After over a year of searching, frustration, false hopes, mis-starts and an awful lot of stuffing around, a new band has formed. To be honest, we don't even have a name yet. We've chosen 'Crookfoot'as a temporary handle because its the name of a magpie who visits us every day. She's got a voice like an angel and a beak which she uses like a stilleto to keep the oher birds in line, so she's our kind of singer!
First "get to know each other" rehearsal was yesterday - Sunday - at Grant's place. Even before the first rehearsal we'd lost one great vocalist to a successful stage audition and sacked the new lead guitarist before he'd played a note. Who needs yet another "guitar hero"? (The guy just rubbed Lee up the wrong way from the get-go: all ego and guitarist-hype).
It went well. The style of songs which suited a two female lead singers just don't work with one voice up front. Hey-ho - turns out our singer has a great big rock voice. So its out with the more subtle stuff and in with the hotter and heavier style. Suits us. The poor kid was also running on about three hours sleep because she's young, and life is like that - but when she pays-down some of the sleep debt its going to be brilliant.
STILL looking for a lead guitarist who is technically capable, talented and not juiced up on testosterone and self-adoration. We want someone who can play, who will play, who wants to play, and who'll turn up and play. Ah well, more auditions this week.
After a year of meeting half the city's wanna-be musicians and singers (and finding that what they wanna-be is lazy, disorganised, argumentative, egotistical or all of the above) we've worked out a few important things.
1. Find out who the person is, before they play or sing a note.
What do they care about? Think about? Feel committed to? Can we stand them? Can we imagine spending time with them? Can we imagine spending time with them in a gear-laden car, on a hundred mile drive to an unknown gig? No? Then they're not going to be band members.
2. Find out if they CAN play or sing a note.
If Australian-American-Armenian-Antarctic Idol has taught us anything, its that people often have no clue how good or bad they are....which leads us to...
3. Audition, audition, audition
Easy-going hookups of the, "Hey, saw your ad on the Indie Board. Wanna be in a band?" sort will almost never get you more than a jam or two, then a cancelled appointment, then the "found another band" excuse email. If you want a band then you have to decide who and what you want and audition people until you get the right mix of talent, commitment and personality.
4. This is a band, not a democracy. LEAD.
Musicians and singers are often very talented and very personable, but very, very, very indecisive. People wanna play. They wanna sing and dance and express themselves. They really haven't got a lot of interest in taxfile numbers, GST, booking hassles, shitty club-owners, set-lengths, stage banter, load in and load out times, and all the other drack which goes into gigging for money.
OK I admit sometimes people think they care about this stuff, and want to be consulted over every decision and be able to vote for or against everything from the name of the band to the colour of the paint on the dressing room walls. But they don't really. Not after the first five or six arguments and dramas and offended egos and hurt feelings.
It comes down to people getting to use their talent for their art. Great singers sing. Great drummers drum up a storm. Great...OK...you get the drift. It's a whole lot better to have happy, talented, fulfilled band-members doing what they're great at, and having someone who's great at all the other stuff, DO the other stuff.
5. Everybody has to be on the same page, vision-wise.
Which means - everyone needs to clear about the goals of the band, what its going to take to achieve those goals, what the personal costs are in terms of time, money and commitment, and what the rewards are likely to be when you get there. One of the great truths of band-success is...
6. The group is only ever going to be as successful as its least committed member.
In practical terms that means that if three of you want to make a career in professional gigging, two of you want to make it a sort of part-time thing to fit around their "real" job, and one of you thinks that the occasional weekend jam with the gang is all that matters....well, you'll be a weekend-jam band, until someone quits from boredom or frustration, or someone is sacked in favour of a keener player.
So, here we are. Day one of the band.
Look in from time to time and see how we're going.
