Got a band and painfully keeping it alive among daily shits?
Or
Wanna form a band and have fun?
Read this and think twice :)
I collected from The Compressor blog - not mine. This situation happens all the time. Sad truth.
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The Compressor is on a Mission From God
Jake: We’ll put the band back together, do a few gigs, we get some bread. Bang! Five thousand bucks.
Elwood: Yeah, well, getting the band back together might not be that easy.
Jake: What’re you talking about?
Elwood: They split, they all took straight jobs.
Jake: Yeah so you know where they are. You said you were gonna keep in touch with them
Elwood: I got a coupla leads, a few phone numbers, but I mean, how many of them visited or even wrote you huh?
Jake: They’re not the kinda guys who write letters. You were outside, I was inside, you were s’posed to keep in touch with the band. I kept asking you if we were gonna play again.
Elwood: Well, what was I gonna do? Take away you’re only hope? Take away the very thing that kept you going in there? I took the liberty of bullshitting you, okay?
Jake: You lied to me.
Elwood: It wasn’t lies, it was just bullshit.
Occasionally, the Compressor will strap on a guitar and take a trip down memory lane. The band had originally existed in the 80’s but split up due to musical differences….the audience wanted to hear different music than ours! We had a few moments of glory, but generally we were crap…it was the gear you see…..
Recently, over a pint in a pub…and before I took up residence at Compressor Towers, we decided to reform the band. It wasn’t so much a mission from God…more of a mid life crisis combined with un-finished business. We had over the 20 years or so, done OK, which made it possible to acquire some relatively decent gear. However, as I started to spend the cash, it became apparent to me how much you needed to spend! And we were only a 3 piece!
A Mackie PA, a little 1604 desk, some in ear monitors, some SM58’s, some stands, a couple of guitars, some amps, a drum kit…more mics for the drum kit, some pedals, miles of cables and of course the obligatory sign! Oh and the lights and smoke machine and portable stage!
Then we began practising…so we needed a room….which cost even more money. Then the location we had a designated for our comeback gig demanded a cd demo in case we were crap….so I bought a small Pro Tools rig, an AD converter and started tracking the band. We lived quite a long way from each other…and we had jobs. Which meant it was weekends only….which meant wives and kids in tow…at mine as I had now converted my garage into a small studio with practise room and small control room. Wives and kids need looking after, which fell to her-in as I was busy in the studio.
Now how can I put this….the wives of the other two band members hadn’t quite grasped the magnitude of this event….it was rapidly becoming the biggest comeback since Lazarus…or Elvis. In their eyes, in terms of good ideas…it was right up there with ‘I know a short cut’ said by the Captain of the Titanic.
Which meant that after about 20 minutes of practising the wives and kids would come and see what was going on. Which meant that we would stop practising….and then it was lunch time. Over a few months we weren’t getting any better, so we started to extend the visits into sleep-overs to allow us more time in the studio….
Does anyone reading this have children? What is that all about? It took my mates an hour to unload the car just to stay a night….travel cots…bags…sterilizers….he even had a plastic duck that was a night-lite AND a tape recorder: ‘she won’t get to sleep unless she has ‘hush little baby’ playing’….this had become a nightmare.
We now had 8 extra every other Saturday night staying over…and being fed…and torching my house. Now I’m not tight, but you would think that an occasional bunch of flowers…a bottle of wine…a box of chocolates could be shoved under my wife’s nose as a thank you? Er….no….zero, blank, nought, nothing….which starts to grate. In fact it soon dawned on me that this had become MY band…MY idea…and they were doing me a favour by coming to practise!!!! Therefore, I should entertain them…and pay for everything… and the missus was getting highly pissed off…there is only so much…’Little Tommy…show Mrs Compressor what else you can do…’ a woman can take.
Meanwhile, back in the studio, I of course needed more plug-ins and outboard to make our brief recordings sound better…and a full HD system, and better monitors. A genius needs his equipment. They would track for a couple of hours, leaving me to comp and mix over the next two weeks, whilst working of course. The idea over a pint had become a second job. Anyway, the cd got made, the pub said yes and we booked the date.
Gig day….and we went to set up…having hired a van and an engineer…which fell to me of course as the other two band members couldn’t wire a mic! Sound check and we were away. The gig of course was amazing…it would have to be….and 250 people came to a pub that normally holds 15. The Landlord not only made a years revenue in one night (and that’s true!) he was so grateful he named his daughter after me….I know Compressor Jones doesn’t work does it.
The next day, after all of the clearing up, loading the van and getting everything back home, we sat and had a post-mortem.
‘Do you think we could go on tour?’ said the bass player. I actually choked. ‘You can’t even stay at my house without 3 sherpas and a caravan as long as this road. Your wife can’t give you more than 5 minutes without showing you what little f$@king Tommy has done in his potty! How the f**k are you going to go on tour you toss pot? And you..(I said to the drummer) you can’t even play. You haven’t bought me a drink in 6 months…instead you come to my house, eat my food, drink my wine, soil my sheets…stink out my bog with your smelly poohs…and don’t even say thank you. F*@k off the pair of you and take your spacco wives with you.’
So that was the end of the band…I had lost the plot…and had in the process lost the band.
Compressor’s thought for the week: anyone thinking of starting a band, think carefully.
Make sure you live near each other
Make sure everyone understands the commitment
Make sure you have the support of your partners
Make it an equal affair
Otherwise, one of you will have so much gear left…they’ll have to start a studio…which I did!
TTFN
The Compressor
