Driving for Dollars

I’ve been a Driving for Dollars musician in Southern California since college, and it’s fair to say that I “cut my teeth” on the Los Angeles
free-lance music scene. My primary clarinet teachers and mentors were free-lance musicians, so I really grew up with it. Becoming a free-lance musician was my first choice – I didn’t want to be tied down with working with the same group of musicians in the same place – and the flexibility in scheduling and variety of music and musicians has always appealed to me. The driving for dollars part of it has always been a natural component of free-lancing, though I didn’t think when I first started out that I would be doing it so much throughout my career.

In Los Angeles and the surrounding areas everybody drives (musician or not), and it’s a way of life here, but dealing with traffic congestion is never easy, and I have never really gotten used to it. Early in my career I was willing to drive just about anywhere for the work, but for a few years there were some jobs I routinely turned down because for me the money was not enough to compensate for the aggravation of the commute, and I was very fortunate to have been in that position. Others were not and are not so lucky.

There is no typical workweek for me. It varies all the time. The most difficult schedules are when there is an early morning gig of some sort and an evening gig of some sort in the same area that is 50-60 miles from home and a two-hour commute each way due to traffic (all too common in the greater Los Angeles area), because you either have to stay in that area and spend the whole day with nothing to do in order to avoid the commute, or drive back home or to
your studio to teach, or to some other rehearsal or recording session in some other part of town, and at the end of the day you have spent 4-6
hours or more just commuting and not getting paid for that time.

A couple of weeks ago one of the orchestras I play in, the Long Beach Symphony, had a series of youth concerts in the morning and rehearsals in the evening. For many musicians that’s a two-hour commute or more each way because of the traffic, and it’s made more difficult because our rehearsals start at 8 PM (because of rush hour traffic) and end at 10:30 PM, and the youth concerts were the next morning. So, you get home close to midnight, and then leave the house by 7 AM or earlier in case there is a serious traffic problem (don’t want to be late), and after a week of that you get burned out but still have to play concerts on the weekend. Some musicians in the orchestra rented hotel rooms in Long Beach at their own expense as a way of dealing with it, but that cost adds up. While all this certainly has its challenges and frustrations, I have found that for me, the advantages of having time off during the day (at least some of the time) and working with different musicians, conductors, music, etc., outweigh the disadvantages. I’m also a bit of an optimist – for me it’s always good to be working.