Some of us seem to be perpetuating a stereotype in one way or another...Not the drinking thing, though all of us will have those stories, but the musician-gone housepainter. I've known scores of musicians who either supplimented their musical dream with an occasional paint job or resorted to painting once the music thing failed to pan out...
I'm kind of the latter. Though I could easily have continued my career in music as a road bassist, two things occured to make a painter out of me; I met the lady I'd spend the rest of my life with, and the manager of the band I was in at the time was discovered putting the band "up his nose". The lady was in Cheyenne Wyoming, a place I swore I would NEVER live, but after a last gig in Tucson AZ, opening for Lita Ford (yeah, we drop names here
), I flew the next day to Wyoming to start a new experience...
I didn't have any experience or education in anything but music at the time, so, believing the that the easiest trade to learn and the fastest route to a good paycheck, as far too many fools do, was the painting trade, I started badgering a local painting contractor...Every morning at 5:30 am, for a week...They finally (to get rid of me, I think) put me on as a laborer, assigning me the crap jobs with the crap foremen. My first job consisted of hanging from steel trusses in a dairy warehouse, wirebrushing rust on the corrugated steel ceiling...I saw a half dozen other new guys come and go on that job, but I had something to prove, me and my knee-length rock-n-roll hair...So I stuck it out. I got made fun of, insulted, given those crap jobs constantly for maybe two months before they gave up and put me on their journeyman program. The path was laid.
Musicians are drawn to the paint trades, probably for similar reasons that I was, similar reasons that laid-off execs from IBM and Xerox are; They believe that "anybody can paint". I've seen a lot of turnover in the painting labor force, but the musicians among us, IMO, stick with it better than most, and a lot of us make good careers out of it. There are bands out there that are entertainers at night, paint companies by day.
It removes the stigma of the "lazy musician" too...