The World’s $#!%!est Gig?

The other night, I sat down with my girlfriend for a romantic night in, and we watched Titanic, that classic ’90s James Cameron blockbuster. Its enduring success owes much to its timeliness tale of love through the ages, arguably one of the most romantic motion pictures of our era. At least, that’s what my girlfriend thought. You see, she identified with the story of the two protagonists: Jack and Rose, and their forbidden love, lost to the depths of time, yet so strong that it endured even a century later. But not to me. To me, it was a damn horror movie. Because if I were on that boat, I wouldn’t be one of the star-crossed lovers, or even one of the rich ones escaping in the life boats. I’d be one of the poor bastards in the band. Oh sure, we love to look back with passing regard at the eight-piece string orchestra playing right till the bitter end out on the Boat Deck and say: oh how dignified, they played even as the ship went down. They were doing what they loved till the very end. Only a non-musician would think that. We musicians are looking at those poor buggars and thinking: ugh what a shitty gig. Even if we’ve never played on a literal sinking ship, we’ve all played on our fair share of metaphorical ones. So here’s a musician’s inside scoop on what the cats of the orchestra led by Wallace Hartley were thinking on that fateful evening in 1912: Ugh, I’ve