Diary of a Player by Brad Paisley Read Free Book Online Page B

now people know who I am. Good-bye anonymity.
    As the song “Celebrity” suggests, sometimes saying hello to celebrity means saying adios to reality. Almost monthly, someone out there reinvents what it means to lose touch due to fame.
    Some of you probably remember the video we did for “Celebrity,” costarring my friends William Shatner and Jason Alexander. The video made fun of what modern celebrity looks and sounds like here in the twenty-first century. Looking back at the video recently, I couldn’t help but notice that all three of us goofing around in the video were anything but overnight success stories. Here’s what you might not know: before William Shatner went off on any star trek, entering that dangerous stratosphere of fame and fortune, he paid his duesand studied hard to become a trained Shakespearean actor back home in Canada.
    By the same token, way before Jason Alexander became George Costanza on
Seinfeld,
he first became a major theatrical sensation onstage in New Jersey and later a Tony-winning actor on Broadway. It’s important to take plenty of time to get good at something substantive before you focus on getting famous. This just makes good common sense to me. And it’s true whether you’re playing a guitar, acting, or working behind the scenes.
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    It’s important to take plenty of time to get good at something substantive before you focus on getting famous.
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    But in our culture today, the paradigm has shifted. It’s a very different process, this fame-and-fortune game. In the earliest days of pop culture, people did something well and then became successful and known. The horse was properly in front of the cart. The horse being unique ability, the cart being fame and fortune. Now it’s almost always cart first, horse optional.
    That’s why I relate to guitar players. There is no way to cheat at being skilled in this field. If you are known for your sound, for your style, your unique ability, then you got there woodshedding. Almost no other wayaround it. Unless you went down to the crossroads, sold your soul to the devil, and made that deal. But that’s only happened once, I’m told.
    As a famous person, I look for inspiration in people who have earned their status.
    One of the most talented and successful people I have ever known is my pal John Lasseter, the groundbreaking and visionary animator, writer, director, and chief creative officer of Pixar who’s behind the
Toy Story
franchise and some of the greatest films of our lifetime. But before John ever ran Pixar and became the principal creative adviser for Walt Disney Imagineering in his spare time, he was a creative little kid drawing cartoons during church services in Whittier, California. Long before he ever became an animator at Disney, John got his first experience with the company as a Jungle Cruise skipper at Disneyland in Anaheim, and my guess is that John was as good as any tour guide they ever had at Disneyland. He is someone who always does his best at anything he does and always will. If you want to be a successful guitar player, be that in a guitarist.
    When people ask me for advice about “making it” in music today, the first thing I usually tell them is that they should try to make it—meaning music—in their own backyard first, beforethey start worrying about the big time. I could be wrong, but “deciding” to be a star and then rushing off to Nashville or Hollywood or New York seems just a little silly and potentially dangerous. It’s the easiest way to get that horse-and-cart thing all askew.
    There are lots of advantages to trying to be a hometown hero before you rush out and try to conquer the rest of a watching world. First of all, ask Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great: it’s a lot easier to conquer a small town than a whole country. Okay, bad example. But starting out taking things a little smaller and slower gives you the