02.11.26: Things I Don't Miss About Playing In Bands...

I know I mentioned wanting to write about recalling some of the silly or downright stupid things I've heard during my time in retail, but this topic has me deep in thought instead.

I have been several bands since high school, and also spent years away from playing music live. I have reasons for both. The TL;DR version is I played with bands for the joy of making some extra money doing something I love, and I've spent time awat from playing in bands because of assholes that took the fun out of playing music as a side hustle.

I won't go into my whole personal history here. Instead I'll mention some red flags that I've kept an eye out for during the last several years since I left my last cover band in 2013, and spent several years on and off with a close friend trying to get something better put together. Basically, these are the kind of "musicians" I know just would not work out after one night:

  • The one guitar player that is self-taught but doesn't know even the most basic theory: the names of the notes and chords on his chosen instrument. (These guys seem to "teach" themselves off of YouTube and UltimateGuitar.com and don't bother with such important matters as note names.) Even worse: one guy like this took a break, smoked a joint outside our rehearsal space, and came back in having forgotten most of what he knew. And then proceeded to show us "an original song" he had written a riff to... only the riff sounded like a note-for-note vwrsion of T. Rex's "Buick MacKayne". Danger, Will Robinson...
  • The bass player who cluelessly was trying to learn a song off of hsi phone... while the rest of us were trying to rehearse an entirely different song.
  • The other guitar player who tried to take over the project and get us to stretch out all of our songs that he was willing to play while forcing us to play stuff like "Born On The Bayou" while he pretended to be Stevie Ray Vaughan for twenty minutes at a time.
  • The three older recruits my friend had found to be drums, bass and keyboards behind the two of us singing and playing guitar, having been appraised of our song choices (we had to sing them)... and not bothered to learn any of them. Plus the drummer going on a rant about how Hüsker Dü were an "irrelevant" band that "only lasted a year" (despite the reality of them being heavily influential and lasting almost a decade and still being foundly remembered and missed today, as a lame excuse of why he did not want to learn, let alone play, "Don't Want To Know if You Are Lonely".
  • The bass player that turned out to be a raging alcoholic that proceeed to ruin three shows in a row by being completely intoxicated to the point where his playing was way out of sync by the third set... and who once badmouthed an audience at once show over his live mic by asking them why they were just standing there watching us instead of dancing.
  • The singer in the same band who promised to let me find a replacement for the "problem" bassist... then ignored the two candidates I found because him and the bassist we had were drinking buddies. (I ended up quitting that band via text when I found that out.)
  • The persistent drummer who kept trying to get me to play in his cover band after I'd left the previous one, promising that "this band will be nothing like your old band", then sending me a copy of their set list consisting of most of the same crap I had played in the previous band. I told him if he let me rewrite the set list, I'd join. He declined. Years later, the guy saw me at my last retail job and tried to get me to buy a guitar amp "just like Dimebag Darrell's" (No thanks). I was already busy with Toy Piano so I told a white lie and said "I haven't touched my guitar in two years" (that was the fib) "because I'm playing synthesizers now." TO which he said, somewhat upset "You're the best guitar player in the area, I can't picture why you'd want to play keyboards instead." (Well, asshole, synthesizers and drum machines don't get drunk and don't refuse to play the songs I tell them to play, how is that?).

Ugh. No fucking wonder I started making electronic music. I'd better finish this before I spend the rest of the night on another rant...