I was a musician. I was never a good one, part 2
I had a lot of fun with the comments from the last part of this that I wrote about so I am going to follow up and see if people are as interested as they were in part 1.
To summarize part one: I became interested in being a musician by accident and because a high-school friend gifted me a guitar. Later, in college, I was approached by some guys who liked my look, as lame as that sounds, and they weren't all that concerned about how good I was at playing bass, which is a good thing because I wasn't good and even after being in that band for close to 4 years, I don't think I was good at the end of it either.
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What I lacked in talent though, I made up for by being a team player. As my abilities grew, i started to realize that people in bands that are too talented will often try to hog the spotlight to the point where it actually works to the detriment of the overall sound. I see a lot of bass players do this both on an amateur and professional level. One of the things that sticks out the most in my mind was when Jason Newsted started doing a lot of back up vocals for Metallica, even in songs that the original version of the song didn't actually have back-up vocals.
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Jason is the only member of Metallica to ever be kicked out and I don't think that it is a coincidence that this happened right around the time that he started wanting to be more in the forefront.
For me, as a bass player that knew where all the notes were and also has excellent natural rhythm, I was perfectly content to stay in the background and do my part of the job, which was to play bass and coordinate with the drummer. The latter part of this was easier said than done because as I mentioned in part 1, the drummer in our band was extremely talented and was always showboating. It isn't easy to coordinate a rhythm with someone who never plays the song the same 2 times in a row. That dude was a maniac on drums and although he was seriously gifted, he never went on to accomplish much in the music world and I think this is at least partially because he was too difficult to work with.
When we would call him out on overly complicating the songs, he would turn into a bit of a baby and revert to playing a comically simplistic version of the drumbeat and even intentionally going off rhythm as a sort of temper-tantrum revenge. The best songs that we had in that group were the covers that we played, because that was the only thing that would keep him playing something the same way each time. Our originals, which were 90% of our repertoire, were never the same two times in a row an that was frustrating for everyone involved, especially me because as a bass player, you are meant to be coordinating with the drummer as the rhythm part of the band.
I dealt with it though, and we ended up having some gigs and a lot of fun.
We had our issues though and one of them really springs up to mind as being super problematic and nearly resulted in the band breaking up over something really stupid.
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One of our largest gigs that we ever had during my college years took place at a really big club in a college town and the bar was called the "Texas two-step." It was an interesting concept for a club because it was split into two separate but really large portions of the club. One side was dance music, bump and grind sort of nonsense where the real star of the show is all the girls dressed like strippers... and the other side was a live music hall that normally featured country music.
The promoter of the "Two step" saw us play a very small venue one day and came up with the idea that he would have a night where instead of country, they would have all different kinds of music play throughout the night and it was country, metal, pop rock, southern rock, and also punk rock. We were the punk rock portion of it. The promoter had just randomly heard us playing one day while walking down the street and got in touch with us I think it was by phone... this was in the days of very little internet. When I think about it I don't even know how dude would have found us. It's not like we had a manager or anything.
Well things were going well and a lot of promotion went into planning this event. We were playing 3rd out of 5 and this was a great spot for us. Late enough that the place would be filled up, but early enough that the crowd wouldn't be shit-faced. It was a truly tremendous opportunity for us.
Now I can't say for certain, but I think that the drummer, who considered himself the leader of the band, didn't have anything to do with organizing the gig because the promoter contacted me. I think he took offense by this because he was used to being in charge.
He was being very problematic in the weeks leading up to the gig, and the day of it, like 7 hours before it was going to happen, he got involved in an argument with my roommate at the time over the phone. The drummer is Filipino and my roommate used to jokingly refer to him as "that little Mexican." It was the 90's.. people were not as sensitive back then and this was not the first time that my roommate had called the drummer that. But on this day, Andy (the drummer) completely blew his top and threatened everyone and also said "the gig is off" meaning that he was not going to do the show because of this completely silly argument that revolved around my roommate who isn't in the band at all and is in no way attached to it.
I think Andy was just looking for a reason to not do the gig and wanted more attention for himself.
Now you need to understand that I had put quite a bit of work into this and the promoter was taking a pretty big risk on putting a punk rock show into a country-music club. If we were to truly back out at the last minute, then the promoter would almost certainly talk to other promoters and we would soon find it difficult to get gigs at all.
none of this seemed to matter to Andy though, he was standing steadfast in his stance of "the gig is off." Thankfully, his brother who was also in the band, got on the phone with me and we were able to diffuse the situation and he convinced Andy to do the gig. But the drama wasn't over yet.
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During the gig, which was going really well in front of about 3-400 people who almost exclusively had never heard of us, things started to go awry about halfway through our set. Andy saw my roommate in the crowd and started shouting at him, on the microphone, in the middle of our set. The crowd has no idea what is going on and I can see the promoter giving us signals to fucking cut it out, but Andy kept at it until I saw the staff go and cut his mic. This enraged Andy further who got up and went to a live mic to continue his tirade.
We, the other members in the band including his own brother, tried to placate him but then people in the crowd started to boo and when we did get Andy to sit the fuck back down it seemed like he was trying to break his own equipment and he was also playing intentionally much faster than he is supposed to... he is sabotaging our own gig. After about 3 songs of Andy being a complete dick, the rest of us told the crowd "thanks for turning up everyone, next up is blah blah blah"*, our set wasn't over and neither was our time.
This ended up being a very big problem for both of the bands after us as well. All because Andy decided to piss all over everyone and everything because he was having a bad day.
I didn't even feel like talking to him after that, and for the next few weeks we didn't meet up for practice. It was also just another couple of months before I was unceremoniously kicked out of the band. All for something I didn't even do.
This video is unrelated, but talking about a crazy drummer made me think of this hilarious video of a ZZ Top cover band and if you haven't seen it, you should.
There is even more to this story but at 1500 words, I feel as though I should cut this off and continue it later.