August 13, 2002
4:05 PM

"OK, Immigrant Song - 1,2,3, go"


My new apartment is about a 1/4 mile walk down to the main street. Tons of restaurants. Strange ethnic-market-plus-video-store places. A cheap CD store. Two porn shops. An unusal number of eye doctors in the same radius. A movie theatre. Convenience stores that close before midnight. And among other things, a tiny music store (i.e. a place that sells musical instruments, as opposed to recordings of music).

Like almost any music store, this place had a cork board with personally placed ads. Bands looking for musicians, musicians looking for bands. When you go into a store like this, you'll typically see a band's ad as a sheet of paper describing what they're looking for, and some tear-off strips on the bottom with email addresses or phone numbers. There have been so many times that I've seen band ads saying they're looking for a bass player. And they list their style of music and the bands they were influenced by. If it sounds worth persuing, I take one of those tear-off numbers. Then I check out their website, and hear a bunch of boring songs I would never want to play. Granted I hooked up with my last band through an ad, but these disappointments happen all the time.

But I did see one small piece of notebook paper tacked up on the board that strangely got my attention. It was along the lines of "Guitarist, 21, looking for people to jam on covers with (Zeppelin, Alman Bros, Sabbath, Crowes, etc.)". No tear-off stripts, just a name and number to copy down elsewhere. I thought about it. At this time, this is really what I'd like to do. I'm not interested in jumping head-on into a band, practicing 3 nights a week and desparately trying to book gigs that end up being way more of a pain than they're worth. I don't want to play in a band where the cover tunes, if any, are only the ones that the guitar player decides to choose. I'm not interested in playing with over-excited aspiring rock stars. I don't want to join a band and have to strictly learn and play their already-recorded songs. I'm even losing interest in trying to write songs with a singer who not only lacks all knowledge of music theory and has bad timing, but doesn't even know a "verse" from a "chorus".

I've done ALL that stuff before. And maybe, just for the moment, it's time to come full circle and do what made me want to pick up the instrument in the first place: having fun playing the songs I like. Just playing the songs of my favorite bands, with somebody else who, like me, already long-since learned the songs and wants to play them. No managers, no rented padded practice rooms, no need for an amp the size of a clothes dryer, and no pressure to furiously prepare for a worthless gig in Boston. Just going down to a basement and jamming. The last time I had fun doing that with other musicians was last year at a party. And that was just one night.

The fun is overdue!

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