What Kind Of Band Are You In?

I'm always amused by how different a band's description of themselves is from what I see. You know, your friend says he plays in a rock band, and you want to come out and show some support. So you put on your classic Def Leppard shirt, make sure you have a taxi service on call in case you drink too much Jack Daniels, and pump some Foo Fighters on the way to the show. Then you arrive and see him backing a cute married couple who show an affinity for the Carpenters.

Or how about the band that thinks they are a power pop band, but plays eight minute songs filled with extended solos: they're a jam band. Those bands will send demos out to labels which focus on power pop and have no idea why they get rejected.

The worst, to me, are the people who say, they are "pro players" but have to cancel every practice for various excuses which sometimes involve family deaths, work, or pet emergencies.

So, let us help out those bands with my personal rules for defining who you are.

Your fans love your cover of (Pick one: Free Fallin, Sweet Home Alabama, Wagon Wheel, Brown Eyed Girl, Watchtower) or any such song: You are in a cover band. Even if you play 90% originals, you're a cover band.

You wear black t-shirts, have lots of tattoos, and your fans look angry: Punk

You wear black t-shirts, have lots of tattoos, and your fans look happy: Rock-a-billy

You wear black t-shirts, have lots of tattoos, and your fans look sad: Emo

You wear black t-shirts, have lots of tattoos, and your fans look bored: Maroon 5.

Your guitarist riffs and solos more than the singer sings, but he can't read music: Metal

Your guitarist riffs and solos more than the singer sings, but he writes music on staff paper: Jazz

Your bassist plays passing tones, scales, fills, and avoids repeating patterns the entire show: Jam band

Your drummer plays the same song different ways each time because of what he "feels in the moment": Jam band

Jazz or Jam? Lots of soling by several musicians, long songs, melodic interpretation, overriding theme, and purposeful transitions: Jazz.

Lots of soloing by all musicians in band, often at the same time, without purpose or direction, but everyone gets high and pretends to follow along through excruciatingly long songs: Jam

Two members of your band are dating each other: A band soon to break up

Your girlfriend is jealous of all the attention you get at shows and wishes you'd play out less: a band on the right path.

Your girlfriend doesn't bother to come to the shows or ask how many girls were there: either a band on the wrong path or your girlfriend is about to leave you.

Local press hails you as the Under-appreciated Next Big Thing: Band with no fans and about to break up

Local press refuses to write about you unless mocking your fans: Next Big Thing

You play to a room where people sit at tables: Folk band

You play to a room without chairs but people sit: Emo

You play to a room where tables and chairs get knocked over: Good band.

Any member has, for any reason, worn shorts and flip flops on stage: beach bar cover band

For every time your singer says "It's great to be here": whatever your band is, you are one step closer to being a Lounge Band

You've been nominated as "Best Garage/ Underground Band": you are sloppy

Your set includes three original songs with different girls names: cliche pop band

Your shows are sparsely attended by guys with beards and girls with nerd glasses, nobody really listens to your CDs more than once, but you sell a ton of them: Indie band

If any member can quote three Dylan tunes and you all know what a 1-4-5 pattern is: feel free to describe yourself as Americana, that seems to be all it takes

You call yourself Americana, but nobody plays fiddle, banjo, piano, or washboard, yet your singer also plays acoustic guitar: you're pop. Or modern country, which is pop. 

There are at least three times the number of people in the audience as there are band members on any given night, and more than one fan will call out the names of your songs during your set: Successful Band

You really want to be punk, but just can't seen to maintain the necessary anger no matter how much you abuse yourself: Power Pop

Your bio includes "indescribable," or "hard to categorize": you sound exactly like a bad version of another famous band

Your bio includes a description of how the members all met in high school: Boring Band

Your bio focuses on the story of how the members met at a Maroon 5 concert: Really Boring Band

You plan a tour to take advantage of fishing season along the way: Southern Rock

Your first band photo shows all the members staring into space off camera in front of a naturally or architecturally unique backdrop: every band

You know how to pee into a soda bottle while driving at 3am, can sleep just about anywhere, have performed while injured, care more about the free beer than the night's pay until the moment the van needs gas, lost a girlfriend because of the band, haul your own gear, and can simultaneously love and hate the guys you play with: Rock Band

Additionally, there are different kinds of players:

A Full Time Musician:

- This is all you know and you have no backup plans. See "Rock Band" above for further clarification.

A Part Time Musician:

- You're living your back up plan

- You've cancelled a decent gig for a girlfriend's sister's engagement party

- You hide any hint of rock band from your boss

- In your closet, your work clothes, casual clothes, and dress clothes all exceed your musician clothes.

A Hobbyist:

- You have to tell the booking agent you can confirm the gig after the other guys check with their wives or girlfriends

- It's been so long since the last gig you have to practice to remember your own songs

- You attend more shows than you play

- If somebody stole your primary instrument but left you the empty case, you might not notice for weeks or months

- You overhear your wife or girlfriend say "Oh, he used to play in bands"

How to Catch Lightning in a Bottle: It's All About The Bottle

As a fifteen year old kid learning bass and playing in my first rock band, the phrase “write a song” conjured up images of Pete Townsend locked in a room with guitars lining the walls, a piano in the middle, and blank music score resting on ornate stands. Of course, there would be pencils everywhere – on the stand, strewn across tables, between Pete’s ear and his genius head, held in his mouth, and certainly in his hand as he furiously scribbled notes on that score paper.

Then I head of Keith Richards emerging from a dream with the most famous guitar riff ever, fully formed in his young and relatively clean brain. Fortunately a guitar was bedside so he could commit it to his fingers’ muscle memory.

I’ve never used music score to write a song. The few times where I have dreamed a song, it has never resulted in a turning point in rock history. But I have written thousands of songs or parts to songs while driving, sitting in boring mettings, or at a great concert.

Through the years I’ve developed some ways to keep those songs, and parts of songs, in safe places until I could find time to work on them.

I think every rock songwriter develops a similar shorthand. It goes something like this:
Intro and Verse: G-D-A-A (as necessary)
Pre CH; D –C# stepdown to Bmi – G –A (2x) (Hammer D 2^nd time)
Ch: A - blues riff to - D 3x   G-D fourth

Then there are a bunch of lyrics written in poem form below.

This was a method I used, keeping notebooks more full of writing than anything I used for school.  Then my father bought me a micro tape recorder. So I began recording these ideas on little cassettes.

So certain was I that someday I would capture a hit song, I made sure a notebook was always close by, and there were always fresh batteries in the recorder. For a while I kept an extra recorder and notebook on the stand below my poster of the 25^th Grammy Awards. (Someday I will go to the Grammy’s, I promised myself).

Over the decades since I started writing, I’ve maintained this need to capture any creative spark, in the hopes that it would burn brightly. So I’ve added to the notebook and tape recorder method.  Here are some tricks I’ve used or seen used:

1.     Call home to your answering machine or voice mail. When on the road with a band and late at night, I have used this trick. Standing at a rest stop payphone, calling once to tell my girlfriend to not pick up on the next call, and a second time to sing into the recorder. Never has this worked out and become an actual song. But hopped up on caffeine after a gig in another state, a lot of things that seem like good ideas, are not.
2.     With smart phones, there are apps for that. In fact a ton of them. I like “Recorder” on my iPhone. It allows me to record long sessions, upload wifi to my computer, and records in .wav format if I need to bring the audio into other programs. After playing a song, I will leave an audio shorthand of the chords, style, or any other notes to tell the future me what the past me was thinking.
3.     At a higher level than Recorder, there are apps like 4Track and GarageBand which let you do more than use the phone as a modern dictating tape recorder. With available tracks, you can know quickly if that riff in your head words with the chords you imagine. Or if the lyrics can really fit the song that needs one more line.

Those are some of the methods I have used. Before I wrote this, I asked musician friends what they used. While I invited those famous philosopher, fiction, and musician friends I have on FaceBook to respond, like always, those guys never write back. It’s like they don’t take the “Friend” thing seriously. Come on Dalai Llama and David Lowery, show some love.

What I got back really surprised and inspired me:
Chris Viola (Viola Contingent http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/viola1) wrote, “I'm very guilty of going the "I don't need to write this down or record it, I'll remember it" route. Of course you don't always remember it. And lately I've been okay with that. I've been letting go of the ones that don't come back as nature's way of thinning the herd.”

Richard Pfleuger (www.rvgnoise.com) hasn’t changed his methods of capturing songs. “I'm old school. No phones, computers, or recorders. I hand write chords / lyrics in a notebook until the finished draft can be drafted. Then they are saved in a special folder I've had since I joined my first band over 20 years ago.”

And Matt Megrue (Loners Society, County Line Strangers http://www.myspace.com/lonerssociety) pushes himself to move forward while using old tech. “I usually handwrite the chords and lyrics in a notebook. My biggest problem is editing before the idea is down, and throwing something away as garbage, before I give it time to develop. I got a typewriter recently though, and that has been helping a lot. It is a lot more permanent and not easy to go back and scratch stuff out...so it forces me to keep pushing forward and not go back, or get hung up on a previous line.”

If anyone else reading this uses other methods or wants to add something, please let me know. We’ll add it to this article and include links to your bands.

Keep holding on to those moments of inspiration. We’d all love to see someone who contributed to this discussion capture and create a hit song someday

Oh What A Mess... review of Hitless Wonder

About twenty minutes ago I finished Joe Oestreich’s book Hitless Wonder, his memoir about being in the minor leagues of rock and roll as a member of Watershed. Because of a hundred things going on in my life, and capped by this book, I am compelled to write something. Anything. I need to write. So I’ve given my son a chocolate chip cookie and permission to watch some TV.

While a dozen stories rattle around my brain, the first thing I have to write is a review of Joe’s work.

First, I must preface this critique with an admission that I wanted to love the book. Joe and I are both bassists from Ohio. We’re roughly the same age. I like to think we share the same desire to entertain on stage. We’ve both been playing the same stages, drinking in the same bars, and pissing in the same urinals in New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Charleston West Virginia and South Carolina, Detroit, Chicago, Austin and who knows where else. But somehow, we’ve only talked face-to-face two or three times. Include the times I’ve gone out to see one of Watershed’s shows, we’ve been in the same room about 20 times. I would not say we were ever friends - guys who call each other up to debate the BCS system - but more like people who work the same job at different companies. Or to use the baseball analogy - Watershed was AAA while my two bands, World In A Room and Rambler 454, were not even invited to rookie developmental league. Yet, since the first time my band played a show with Watershed circa 1994, I’ve been a fan. So, not exactly peers either. And how could I not be a fan? Watershed has terrific songwriting, great stage presence, and great personalities. Since that first show together, there was something about them that told me they were going to be great.

I was right about that. But greatness never opened up its treasure chest to them. They recorded several hit records. They received critical praise. They even achieved a certain level of immortality (hey, having your band name tattooed on someone is pretty damn close to immortality). Their longevity surpassed the Beatles, Replacements, Nirvana, and all but probably one percent of one percent of bands that record a song. It’s just that when achieving these levels of greatness, fate switched the first prize cash with the consolation pat on the back.

I knew that much. The book promised to fill in the details, answer the existential questions, and entertain with stories from the road.

Again, I am biased by a personal connection. I wanted to love this book. (And by the way, I caught Watershed on tour last night. They rocked. So did their opener Sky Dragster. I proceeded to get embarrassingly, over-talkative, drunk. I expect that they have all lost my FaceBook link or Joe has cataloged my idiocy for some other writing. That’s what happens.)

I wanted to love this book. I knew it was going to be about a middle aged guy looking back on his years of rock and asking himself the questions: Was it worth it? What do I do now?

I wanted to love this book and see myself in it. To help me answer the same questions I have. I wanted to see the members of Watershed not as the pitiable characters in Anvil (if you have not seen that rock documentary, you must), but as champion survivors of the indie band road.

But I was also afraid I’d have the same reaction when a friend hands me a copy of a song from their band – what if I love the guy, but hate the art? That gets me anxious.

It surpassed my expectations. As Uncle Tupelo once sang, “Oh what a life a mess can be.” This rock and roll mess has left a wonderful life in print.

The timeline of the book follows the band through a tour, 20+ years after they formed in the back of a city bus. As the tour unfolds, Joe does ask the questions I wanted him to ask. He tells great stories. And he is not afraid to be as honest as anyone can be.

What is so special about the book is how he weaves stories from 20+ years of a band, into the log of one tour. He jumps decades, locations, and attitudes deftly, like a major league pitcher mixing up his pitches in the midst of a no hitter. Throughout it all, he continues to make poetry with many of his descriptions. Columbus, New York City, and a peacock farm in Michigan, all come alive in full color, painted with black text. So do the pain of disappointment, and the angst of always wanting more.

Joe also adds in so many lessons for bands. I’d like to see chapters assigned to anyone who ever books their band into a 200-person venue and hopes to “make it big”. I’d also like to make it required reading for band girlfriends.

Now, maybe I’m biased. As Joe describes these characters, I can see them. Because, well, um, I have seen them. I can hear the songs because I have heard the songs. I can smell St. Andrews Hall, cringe at the CBGB’s toilet, feel the power of a hometown crowd or the gut punch of a room full of chairs, understand the fatigue and silliness of a long road trip, because I have experienced all of that. However, I am fully convinced that even if you have never experienced those things, and the camaraderie of a band, Hitless Wonder will put your ass in the passenger seat of the Econoline Van between crap gig and cancelled gig; and you will enjoy every smelly, cramped, second of it.

This is another success for a Watershed guy. If karma ever wants to get things right, this book will be a commercial hit.

By the way, it inspired me to write this on a blog I had abandoned long ago. And write some of the stories in my head. Just like Cheap Trick inspired kids everywhere to rock. That's success, Joe.