In Part One (Issue 208), I noted the fact that I’ve had more than 50 years of playing in rock bands, and during that time I’ve seen people make every kind of mistake imaginable, and some I couldn’t have imagined. Like the time when our band the Lines warmed up for the Go-Go’s at the club 2001 in Islip, New York. I decided I was going to wear sunglasses to look cool, and wound up falling off a high stage into the audience because I couldn’t see the edge of it. Luckily, the only things injured were my Telecaster neck and my pride. (I should have asked Eric Bloom for advice.) So, this series will talk about what to do…and what not to. This will not be a course on mastering a musical instrument, though aspects of playing will be talked about.
Why would you want to play in a band anyway?
No, seriously.
If you’re like most musicians I know, you want to be in a band because you love to play. In many cases, it’s because you have to play. It’s a primal urge that you don’t even think about on an entirely conscious level. Playing is what musicians do. (At the end of this installment I'll tell you how I got into it.)
Some people, especially those with good voices and/or who are gifted songwriters, can pull off a solo act. And today’s tech enables people to create fantastic-sounding music in the comfort of their bedrooms, as Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell did for their hit debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. But most of us who want to play live are going to wind up in a duo, trio or band. There’s nothing like the dynamic give and take and endless musical possibilities of playing with other musicians, and feeding off the energy of the audience.
If you write original music, it goes hand in hand that you want it to be heard. Sure, you can upload your music onto YouTube and various streaming services – and as Richie Castellano of Blue Öyster Cult and the Band Geeks (who are on tour playing Yes music with Jon Anderson) once told me, in today’s world, if you’re in a band, you have to have a video or you’re nowhere. But if you’re like most artists I know, you want to play your original music in front of other people.
OK kids, we know that a big motivation for wanting to play in a band has nothing to do with music. Yeah, you want to meet girls, or guys. Especially in high school and college. How many of us musician guys learned how to play and joined a band as a way to meet girls when we were teenagers? Pete Townshend of the Who has said that he formed a band to “pull the birds”…and that at the beginning of his career, he still wasn’t pulling the birds. (I confess, neither did I. Maybe if I wasn’t such a dumb schmuck to some women when I was a clueless kid I would have had better luck, and I wish I could apologize to some of them now, but that’s another story.)
Most musicians I know want to get better. The best way to do that is to go out and play, so you learn the give-and-take of complementing other players and what it takes to create a coherent musical whole.
Here's another fundamental: Playing with musicians who are better than you is the best way to get better. Sure, you have to reach a basic level of competence to do that, but I can’t emphasize enough that playing with people who are better than you are will really push you to another level.
A corollary of asking why you’d want to play in a band is this: what are your goals? Most of the people I know on the local circuit want to do it for fun, make a little extra money (with the emphasis on little, and we’ll get to that in a future installment), keep their chops up, and enjoy the hang and have a fun night out. it's perfectly fine to be in a "dad band" or be a weekend warrior, and in fact this is where many of us wind up, replete with questionable wardrobe choices and expensive guitars and gear that gets aired out only at the local watering hole. (I will have much more to say about dressing for success in a future article.)
Or are your ambitions loftier? In that case, you may want to look at going semi-pro and getting into a working band that does casuals, corporate events and other gigs that can earn a nice part-time income. At the highest level, maybe you want to become a true professional and make your living by playing, although it must be said that if you want to do this, the odds will be very much against you. I’m talking, making it as an Olympic gymnast-level odds against you. And talent is only part of the equation. You need a fair amount of luck, and you generally need to not be an a-hole. I am told that you need to be ruthless if you want to get to the top, especially in scenes like in L.A., but I have no first-hand experience.
Even if you reach the A-level, you may have to supplement your income by giving lessons, getting a teaching degree, or doing other activities. Legions of former players have decided it’s literally not worth it. And being on the road is tough.
But don’t let anything stop you from trying to be a rock star if you really want to. So what if the odds are overwhelming? Some of us do get there, even if behind the scenes. I went to Hauppauge High School with Vince Giordano of Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. A student from the high school near where I live performs on Broadway and became a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Another person I went to school with went to Hollywood and become a successful writer of film and TV music. My guitar playing pal and HHS alumnus Bob Palladino is an Emmy-winning production sound mixer for Saturday Night Live. And even if you don’t “make it,” you can always play on some level and find great reward in it. (In fact, not playing professionally is much less stressful.)
Never let anyone try to crush your dreams. They’re not you.
Words of inspiration from Tovah Feldshuh, written on a backstage wall at the Chapin Rainbow Stage in Huntington, New York.
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So, what’s my story?
Some of my first childhood memories are of hearing songs like Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” and David Seville’s “Witch Doctor” coming out of my parents’ kitchen radio. I was fascinated in particular by the sound of the saxophone, then the main lead instrument in Top 40 rock and pop radio, and wanted to play it.
My elementary school would let students begin music lessons in third grade, but only on a limited amount of instruments. You had to be in fifth grade to take up a wind instrument. I wound up on viola but really wanted to play the saxophone. When I was old enough, I asked to switch instruments, but my music teacher wouldn't let me, because he wanted me to stay in the orchestra. Stubborn kid that I was, I quit the orchestra. For a few years I didn’t play an instrument at all.
In the early 1960s the emphasis started to switch from the R&B-influenced stylings of the saxophone to the electric guitar. You probably know what happened next, on February 9, 1964.
The Beatles blew my nine-year-old mind.
An entirely new musical and sonic world sprang forth. The psychedelic fuzzed-out sounds of the 1960s from bands like Iron Butterfly, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Blue Cheer and the Ventures left me dazzled. From that point on I was obsessed with the sound of the electric guitar. I drew pictures of guitars in my school notebooks (decades later, I found out that George Harrison did the same). I dreamed of owning one, but my very-old-school father was, shall we say, opposed. Meanwhile kids everywhere were forming bands in basements and garages. I wanted to be one of them.
For my Bar Mitzvah I begged my father for an electric guitar. He reluctantly agreed and got me a $29.95 Kimberly guitar and Bryan amp from the King George department store in Smithtown, New York. As my father told me years later, “I felt like I was giving heroin to a junkie.” He thought it would be the path to nowhere, a siren song for hanging out with freaks and druggies. (Well, as it turned out he wasn't entirely wrong.)
Yet he knew I loved the guitar, and he loved me, so, conflicted or not, he determined that I should learn how to play properly. A couple of weeks later I began lessons with Joe Marino, a noted area guitarist and bass player. Later I would study with Charlie Martone, another serious-musician Italian guitar guy. I went through the Mel Bay books (the Alfred books were for slackers!) and learned how to play “legit,” unlike most guitarists of the day who never learned how to read.
About two months after I started playing, three other neighborhood friends and I formed a band, Absolute Neon. (This was before The Absolute Sound started publishing. Weird synchronicity?) We first played at my parents’ party in the back yard around 1968 or 1969. I remember it distinctly. Later we played at a few high school events…and about a year later, broke up. The rest of the band got fed up with the drummer’s inability to keep time. Welcome to the world of being in bands!
I dreamed of becoming a rock star. I practiced to the point where I’d fall asleep with my 1969 Fender Telecaster, passed out on the bed with the guitar still plugged into the amp. I was insecure that I wasn’t good enough, or good-looking enough, especially since I was a skinny kid with psoriasis. (Only later, after seeing some rock stars in person, did I realize I needn't have worried about the skinny part.)
I joined the Hauppauge High School Stage Band because I was the only guitar player in the school who could read music. In college I joined a rock band, Third Hand, and at one point we were making enough money to enable me to pay my off-campus rent. (It was $75 a month, but still…)
After two years in college I wanted to quit so I could pursue music full-time. Back then, you had to be young to be in a rock band and I thought I was losing valuable time, and I seriously wanted to be a rock star. My father begged me not to drop out and convinced me that if I did, I'd regret it for the rest of my life. I came to see the wisdom of his thinking, though if I'd spent as much time in college studying as I did copying guitar licks off records and reading Creem and Circus, my grades would surely have been higher.
After I got my B.A. in the late 1970s a bunch of high school friends and I decided to form a new wave group, the Lines. We started out as a cover band but soon came up with a bunch of originals, and they were good. Thanks to our adept and energetic manager (who went on to become a successful music industry executive) we got a lot of gigs, including one at the legendary My Father’s Place on Long Island, where The New York Times Writer Andy Edelstein happened to be present and wrote a positive review. The noted music writer Wayne Robins (yes, the same one we're honored to have as a Copper contributor), also saw us early on and wrote us up in Newsday. We thought we had struck gold and were on our way to fame and fortune. In the next few years, we played a lot in the New York area.
We backed up a lot of name acts including the Ramones, Duran Duran (twice!), the aforementioned Go-Go’s (who we never got to meet because they had the nastiest management I’ve ever encountered, but that’s another story), Delta 5, Defunkt, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, the Bush Tetras, Our Daughter’s Wedding, Paul Weller, Jim Carroll, and others I can’t remember. (I'll tell the story about sharing a dressing room with Madonna at some point.)
Yes, there was actually a club called Spit on Long Island, New York in the early 1980s, and our band the Lines played there with an Arista Records band called the A's. I'm sure we were all dressed punk or proper, period.
However, I was also working a tough 50-hour-a-week job. My life was at turns exhilarating and exhausting. I’d catch naps in my car during lunch breaks, and crash all day Sunday.
Eventually the band started having musical differences (welcome to the world of being in bands!), one of the members left, and at age 27, I couldn’t keep burning the candle at both ends and decided to quit. I was getting OD’d on life itself, as the song goes, and needed to make some serious changes. I quit hanging out in new wave clubs and stopped listening to the music (it started to turn to crap around 1983 anyway), quit smoking (I knew it was terribly bad for me, but it was such a stress reliever), cut back on my partying, and decided I was going to quit my job for a company I hated, and try for a career at writing, which, other than playing guitar, I considered to be my other real talent.
Happily, the writing thing worked out.
I was so burned out after my brush with almost-fame that I didn’t play a gig for 10 years.
But if you have it in you, you have it in you. In the 1990s I began to play parties and get-togethers, then started playing regularly in another band with a bunch of friends. That lasted for a number of years until one of the band members moved and the rest of us started to become ridiculously busy with our careers and the band inevitably fizzled.
For the past 14 years, I’ve played in a band called Grand Folk Railroad, and we do about 10 – 20 gigs a year, playing 1960s and 1970s hits and forgotten favorites, classic country, and originals. My hands are in good shape and I’d like to think my brain is too, though some of my peers may beg to differ. It’s getting harder to physically play, but my desire to do so still burns. After all, playing is what musicians do.
Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/thekaleidoscope/Vishnu R.
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