Performance metrics are my life, or Why I'm Here And Not There.
This may surprise you, but sometimes folks just don't catch my drift.
Why am I wasting words on words, anyway? I'll just cut to the chase, and use my boy Strangler Mike as an example. (To add a rather wordy disclaimer, I love Mike like an autistic little brother that my parents were smart enough to put up for adoption. He rocks, in his own short bus way, and his success at superficiality in all aspects of life must be respected, but sometimes I wonder if he even knows I'm talking, much less that I'm trying to tell him something/anything.)
Mike is deeply into cover bands (I believe he was bitten by a radioactive bar band as a child), and as a member of the inner circle of a rather successful local bunch of future 12-steppers, I view his insights into that realm as relatively verifiable, if somewhat disturbing on a sociological level. Mike came to see me play the open mic at The Space on Tuesday, and, upon my completion of a somewhat ragged, but otherwise satisfying, pair of original tunes (neither of which could be easily covered by Blink-182, Green Day, Limp Bizkit, or Avril Lavigne), he turns to me and says, with full knowledge of my history in his chosen field of endeavor, "You can still play. Imagine how much money we could be making in a working band."
Now I must give you the boring part of why he deserved a wedgie. I apologize, but the truth would have come out eventually.
I've been playing bass for 17 years in July, and over that time, I've done a lot of work playing a wide variety of crappy cover songs. In January, I capped off a nine-month stint in a cover band of growing renown by playing the biggest club in the county...and quitting five minutes after our set. I was done wasting time away from the kids, playing other peoples' music for no money, being (at best) underappreciated by any sticky-floored date-rape showroom that bothered to call us back, and generally spending more time in a practice space (see also: a shoebox with a door, shabby even by UNICEF's standards) than I did in the house I'm overmortgaged on. Now, I'm no John Entwistle, Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, etc. (Oh, what the hell do YOU care who the bassist is? Only the drummers and bassists honestly care who the drummers and bassists are...and most of us are really ok with that. You can go fawn over the cirrhotic imbecile guitarists and egomaniacal lead singers; the bassist is the guy in the back, occasionally tormenting the drummer to stay awake, counting the crowd so those typically inebriated cerebral nullsets up front still get paid. We're cool with that. We know those cats are lunch meat without us.), but I do figure that if I'm going to work that hard, I should be happier at the end of a night. That never happens unless I'm working with people who made their own stuff. I've told the same to Mike about 70,000 times since I quit the cover band...ok, maybe it was only 50 times, but it was still pretty often. Mike's the one who rode with me the first time I went to The Space, when a very dark cloud had obscured the stars, and I had a very real need to be somewhere more nurturing than one of his dive bars full of hepatically-questionable karaoke stylists. (That's all the cover band scene is: it's karaoke at its most egotistical, and yet it makes enough money, at least in the case of Mike's acquaintances, to strangle any hope for an original-music scene in local bars.)
I just looked at him, eyes awash in disbelief, and asked him when the crack habit had started.
There's more to this, but it'll have to keep. I'm just about passing out now.
This may surprise you, but sometimes folks just don't catch my drift.
Why am I wasting words on words, anyway? I'll just cut to the chase, and use my boy Strangler Mike as an example. (To add a rather wordy disclaimer, I love Mike like an autistic little brother that my parents were smart enough to put up for adoption. He rocks, in his own short bus way, and his success at superficiality in all aspects of life must be respected, but sometimes I wonder if he even knows I'm talking, much less that I'm trying to tell him something/anything.)
Mike is deeply into cover bands (I believe he was bitten by a radioactive bar band as a child), and as a member of the inner circle of a rather successful local bunch of future 12-steppers, I view his insights into that realm as relatively verifiable, if somewhat disturbing on a sociological level. Mike came to see me play the open mic at The Space on Tuesday, and, upon my completion of a somewhat ragged, but otherwise satisfying, pair of original tunes (neither of which could be easily covered by Blink-182, Green Day, Limp Bizkit, or Avril Lavigne), he turns to me and says, with full knowledge of my history in his chosen field of endeavor, "You can still play. Imagine how much money we could be making in a working band."
Now I must give you the boring part of why he deserved a wedgie. I apologize, but the truth would have come out eventually.
I've been playing bass for 17 years in July, and over that time, I've done a lot of work playing a wide variety of crappy cover songs. In January, I capped off a nine-month stint in a cover band of growing renown by playing the biggest club in the county...and quitting five minutes after our set. I was done wasting time away from the kids, playing other peoples' music for no money, being (at best) underappreciated by any sticky-floored date-rape showroom that bothered to call us back, and generally spending more time in a practice space (see also: a shoebox with a door, shabby even by UNICEF's standards) than I did in the house I'm overmortgaged on. Now, I'm no John Entwistle, Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, etc. (Oh, what the hell do YOU care who the bassist is? Only the drummers and bassists honestly care who the drummers and bassists are...and most of us are really ok with that. You can go fawn over the cirrhotic imbecile guitarists and egomaniacal lead singers; the bassist is the guy in the back, occasionally tormenting the drummer to stay awake, counting the crowd so those typically inebriated cerebral nullsets up front still get paid. We're cool with that. We know those cats are lunch meat without us.), but I do figure that if I'm going to work that hard, I should be happier at the end of a night. That never happens unless I'm working with people who made their own stuff. I've told the same to Mike about 70,000 times since I quit the cover band...ok, maybe it was only 50 times, but it was still pretty often. Mike's the one who rode with me the first time I went to The Space, when a very dark cloud had obscured the stars, and I had a very real need to be somewhere more nurturing than one of his dive bars full of hepatically-questionable karaoke stylists. (That's all the cover band scene is: it's karaoke at its most egotistical, and yet it makes enough money, at least in the case of Mike's acquaintances, to strangle any hope for an original-music scene in local bars.)
I just looked at him, eyes awash in disbelief, and asked him when the crack habit had started.
There's more to this, but it'll have to keep. I'm just about passing out now.
posted by Thom Guthrie, Bassist and Adventurer at 9:24 PM
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