Life's Little Injustices (Take XIII): No Drummer? No Booking

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Every musician experiences misadventure. I'm no different. I've weathered my fair shaer of them after My First Band, which probably sounds like Your First Band. 

Take the issue of getting shows, Your First Band's lifeblood. Without them, it's tough to justify all that time spent polishing those nuggets into songs, let alone recording (God forbid), or assembling, a release that somebody might want to buy (God forbid, again). You wouldn't hire a plumber sight unseen, so why buy a record you've never heard, right?

However, unless you're well-connected, getting to play venues that don't treat you like dirt, and pay decently, is next to impossible. I'm as DIY as the next man, but surely, Your First Band benefits from treading a few well-established boards, right? Remember, whether you book the gigs, or someone else does, you face the same challenge: getting people to show up (God forbid, yet again).

Then why's it so hard to score decent shows? Because the venues that matter are often run by a clique that spends much of its time and energy clanking up the drawbridges of their real or imagined castles against those dreaded outsiders. Every local music scene suffers from this syndrome, to varying degrees. Some places are better than others; such is life.

I learned this lesson the hard way, when I tried booking My First Band at Club Snoot. Our guitarist suggested it, because their management worked in tandem with our hometown watering hole, Romanov's (an hour and 70-odd miles south).

"If you're in, you're in," my guitarist prompted. "Bands that play one of those clubs usually play at the other."

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Thus encouraged, I dutifully phoned Club Snoot's booker, the bass player and frontman for a hot local prog-metal band. We'll call them Grey Matter Cartel. (Storyteller's Note: Names have been changed to avoid retribution from the guilty. It sucks, but it is what it is.) 

I ran down My First Band's sound and credentials, such as they were, after roughly a year of existence. We seemed to get on okay, until I mentioned our present lineup: my guitarist, and yours truly (bass, lead vocals). "We're between drummers right now," I explained, "so we're getting by with a drum machine. That's how we started, anyway, so it'll do, for now."

Grey Matter Cartel's mainman immediately took issue. In several exhaustive sentences, he claimed that Club Snoot's crowd weren't used to such fripperies, which they might take for self-indulgence on our part.

Hmm, I thought, doesn't bother the industrial music crowd! Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Sisters Of Mercy -- you name it, nary a drummer among 'em, and nobody's ever asked for their money back! Hell, even conventional bands have done it, including Echo & The Bunnymen,  (sparking a rumor that "Echo" referred to the machine, one the band hotly denied using).

I thought the objections were stupid. This being the late '90s, drummers had often become increasingly sidelined by all manner of mechano-beats, which those big hotshot producers found more expedient to use in their increasingly over-arranged, overly polished scheme of things. Time is money and all that, right?

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But I never got to explain those subtleties, such as they were, to Grey Matter Cartel's guiding light. The catch in his throat rang loud and clear: get lost. You aren't what I expect. You're dead meat.

He hemmed and hawed a minute longer. Finally he decided: "I'll book you when you have a drummer. Let me know when you do."

Click! There you had it. We didn't have a live human keeping the beat. Ergo, we couldn't be part of rock's holy trinity, its nuclear family, of guitar, bass and drums. That was that.

Club Snoot has long since closed, like so many dysfunctional dens of iniquity. Grey Matter Cartel itself called it a day in 2001. By then, the fellow I'd spoken to had replaced the whole band, with himself as the sole remaining original. So much for tradition, I suppose.

Still, after scouring the Internet, I've found no evidence of him releasing music after the mid-2000s. Aside from a couple of Grey Matter Cartel reunion shows that happened four years ago, he seems to have disappeared from the scene that he once lorded over.

So, while My First Band didn't go on to massive acclaim, neither has this gent, apparently. I'm still working, mostly on my own, which feels way more satisfying than dealing with the egos and excesses of trying to break My First Band. Or Your First Band, for that matter.

Roy Orbison said it best, I believe, and mind you, I'm working from memory. But the quote goes something like this: "Time takes care of a lot of things." That's my solace, and I'll have to take it. --The Reckoner