Problem Solving with Adam Schatz: Green Room Rock Photos

Hello friends, family, acquaintances, and confused readers who have mistaken me for acclaimed journalist and actual writer Adam Shatz. I am pleased to welcome you to my new monthly Talkhouse column: Problem Solving with Adam Schatz. The music industry is a 17-layer dip of fuckery and mishaps, and I aim to do my best to offer cogent solutions to some of our most perplexing problems.

So let’s get right down to it. This month’s problem…

Rock Photos in the Green Room

Now, as I gift myself the generous assumption that there is a reader, I must first make sure this supposed reader (show yourself, coward!) is educated on the matters upon which I am lofting my gripes. First thing’s first: what is a green room? I’m glad you asked.

Ironically named because nothing can grow there, the green room is the place where a band is stuffed to await the brief moments of the day when they-as-people can be considered useful and good. Traditionally, the green room is in the basement, sub-basement, or sometimes it’s a cute closet just next to the stage. Once in a blue moon, there are windows, and if you’re really lucky, there’s a full-size fridge that isn’t disguised as a cool Marshall stack amplifier.

Environmentally, it can be helpful if the air in your green room is two-parts “must” to one-part “damp.” Just the other night, I performed in a theater where the basement dressing rooms featured mysterious black oil seeping up through the floor — possibly ectoplasm, which would allow ghosts of bands past to visit us and howl, “Nooooo hot water in the shooooooower…” But I digress.

And I’ll continue to digress. You really want a little moisture in the air of a green room at all times because it’s the ideal climate for baby carrots to thrive. As you know, a baby carrot is naturally wet, an ungodly creation that is consistently offered up to touring musicians as if to say, “Hey, Mr. Big Shot Rockstar, if you’re so great then why are you eating such a tiny vegetable?” And the ego is deflated and another green room goes untrashed.

Yes, the baby carrots, as with many pieces of the venue equilibrium, have their place. But the issue I am tackling today is one without merit, and yet it is present on the walls of countless green rooms across the country. I speak, of course, of the rock photo.

The rock photo is like any photo, except the photographed subject is currently rocking. Sometimes it’s Dave Matthews strumming a guitar on stage, sometimes it’s Steve Earle strumming his guitar. Other times, it’s Steve Earle again but with a different guitar. In polling a sample group of touring musician and crew pals, I received reports of recently sighted rock shots of Sting, The String Cheese Incident, and surviving members of the Grateful Dead. My dear friend, [NAME REDACTED], wrote to me, with fear in her heart, that she’s been seeing the Grateful Dead everywhere. And almost immediately after I received that message, another friend sent me a photo of himself beneath a framed photograph of Bob Weir. Listen, if I wanted to see a framed photo of the Grateful Dead, I’d go to the world’s worst museum. But keep ’em out of my place of business.

I also learned that most often, my touring friends don’t recognize the artists in the photos at all. It’s tough to say which is worse, seeing a photo of someone who most certainly sells more tickets than you, or being surrounded by images of people you don’t recognize, which can cement one’s own out-of-touchness. Plus, it takes only a few steps of junior varsity mental gymnastics to convince yourself that those people you don’t recognize also sell more tickets than you, or at the very least are making wise investments and probably exercise every day.

No matter which path you take down the spiral, I posit that no good can come from putting framed rock photos on the walls of a green room. Yes, even if they’re photos of the artists performing at the venue you’re in. That’s where we’re about to be in a few hours, why do we gotta look at it right now? You’re harshing my dissociation, man! Hey, who dried my carrot?

Naturally, this brings us to a bigger issue: nobody designing these spaces has had to spend more than five minutes sitting in one.

Now for some sensible solutions. After all, it’d be simple enough to take the photos off the wall, and we could surely find them loving homes at a local hedge fund office. So what goes in their place? I’m glad you asked.

My Suggestions for What to Put on the Walls of Green Rooms Instead of Rock Photos

• Past performers’ W9s
• Sharper Image Vertical CD Player that only plays Sports by Huey Lewis & The News
• Eye charts
• Where’s Waldo? paintings with easily findable Waldos to boost confidence before the big show
• Suggestions for other viable careers, like Fireman or Widow or bassist of The News
• A few pieces of the art currently on the walls the Live Nation CEO’s second home
• A magic mirror that makes you look clean
• Exclusively photographs of the Beastie Boys looking cool and doing cool Beastie Boys stuff
• Lessons on how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius
• Lessons on how to tune a guitar more quickly
• Big signs that say the day of the week it currently is

And those are just off the top of my head. If you have any suggestions, please send them in to [email protected], and if I like any of them I can share them next month. Also, if you have any problems you’d like me to solve, send them in as well. If it makes me mad, I’ll pull deep from my energy reserves and see what solutions I can conjure up.

Thanks for taking me seriously, I mean every word.

Until next time.