by CHRIS BARRY

I have been a card-carrying member of Montreal local 406 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) several times in my life. Never because I truly believed in the union's ability to bring about better working conditions to aspiring rock stars through the subtle art of collective bargaining or out of any sense of obligation to my musical comrades in arms, but because I had been forced to. Plain and simple.

Traditionally, the Quebec Musicians' Guild has never been much help to your average guitar-wielding bozo just trying to eke out a modest living through social assistance, the occasional performance royalty and whatever pittance might be left over from their big gig at Foufs after everyone else - agents, roadies, managers, soundgoombahs etc. - have taken their share of the gate.

And while the guild has never had too much of a moral problem coercing musicians out of their money by way of union dues, initiation fees and a whole lot of other crap like a bullshit pension fund that most rock 'n' roll players can never expect to see, historically they've offered younger pop musicians very little in return - with the exception, it should be duly noted, of an always compelling and equally well-written quarterly newsletter.

Seemingly run by, and for, the handful of dudes lucky enough to score gigs wailing for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, many local players feel that local 406 has been nothing short of an elaborate extortion scam designed to protect the old classical musicians and their well-paying symphony gigs, largely on the strength of membership dues contributed to them by schmucks like me.

Welcome, comrade!

So why would any self-respecting rock 'n' roll musician want to join up with these cats in the first place? Again, it's usually because they have no choice.

I first began contributing to the MSO's first chair oboe player's pension fund when I was about 18 and started getting invited on to the occasional television show to perform my band's big hit single - which went on to sell a whopping 2- or 3,000 copies, which I, of course, received no money for. Now, perhaps this was to be expected, in that we recorded this gem for mobsters, literally at gunpoint after having the audacity to actually argue with the criminals about how the record should sound at one point, but I don't recall the guild ever being too concerned with any of that nastiness at the time.

But what certainly was important to all involved is that we become AFM members before performing that record on television. If I remember correctly - and I may well not, in that it was a very long time ago and I smoke a lot of pot - I believe we were getting, as a group, something like $800 total for a television performance, from which we had to pay the usual assortment of characters, i.e. managers, agents etc., their standard 10, 15 or 20 per cent right off the top. For everybody in the band to join the guild, pay our initiation fees and annual dues right up front, it cost us a little more than what a television performance was going to earn us - even before paying everybody their commission.

But what can you do? You want to promote your record, you want to get on television, you want to become the next Prism, so you have no choice but to play the game, fork over your cash and surrender to the guild.

Ultimately, we wound up doing one television show as guild members, the record started stiffing and the band broke up. I stopped paying my dues, got suspended from the guild and didn't hear anything from them until the next time I was forced to join their ranks in order to do a live radio performance for the CBC. Once again, re-joining the union cost me more than I made on the gig.

Dues blues

Such was my introduction to the AFM. But they would always be an annoyance, and, as was the case with so many other young upstart musicians, they were rarely my friend and frequently my foe. Later on in my illustrious musical career they would send thugs down to a week-long engagement my band was suffering through in Halifax and threaten to shut the club down if we didn't all pay up our outstanding union dues - immediately. There could be no compromise.

And why hadn't we paid up our union dues in the first place? Because we were musicians, for fuck's sake, earning essentially nothing touring the continent in a 12-year-old van held together with gaffer tape. We could hardly afford to feed ourselves, let alone contribute to some symphony dude's retirement fund. But that meant very little to our comrades in the union, so we scrambled around and got an advance from the venue, forked over our dues and spent the rest of the week worrying about how we were going to pay for the gas to get home now that the guild had all our money.

But that was all a long time ago, and apparently, the times they are a-changin' with respect to the relationship between the guild and the latest generation of struggling semi-pro/semi-amateur indie musicians. And if the guild, which in theory might even be a pretty good thing, is to going to survive the new century, one might suspect that they have little choice but to start recognizing the concerns of freelance and rock 'n' roll musicians, who constitute approximately 80 per cent of their membership. These days the AFM can lay claim to fewer than 100,000 members across the continent, down from the over 300,000 musicians they represented in the late '70s. One can only guess why.

Making up is hard to do

Still, shaking off their legacy and improving relations with "emerging" musicians, as they like to call them, may well yet prove to be an uphill battle. The guild has decades of catching up to do in order to reduce the animosity and alienation the arguable majority of local musicians feel towards them. By last fall the situation locally had deteriorated to the point where grassroots organizations like l'Association des musiciens autonomes du Québec (AMAQ) - who claim 500 frustrated and disillusioned local musicians among their ranks - started springing up with the express purpose of opposing union initiatives and obtaining adequate representation for their members, with or without the guild.

Initially sparked to action after local 406 launched what many perceived as an aggressive and unreasonable campaign to regulate a minimum wage for musicians working the local bar/club circuit - a move widely believed that, if implemented, would sound the death knell for what is left of the local live music scene - this winter l'AMAQ began organizing surprisingly well-attended benefit shows in Montreal and Quebec City under the banner of "All Against the Guild." A handle destined to warm the hearts of the brass over at local 406.

"You know, a lot of musicians do not see the guild as a helper, but as an oppressive entity," says l'AMAQ founder Simon Jodoin, who also doubles as lead singer, guitarist and "propagandist" for local folk band Mort de Rire. "The guild understood nothing. Guys like us had been playing these venues for maybe 10 years at that point and really didn't want to see the guild come in and start messing with them. We were forced to start l'AMAQ to make the union understand that no, we are not exploited people, we are not employees of the bar, but just musicians using these venues to do our shows. And if we are the producers of our shows, then we are free to ask whatever amount we want when we play."

Top-down about-face

Much of the blame for the animosity between local musicians and the union mandated to represent them is being directed at recently-ousted longtime guild emperor/president Émile Subirana, a man Jodoin accuses of not only being clueless, but needlessly confrontational in his relations with both club owners and musicians. Paul Harwood, a director with the new union administration, agrees.

"Frankly, we understand what they [l'AMAQ] were upset about, because under the Subirana administration there was nothing positive going on. They were only interested in confrontation, and never prepared to open up a dialogue - which was going against the spirit of the status of the artist law. Instead, all Subirana did was take an adversarial position with everyone. But [under the new administration] we've changed all that."

Which may even be true. For starters, local 406, now under the stewardship of infinitely more popular president Gérard Masse, has decided to drop all legal proceedings against Simon Jodoin and l'AMAQ, old Subirana initiatives which Harwood claims were embarked upon "just to force the guy to go out and hire a lawyer" and waste his money in court. And l'AMAQ co-founder Sébastien Croteau, he of Café Chaos booking fame, has recently been hired on to the union payroll as director of the newly assembled Emerging Musicians Committee, a body set up specifically to address the issues and concerns of freelance and rock 'n' roll musicians. There is optimism all around.

"Under the Masse administration the guild has become a lot more co-operative in these areas that concern us," says Jodoin. "Now they consult l'AMAQ to get our point of view on things. They want to hear what we have to say."

Thugs out, dialogue in

Of course, what both l'AMAQ and the guild have to say about what can be done to improve the lot of struggling local musicians is still vague. How they intend to address the intolerable "pay to play" situation (where musicians must pay clubowners in advance for a chance to play) that is increasingly becoming de rigeur in Montreal clubs remains unclear, and only time will tell if the new spirit of cooperation will remain intact once the two parties start looking for solutions together. But at least there is a dialogue going on - one which I'm guessing will probably be going on for quite awhile, given that neither party appears to have a clear agenda on what exactly needs to be done, and both have told me that the immediate gameplan is to talk about it a lot.

For the time being, all agree that educating "emerging" musicians to the realities of the music biz is the best place to start. And to this end l'AMAQ has organized an all-day affair under the banner of the considerably less confrontational "Journée tous pour la musique," which will be going down May 13 at Club Soda, and will feature, alongside a slew of performances by local bands, a discussion panel which will include new union president Masse, among others.

Harwood is confident the new dynamic between the guild and freelance and rock 'n' roll musicians will reap positive results.

"This is all very new to us," says the one-time Mahogany Rush bassist and a man certainly no stranger to the local bar circuit. "We've just had one board meeting and are in the process of re-organizing, so there is a lot of work to be done. Plus, there is a lot of strangeness from the past few years that we are looking at financially, so right now we're just trying to see what kind of resources we have and then we'll be open for business. But I would say that the situation has already improved. We are no longer badgering club owners, and are saying to all musicians that they are welcome, member or non-member, to phone us and talk to us and we'll give them as much information and be as helpful as we possibly can - which was definitely not the case before. Give us 18 months and we are going to have all of these problems solved."