“I took it personally” Steve Baker on lockdowns, and a better strategy for dealing with the virus
This is an excerpt of my interview with trumpeter and entrepreneur Steve Baker. Steve founded the Bull City Syndicate, which does a lot of weddings, festivals and corporate events in the Raleigh/Durham area.
Steve was hit hard by the Covid lockdowns and opened up how they affected his business, to the point he was one cancellation away from filing bankruptcy.
To listen to the entire interview, and subscribe to the podcast, go to https://jamesnewcombontrumpet.com/stevebaker
His story, as well as many other trumpeter’s stories are on my mobile app. Click here to access the app.
James Newcomb: Basically you said obviously COVID is, it’s obviously real and it’s not like COVID is fake, but perhaps, maybe the reactions have been overblown or maybe it’s just been taken out of context or just give a little clarity on what, on how you see that the reactions have been to the pandemic?
Steve Baker: It’s not very hard to understand, but I took this thing personally. Very early on his felt like an attack against me. Not the virus, but the government reaction to the virus felt like an attack against me.
Now you have to understand maybe a little bit more background about I’ve been a hobbyist political writer for 20 years and had never monetize that but I had gained a following tens of thousands of people over the last several years, particularly once we entered the MySpace and Facebook generation of social media. And so it’s something that I do every day, apart from my having to keep my chops up for trumpet and book and manage three bands and that sort of thing. So this is something I’m always done.
So when this whole COVID thing started, the news started breaking back last January, obviously my radar is up, my antennas are up. And finely tuned and then they became much more finely tuned as I realized that this just might begin to affect me personally.
First of all, yes, I believe the disease is real. All right. I believe that the disease is deadly. No questions about it. If I want to jump forward now 12 months and talk about the vaccine very quickly. I believe that the vaccines work, I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I don’t believe in mandatory vaccines, but I also don’t believe in mandatory lockdowns.
So we’re going back now to the beginning of this thing, to answer your question, how government dealt with it. Now as a writer myself, and also somebody who does two things, I am an obsessive reader. Anybody that knows me knows that I can’t have multiple media sources going at the same time and I never stopped reading all the time, even when I’m practicing my trumpet.
And I’m not joking when I’m practicing my trumpet. There’s some sort of visual media going at the same time. And then I will take my breaks and I’m re and I’m reading in between so you play an Arban’s study, you take your break and you read that’s what I do.
And so the next thing that happened was I started doing the math because I’m actually pretty good at math as well. So I started doing the math and I realized that no later than mid- April, there was enough data pouring forth from, and we’re talking about, we’re talking about Stanford university. We’re talking about UCLA, University of Stockholm. They were already releasing the studies from worldwide of exactly who this disease was hitting the hardest and who it wasn’t hitting. And it became very apparent to me early on that the lockdowns of an entire world or an entire state or an entire city were unnecessary, is that what the government response needed to be was a more focused protection of those at risk.
And that’s what the strategy should have been built upon. Had that happened, I wouldn’t have been out of work for the last 14 months. So that’s the basis of what we’re starting with from the perspective of two guys who were in the entertainment business, because we hear all about restaurants and bars being shut down. Nobody was hurt worse than the entertainment business. We were shut out. We couldn’t do take out service. We tried to do some experimental things. We did some driving shows. We did a series of drive in movie theater shows. Seriously, all three of my bands played on a drive-in movie theater and people would pull up in their cars. But that’s not what people want to do when they go to a concert, they want to press flesh.
They want to get sweaty and they want to dance. They want to jump around and and enjoy the event with you. That’s the reason for live music, is enjoying it with the person standing right next to you and the energy from a crowd. And you don’t get that sitting in your car with the windows up.
And the band is way off in the distance, on a stage in front of a drive-in movie,
James Newcomb: Six car lengths apart….
To listen to the entire interview, and subscribe to the podcast, go to https://jamesnewcombontrumpet.com/stevebaker