A Quote by James Iha

My first job in NYC was playing a gig in the early nineties at CBGBs. — © James Iha
My first job in NYC was playing a gig in the early nineties at CBGBs.
I was so happy and content with in life playing music. Music was always my first job and my day gig was my second job.
A lot of people know me from Instagram, and most of the concepts that I post there are my looks or my makeup. They don't know or remember that, almost every night in NYC, I am running from gig to gig and working hard.
I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief.
When I had my first gig, I was 18 in January in 2007. My first gig that I got paid, I was playing for 10 people in a 250 people capacity venue. The promoter wanted to book me because he liked my music. I played a couple of songs that made people dance. To me, that rush has always stayed the same.
I love entertaining people, I love playing music, and I love rocking like an animal. But at a certain point, you're playing gig after gig after gig, in town after town after town, and you're lying down, staring at another hotel-room ceiling, and it's like, 'I want to be home. I'm a dad. I've got kids.'
That period in the late Eighties and early Nineties was when I was playing my best snooker. My trouble was that I had so many bad habits that my preparation was terrible: people like Steve Davis or Dennis Taylor were model pros.
I have known people throughout my years of playing where maybe they had a gig, but then lost the gig because they didn't really move forward with them.
In the early Nineties, after my first round of financial problems, I started a studio in Kensal Road in London right at the time when no record company wanted to hear anything from Leo Sayer.
When I first started coming to New York in the early Nineties and seeing the vitality of the programme compared to what was going on back in London or Paris, it was just in a different league. It's like a 16th-century court.
No matter what - rehearsed, under-rehearsed, over-rehearsed, doubts about rehearsing - the first gig is always the first gig, and you put on your little praying hat, batten down the hatch, and do what you do.
My first job was at Zellers in Belleville! It's weird that my first job was in a store like this. And 15 years later I'm playing a character on American television who works there.
NYC is a wonderland full of passionate music fans. Once I got over being intimidated by rock critics and finicky hipsters, I realized that NYC was a great place to play.
First acting gig was playing a victim in 'America's Most Wanted.' The night the show aired, they caught the killer!
I was interning at a children's theater group in Kentucky - that was my first job out of college. I had jumped around a couple of regional theaters, and I was about to go back to Maine to work at a summer Shakespeare theater there. I didn't want to just jump around the country from gig to gig. I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community.
My first pilot gig; in fact my first job in television; was 'Freaks and Geeks,' and the experience of directing that pilot was probably the single most formative of my directing life.
My first pilot gig, in fact my first job in television, was 'Freaks and Geeks,' and the experience of directing that pilot was probably the single most formative of my directing life.
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