Russ mentioned 20,000 gigs in his lifetime (unless he's including a previous lifetime in the count?).

I figured out a few years ago that my own count is 15,000 +. I went full time in my early 20's and have been playing full time ever since. Of course, you have to remember jobs were hanging off of the trees just waiting to be plucked in those pre-DJ days.

Donny mentioned in another post that when we talk we need to remember each other's background if we want to be understood. The full-timer vs the weekend warrior.

Speaking for myself, I've been through it all from the days you'd be playing seven nights a week and wore a business suit in the night club you were playing or you'd walk into a VFW and the people were lined up wall to wall, laughing, joking having a good time and just waiting for the musician to come so the dancing could begin. And the 2-3 hours overtime you would get on every gig. Right up to today's audiences who are so busy working their smart phones they don't even know you're there. Or they're sitting there making plans for when they can leave the event. Jobs no longer go 4-6 hours, they barely reach two hours before they're totally bored.

The point is, speaking for myself, unless you've lived through those times and through the days when you had a simple keyboard and you made it work, and technological breakthroughs in music equipment happened so slowly you had time to adjust, and changes in audiences, etc, you're not going to understand a person who has.

So Donny is absolutely correct that full-time professionals, those of us who took stagecoaches to a gig in the early days, are going to talk differently and understand differently and have a different slant on things than those who play on the weekends.

BTW: any others who come close to Russ and me?