Nobody's in it to make a million dollars," Purpose says. "That's pretty unique. Instead they're interested in bigger things: peace, justice, fairness, sharing the wealth, the major philosophical questions of life. And they make my music career possible. I love these people." He laughs. "Without them, I'd have to get a job."

THE TICKET:

At http://www.musi-cal.com, a live music calendar, you can search for performances by your location and the style of music you prefer. For more on Darryl Purpose, go to www.darrylpurpose.com.