There were thousands of people outside Red Rocks waiting for the show.
Inside, Jake Jones was walking his dad through the tunnels beneath one of the most legendary music venues in the country. They were passing memorabilia from artists like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. Jake was about to walk onto that same stage for the second time with his band.
This is the sort of moment musicians are supposed to dream about.
Except Jake was also beginning to realize that his band might be coming apart.
I keep coming back to that scene from my conversation with Jake on the Sober Life Rocks podcast because there are almost two completely different stories happening at the same time.
From the audience, this is what success looks like.
From backstage, it’s much more complicated.
Jake knows something about the distance between those two views. He was a member of the rock band We As Human, toured extensively, later worked as a producer and songwriter in Nashville, and now works in film production and post-production.
In other words, he actually got to live inside a world many people spend years trying to reach.
And somewhere along the way, he found himself confronting a surprisingly ordinary question:
Is this it?
I suspect you don’t have to be a rock star to recognize that feeling.
When the Thing You Wanted Becomes Normal
One of the stranger things about success is how quickly extraordinary things can become ordinary.
The first time people cheer for you, promote you, publish you, hire you, recognize you or pay attention to something you’ve created, it can feel enormous.
Then it becomes Tuesday.
Jake described a version of that happening on tour. The excitement of playing for a crowd eventually becomes familiar, and suddenly you’re looking toward the next show, the next opportunity, the next level.
The thing that once represented success becomes the baseline for whatever you’re chasing next.
Jake used two words that captured it rather neatly: “never enough.”
That interested me because we usually talk about success as though reaching it answers something. Jake’s story suggests that sometimes reaching it raises a whole new set of questions.
Red Rocks makes that contradiction almost absurdly visible.
There Jake was, inside one of those career moments that looks spectacular from the outside. His father was there to see it. Thousands of people were waiting. He was literally walking past evidence of musical history on his way to becoming a tiny part of that history himself.
And at the very same time, he understood how temporary the whole thing might be.
That is the backstage view we rarely get.
Most of us encounter other people’s careers through the finished version. We see the stage, the announcement, the launch, the audience, the promotion, the photograph.
We don’t see the exhaustion, uncertainty, strained relationships, long stretches of waiting or the slightly disorienting realization that achieving something doesn’t necessarily feel the way you expected it to feel.
Social media has probably made that gap even more familiar. We’re surrounded by everyone’s metaphorical Red Rocks moments without access to the hallway underneath the stage.
Jake happened to have an actual hallway.
The Culture Becomes Part of the Scenery
There was another part of Jake’s story that made the backstage idea even more interesting to me.
Alcohol was around.
Of course it was. It’s rock and roll.
That sentence alone tells us something.
There are environments where certain behaviors become so expected that we barely register them anymore. Alcohol and musicians. Champagne and celebrations. Cocktails and networking. Wine and dinner. Beer and sports.
Nobody has to stand at the door and announce, “This is the culture.”
It’s simply the scenery.
And when something becomes scenery, it gets harder to ask whether it’s doing what we assume it’s doing.
Jake’s perspective on alcohol has changed since making his own sober choice, and that has allowed him to look back at parts of the music industry differently.
One of those assumptions is especially interesting because it reaches far beyond drinking: the mythology of the tortured artist.
We’ve created a remarkably durable cultural picture of creativity and excess living together. The brilliant musician, writer or artist is chaotic, troubled, unpredictable and probably has a drink nearby. Somehow the mess becomes evidence of the genius.
Jake’s experience complicates that picture.
He didn’t find alcohol made the difficult work of creating more compelling. Over time, his experience was closer to the opposite. The desire to chase the lyric, the riff or the idea could lose out to something offering a much easier reward.
That makes me wonder how many things we attribute to a culture simply because the two have been standing beside each other for a very long time.
Maybe some of what we call rock-and-roll culture is just habit.
And rock and roll certainly isn’t alone.
Seeing the Room Differently
Jake now works in another environment where alcohol frequently becomes part of the scenery: professional events.
Recently, he found himself observing a gathering from a different perspective because he wasn’t drinking.
The event was supposed to create networking and connection, but alcohol had become one of the primary activities. As the evening progressed, Jake began noticing the disconnect between what the event was supposedly designed to accomplish and what was actually happening in the room.
That caught my attention because it brings his backstage experience into an entirely different setting.
On paper, the event has one purpose.
Inside the room, the experience can become something else.
That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re curious about at Sober Life Rocks.
We’re not particularly interested in arguing that nobody should serve alcohol at professional events. Adults can decide what they want in their cups.
I’m much more interested in the assumption that putting alcohol into a room somehow creates connection.
Those aren’t the same thing.
If the purpose of a gathering is networking, what actually helps strangers become comfortable enough to talk?
If the purpose is relationship-building, what makes people remember one another the next morning?
If the purpose is belonging, what creates a room where someone drinking a cocktail, someone drinking an alcohol-free beer and someone drinking sparkling water can all have essentially the same experience?
Those questions get much more interesting once alcohol stops being treated as the activity itself.
And that brings me back to Jake walking beneath Red Rocks.
There is the thing we’re looking at, and then there is the culture surrounding it.
Sometimes we confuse the two.
The cheering crowd isn’t necessarily the same thing as fulfillment.
Chaos isn’t necessarily the source of creativity.
Alcohol isn’t necessarily the source of connection.
Those associations can become so familiar that separating them feels strange.
Until something changes your vantage point.
Jake’s sober choice has given him one of those different vantage points, but what makes his story interesting to me isn’t simply that he stopped drinking. It’s what he can see now that he couldn’t see in quite the same way before.
The rock star mythology looks different.
Creativity looks different.
Professional gatherings look different.
Even success looks different.
And there is something useful in that whether you drink or not.
Most of us are standing inside cultures we didn’t personally design. We inherit ideas about what successful people do, how creative people behave, how professionals network, how adults celebrate and what belonging is supposed to look like.
Eventually those ideas become the hallway we’re walking through without noticing what’s hanging on the walls.
Every once in a while, someone gets far enough backstage to look around.
Jake did.
And there is considerably more to his view than I’ve given you here.
In the full Sober Life Rocks conversation, Jake talks about life inside the music industry, creativity, losing and rediscovering his relationship with music, making a sober choice, and what he’s noticing now in the rooms where he works and connects.
It’s worth hearing him tell those stories himself.
Stay Connected with Jake:
Instagram: @jakejonesofficial
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
