San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover story
You turned to music to cope with the pandemic. What about musicians?
In March 2020, as news broke that Austin, Texas, had canceled the South by Southwest festival for the first time in its 33year history, Jeremy Stith realized he might not play another live show for a while. He knew COVID19 was bad, of course, but if he’s honest, he was initially excited for the break.
His hardcore punk band, Fury, was coming off a threeweek tour supporting its most recent record. Stith, Fury’s vocalist, has a day job with an East Bay coffee roaster, and he was happy to spend time with his girlfriend, settling into their new Oakland apartment.
Then, a couple of months into shelterinplace, two friends from the music scene died by suicide within weeks of each other. Both were in their 30s, respected figures in the punk and metal community. Stith, 29, looked up to them as older brothers, and it sent him into a dark place.
“It shook me to my core,” Stith says. “I had feelings of regret: I wish I had said this, or I wish I could see him one last time. But it also scared me, because it was the first time I really had to face not only what happened to them, but my own feelings . ... I think we all have that little something inside of us, and it really got a hold of them.”
Stith decided to seek out therapy, and he quit smoking weed for the first time since high school. Both have helped. But more than anything, he says, “I just wish I could be at a show with all my friends and mourn together.”
It’s not news that the music industry has been hit hard by the pandemic, as necessary restrictions have dealt a devastating blow to the careers of artists, book ers, stage technicians and more. But it’s tough to overstate the extent of the damage. For one, the industry doesn’t offer much of an alternative to performing live: While a struggling restaurant might have
squeaked by over the past year with takeout, there’s no real equivalent in music. Thanks to streaming services all but oblit erating physical record sales, live concerts have been most artists’ primary income source for a decade.
And live concerts — at least those in legal, permitted spaces — have been offlimits since the initial coronavirus outbreak. Due to the way the virus spreads in crowded rooms, music venues were among the first businesses to close and will be among the last to reopen.
While certain corners of the industry are flickering to life — new guidelines announced in late March indicate outdoor concerts may begin soon at a reduced capacity, and promoter Another Planet Entertainment announced that this year’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival is expected to take place during Halloween weekend — the future remains deeply uncertain for the small and midsize indoor clubs where most artists make their bread and butter. Meanwhile financial relief, where it exists at all, has been slow and scarce.
But many artists say they’re suffering in another way that’s harder to quantify. For most working musicians, a live show represents more than a paycheck: It’s a hub for community and connection. Music lovers know seeing a concert can be a balm for the soul, but for those performing on stage, the catharsis can be nothing short of sacred. That feeling would have been especially welcome in a pandemic year marked by a contentious presidential election, police brutality and a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a spate of antiAsian hate crimes.
So what has it meant to go a year without a live, inperson show?
“People are in crisis,” says Debbie Carroll, vice president of MusiCares, a nonprofit arm of the Recording Academy that connects musicians in need with health services and financial support. She notes that the organization has seen “a vast increase” in clients reaching out for help in the past year. A recent MusiCares study found that 51% of respondents had “low to very low levels of confidence in
“It was something I always encouraged friends to do, and something I respected, but when I needed it I think it was easier to talk about the idea of it than actually do it. I know I’m fortunate to have a job and health insurance (to help pay for it) in the first place.” Jeremy Stith on therapy
being able to afford basic living expenses during the pandemic.”
Even under normal circumstances, artists have a higher propensity for mental illness. A 2019 study by the music distribution service Record Union found that 73% of independent musicians had experienced difficulties with their mental health, including anxiety, depression and panic attacks. And while experts say the stigma about mental illness has begun to shift in recent years, selfdestructive behaviors are still accepted as the norm, or even romanticized, in entertainment industry circles. In the same study, just over 30% of musicians said they had sought professional treatment for mental health issues, while 50% said they selfmedicated with drugs and alcohol. The pandemic has not helped.
“I did get afraid that I’d get into a low place and just drink myself away,” says Camille Carlos, a Vallejo rapper and sound engineer who goes by the stage name Thug Misses. In a matter of days last year, Carlos, a single mother, lost both her scheduled live gigs and her day job with an audiovisual company, setting up equipment for events. “I went through a lot of the grieving steps at the beginning. That was the most stressful part for me.”
At 38, she’s been sober for about two years, and she quickly saw how easy it would be to relapse. Instead, she reached out to her doctor to talk about it. She stayed busy performing and connecting with fans on Instagram and TikTok. So far, in large part thanks to her home studio and her 8yearold daughter, Aria, Carlos says, “I’ve been keeping myself clean.”
That’s no small feat, given that the gigs that used to make up the structure of her life disappeared overnight.
“You’re seeing people who have lost not only their livelihoods, but their ability to perform, when for so many, that’s their identity,” Carroll says. “In some professions I think it’s easier to have your job and your life (be separate), to leave your 9to5 at the door. But with the music community, it’s such an integrated part of who they are. You’re seeing people say, ‘Without this, what am I? Who am I if I’m not performing on a stage?’ ”
“I know anyone who’s lost work is experiencing this at different levels right now, and I’m not trying to say it’s worse for musicians. But I do think music isn’t valued as an occupation to begin with — people think it’s a hobby. So when you’ve had to struggle through all these factors and you reach that point where you make your money only doing music, to have that unceremoniously pulled out from under you in a matter of 48 hours, to watch it all evaporate, and then have so little support at the municipal, state, federal level … it’s been really tough.”
C.L. Behrens, a bass trombonist who normally performs with Opera San José, Symphony Silicon Valley and the Stockton Symphony, has been trying to answer those questions for more than a year.
At 33, Behrens has been studying and playing the trombone for 22 years. For the past six, he was proud to be making a living off music alone — until the pan demic hit, and all three orchestras canceled shows for the foreseeable future. He’s been able to teach trombone lessons virtually through videoconferencing, but he also started working at a deli counter to make rent.
“My mental health has been volatile,” says Behrens, a San Franciscan originally from Iowa. “It’s more apparent than ever that music was not just a vehicle of employment and passion, it was a kind of emotional therapy for my Midwestern stoicism.”
He’s also been grappling with impost er syndrome since taking a day job. “We live in a capitalist society that, for better or for worse, has trained us to say our selfworth is connected to our work and how much money we make … and I’ve been realizing so much of who I am was wrapped up in being able to say, ‘I’m a musician.’ ”
As San Francisco begins to reopen bars and select entertainment venues, fall festival lineups might seem encouraging to live music fans, and it’s tempting to envision the imminent return of packed crowds and thundering bass. But Behrens says events like Outside Lands have little bearing on the livelihood of the average working musician. Smaller club shows, for example, bring up a sort of catch22 for artists, promoters and venues: Depending on a room’s size, the ticket sales from a reducedcapacity show might barely offset the increased costs of safely putting it on.
“It’s frustrating when people are like, ‘Hey, things are getting better,’ and I’m like, there are still a lot of people out of work. I still have no idea when we’ll go
back to playing shows,” says Behrens, noting that putting on a symphony concert presents an extra challenge — as does the typical symphony audience, who tend to skew older and are more at risk for severe illness. “A lot of us are really far from getting back to normal.”
“It’s a funny negotiation to decide how accessible you’ll be online. There are mental health aspects of going too far down, how easily you lose all your time, because you can’t just stop at the nice thing the nice person said. You always look a little bit too long, like you have to stay until it takes a nosedive.”