For the last few weeks, Arts Desk contributor Justin Moyer and his band, D.C. modern rock quartet Edie Sedgwick, were touring Europe. Here is his final dispatch.
Dear corrado90,
I write to express disappointment that you fucked me out of a 450 euro guarantee for a show at the club “Lo-Fi” in Milan on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011. Though I could express these concerns to you at your mobile number, I prefer the public forum that is the Washington City Paper’s Arts Desk.
Corrado90, I did not need to play a show at the club “Lo-Fi” in Milan on Oct. 26. This was the last show of my European tour. It would not have been difficult for me to simply fly home one day early instead of reporting to your deserted venue, which is located next to lonesome train tracks (but not a train station) about as close to downtown Milan as this secondhand building materials store in Hyattsville, Md., is to Washington, DC. I would have been happy to play a small club in the city’s center for, say, 250 euro, but you thought that a Wednesday night show in a venue that holds well over 300 people for a band who can (sometimes) expect to draw 50 was a good idea; that the venue’s remote location was not a problem; that the show’s confluence with a number of high-stakes soccer matches was not an issue; that people might come to see the local band, which, while staffed with very nice guys, sounds like Bush; and that you could expect to break even, if not turn a profit, from your half-baked plan. Further, you thought that, when fewer than five people came to the show, you would somehow revise my guarantee and not expect me to storm out of the building without playing.
Corrado90, this is weak tea.
Still, in a sense, corrado90, you have hit the jackpot. Though you have publicly humiliated me—-forcing me to end a not-entirely-unsuccessful European tour on a sour note—-you will suffer no consequences. I am not a large, angry man ready to settle any argument with fisticuffs. I am not a powerful man who can, with a word, summon my powerful booking agency to ruin your reputation as a Milanese concert promoter. I am not a litigious man who can page an Italian barrister to appeal to an Italian court for my missing 450 euro.
Forsooth, corrado90, I am a punk rocker. Though I can summon the ire of 405 Twitter followers and tens of faithful readers of Washington City Paper’s Arts Desk to my cause, I am powerless in the face of your nonexistent instincts as a marketer of entertainment and your refusal to pay me money that you owe me.
Corrado90, if you are not a man of honor, that is not my affair. I do not make it my business to investigate the ethics of random Milanese who sport unfashionable glasses, questionable haircuts and uncreative email addresses. But you have invited me to do business, and I must strenuously, if nonviolently, object to the fashion in which you have drug my good if not unimpeachable name through the stinking mud in which you and others of your cursed kind so ignominiously dwell.
In sum: Corrado90, you owe me an apology and 450 euro. Lucky for you, I accept Paypal.
Farewell, corrado90. I will now board a flight to America to lick my wounds, count my losses, and attempt to convince a legacy label which rarely releases records by active bands to press 1,000 copies of my latest LP which, if ever released, will undoubtedly sell fewer copies than some record released in the early-to-mid 1980s by a band that played less than 50 shows.
The Lord be with you.
END OF BLOG