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MN Punk
August 8th, 2011, 05:01 AM
A lot of posts in the "Band Wagon" forum from people lamenting how difficult it is to find band-mates, some of you even saying it's not worth the hassle at all. I relay this story to you in order to perhaps lift your spirits a bit.
It all started a few years back when I finally watched the movie "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." It's a Mockumentary in the style of Spinal Tap based on an off-Broadway gay-anthem musical. Not only is it a pretty funny movie, but the songs are AMAZING. It drove the point home to me that old-school glam and old-school punk are really cut of the same cloth.
Then, a couple years later, I stayed up late and watched a documentary on NetFlix about the bassist from New York Dolls, and thought to myself "goddammit! Somebody should be doing this! Nobody does this in my town! I wanna do this!"
So even though I'm already in one local band, I decided to launch a side project. A band committed to the rock-and-roll spirit of 70s glam and proto-punk. I'm a pretty good bass player, and an okay-ish guitarist, and can even get by on drums if I must. I figured I would seek like-minded individuals and whatever instrument I didn't get, that's what I would fill in on. I didn't care what I would be doing in the band, I just wanted the band to happen.
So I put an ad in Craigslist with the headline, "CRAPPY MUSICIANS WANTED"
In it, I said I was forming a cover band that would favor music we loved over hits, and I looking for people who wanted to play too fast, too loud, and too sloppy with no taste in sleazy little bars in front of almost no people for no money. I closed the ad with the line, "freaks, misfits and queers strongly preferred." And I included a couple of publicity photos of Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, and Lou Reed to make sure people had an idea of what I was aiming for.
Oddly enough the FIRST person to reply was a bass player. He was a huge fan of pretty much all the bands that inspired this project, and had some suggestions for covers that told me he was on EXACTLY the same page as me. So... I guess I won't be the bassist. Huh.
I was swamped with ads for guitarists, and frankly had no desire to hold auditions. So I took the 4 e-mails from people who sounded the most "cool" to me, and told them they were in. I figured one or two were bound to flake out, and if not, WHY NOT have an army of guitarists on stage? It would be attention-getting, and it's not like we were expecting the checks for this project to be worth splitting up anyway.
I also heard from several drummers, almost all of whom flaked out. We rolled with the one that stuck around. A 20 year old kid who tended to rush a bit on tempos sometimes, but fit the style we wanted well.
So suddenly, I find myself with a band which I'm not only managing, but fronting, since there's no job left for me except to be the lead vocalist. I don't even think of myself as a singer at all.
Most shocking of all, the level of quality of musicians I ended up recruiting was OUTSTANDING. It turns out that the world (or at least the Twin Cities) is brimming over with great players sitting in their bedrooms or man-caves, working hard on their scales and playing along with their favorite albums, just waiting for somebody like me to invite them to join me on stage, and perhaps mostly by luck, I got the cream of the crop.
We eventually did end up with just two guitarists. One that plays a thin-line into a solid-state amp who uses a lot of effects, and another that plays a Gibson Les Paul into a Marshall JCM800 half-stack (of course) with nothing on it but a little dirt. They trade off solos and mesh like a perfect iconic guitar duo. We've also added an auxiliary percussionist, a keyboard/sax player, and two backup singers, bringing our roster up to NINE members! :shock:
We play covers of T. Rex, Bowie, Sex Pistols, and of course the Dolls, among others. We've mixed in a few from more modern bands like Electric Six, and obscure forgotten classics like Tonio K. Absolutely no "hair metal" or the usual wedding-band hits that all the other cover bands in town do. We've all got other jobs and/or other bands so we've got zero goals for accomplishments beyond putting on a show we can be proud of.
We've been through a few line-up changes, but the core of the band has now been together for two years. What's more, to this day I've yet to fire anybody from the band. My list of rules is short & sweet: Show up (or at least let me know why you can't), don't be an ass, and learn your parts on your own time. Beyond that, I tolerate just about everything. Oh, I take that back... One more rule came about: Our hand-percussionist is a cop, so he can't see anybody doing illegal drugs. As far as I know, nobody has shown up to a gig high, and as long as I don't know about it, I don't consider it an issue.
We've played everything from a rough gay bar in the Lake Superior harbor to massive festival stages to private house parties. Some gigs payed well enough that we were able to buy a band trailer for road-trips, while others... we effectively lost money from doing them.
Now we're working on writing some original songs. (Two years of covers before writing anything seems about right to me. That's how a lot of my favorite bands started out, after all.) We're also talking about taking some of the band "slush fund" money and self-producing an album to put out on iTunes and elsewhere.
This Fall/Winter, we're also working on putting together a "revue" show of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", in which we intend to perform all of the songs from the show, with me stringing them together with monologues while performing as the Hedwig character. (We've invited our friends from the local band Rape Door to be a part of that project, performing the song "Freaks" while I'm doing a costume change. They've informed me that they're excited to do it.)
I'm having so much fun with this band it's stupid. Some people have darts night or softball teams or bowling leagues... I have an enormous semi-pro glam/punk freak-show that keeps landing bigger and bigger opportunities and enjoys every moment of it. These people are like family to me now, and until recently they were total strangers to me.
So yeah, if you want to launch a band from nothing, you CAN find other players with the same goals. Even if you've had poor luck doing so in the past, keep trying. It sure beats sitting at home wishing you had a band.
(Shameless plug: My big ridiculous glam/punk band is called Parental Advisory. (http://glamarmy.com) The link takes you to our web page, which our fabulous bass player worked very hard on. Feel free to poke around if you're curious.)
It all started a few years back when I finally watched the movie "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." It's a Mockumentary in the style of Spinal Tap based on an off-Broadway gay-anthem musical. Not only is it a pretty funny movie, but the songs are AMAZING. It drove the point home to me that old-school glam and old-school punk are really cut of the same cloth.
Then, a couple years later, I stayed up late and watched a documentary on NetFlix about the bassist from New York Dolls, and thought to myself "goddammit! Somebody should be doing this! Nobody does this in my town! I wanna do this!"
So even though I'm already in one local band, I decided to launch a side project. A band committed to the rock-and-roll spirit of 70s glam and proto-punk. I'm a pretty good bass player, and an okay-ish guitarist, and can even get by on drums if I must. I figured I would seek like-minded individuals and whatever instrument I didn't get, that's what I would fill in on. I didn't care what I would be doing in the band, I just wanted the band to happen.
So I put an ad in Craigslist with the headline, "CRAPPY MUSICIANS WANTED"
In it, I said I was forming a cover band that would favor music we loved over hits, and I looking for people who wanted to play too fast, too loud, and too sloppy with no taste in sleazy little bars in front of almost no people for no money. I closed the ad with the line, "freaks, misfits and queers strongly preferred." And I included a couple of publicity photos of Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, and Lou Reed to make sure people had an idea of what I was aiming for.
Oddly enough the FIRST person to reply was a bass player. He was a huge fan of pretty much all the bands that inspired this project, and had some suggestions for covers that told me he was on EXACTLY the same page as me. So... I guess I won't be the bassist. Huh.
I was swamped with ads for guitarists, and frankly had no desire to hold auditions. So I took the 4 e-mails from people who sounded the most "cool" to me, and told them they were in. I figured one or two were bound to flake out, and if not, WHY NOT have an army of guitarists on stage? It would be attention-getting, and it's not like we were expecting the checks for this project to be worth splitting up anyway.
I also heard from several drummers, almost all of whom flaked out. We rolled with the one that stuck around. A 20 year old kid who tended to rush a bit on tempos sometimes, but fit the style we wanted well.
So suddenly, I find myself with a band which I'm not only managing, but fronting, since there's no job left for me except to be the lead vocalist. I don't even think of myself as a singer at all.
Most shocking of all, the level of quality of musicians I ended up recruiting was OUTSTANDING. It turns out that the world (or at least the Twin Cities) is brimming over with great players sitting in their bedrooms or man-caves, working hard on their scales and playing along with their favorite albums, just waiting for somebody like me to invite them to join me on stage, and perhaps mostly by luck, I got the cream of the crop.
We eventually did end up with just two guitarists. One that plays a thin-line into a solid-state amp who uses a lot of effects, and another that plays a Gibson Les Paul into a Marshall JCM800 half-stack (of course) with nothing on it but a little dirt. They trade off solos and mesh like a perfect iconic guitar duo. We've also added an auxiliary percussionist, a keyboard/sax player, and two backup singers, bringing our roster up to NINE members! :shock:
We play covers of T. Rex, Bowie, Sex Pistols, and of course the Dolls, among others. We've mixed in a few from more modern bands like Electric Six, and obscure forgotten classics like Tonio K. Absolutely no "hair metal" or the usual wedding-band hits that all the other cover bands in town do. We've all got other jobs and/or other bands so we've got zero goals for accomplishments beyond putting on a show we can be proud of.
We've been through a few line-up changes, but the core of the band has now been together for two years. What's more, to this day I've yet to fire anybody from the band. My list of rules is short & sweet: Show up (or at least let me know why you can't), don't be an ass, and learn your parts on your own time. Beyond that, I tolerate just about everything. Oh, I take that back... One more rule came about: Our hand-percussionist is a cop, so he can't see anybody doing illegal drugs. As far as I know, nobody has shown up to a gig high, and as long as I don't know about it, I don't consider it an issue.
We've played everything from a rough gay bar in the Lake Superior harbor to massive festival stages to private house parties. Some gigs payed well enough that we were able to buy a band trailer for road-trips, while others... we effectively lost money from doing them.
Now we're working on writing some original songs. (Two years of covers before writing anything seems about right to me. That's how a lot of my favorite bands started out, after all.) We're also talking about taking some of the band "slush fund" money and self-producing an album to put out on iTunes and elsewhere.
This Fall/Winter, we're also working on putting together a "revue" show of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", in which we intend to perform all of the songs from the show, with me stringing them together with monologues while performing as the Hedwig character. (We've invited our friends from the local band Rape Door to be a part of that project, performing the song "Freaks" while I'm doing a costume change. They've informed me that they're excited to do it.)
I'm having so much fun with this band it's stupid. Some people have darts night or softball teams or bowling leagues... I have an enormous semi-pro glam/punk freak-show that keeps landing bigger and bigger opportunities and enjoys every moment of it. These people are like family to me now, and until recently they were total strangers to me.
So yeah, if you want to launch a band from nothing, you CAN find other players with the same goals. Even if you've had poor luck doing so in the past, keep trying. It sure beats sitting at home wishing you had a band.
(Shameless plug: My big ridiculous glam/punk band is called Parental Advisory. (http://glamarmy.com) The link takes you to our web page, which our fabulous bass player worked very hard on. Feel free to poke around if you're curious.)