Playing Covers in the ‘Burbs for Small Change and Big Fun
Craigslist is magic. Where else can you find a new job, a car to get you there, an apartment to sleep in, a bed to sleep on, and a lover to sleep with — all in one place? Craigslist is also where I found my band, by answering an ad in the Musicians community section.
I had spent a few years playing original acoustic music around town, both solo and in a trio, for free coffee and not much more. In this market, the “good” coffeehouse is the one that puts in ten bucks of their own money to start off the tip jar. Of course, this is the same place that double-booked my date, let me put up posters, and didn’t tell me I was frozen out until I showed up with all my gear the day of the show.
So in the fall of 2008 I was ready for something different. Instead of playing originals for love, I wanted to play covers for money. Instead of being an acoustic player who owned an electric guitar, I wanted to sharpen my chops and hold down my place in a four-piece band. And I wanted the energy that comes from a group pushing and pulling together, instead of sitting alone in my living room wondering what to do next, or who would care.
The band I found was rebuilding after losing two members. Their former bass player had showed up to a job drunk, gotten angry over who-knows-what, and walked out in the middle of a set. Their former second guitarist had quit, saying he didn’t want to play in bands anymore; but by the time I joined up they had heard he was in another band. Like me, the two remaining players were in their mid-to-late forties and wanted to play classic rock covers. The former drummer was switching to bass because it was less gear to haul, so they were looking for a guitarist and a drummer. I auditioned for them in October 2008, and got a spot as the second guitar player. I must have sucked less than the other wannabees replying to their ad on Craigslist. By Thanksgiving we had our drummer. Like the other two, he had been kicking around, in and out of various bands since the eighties. So even though we were all similar ages, I was the “new kid” with the least amount of rock band experience. To balance that out, I had done all the booking for my last two musical ventures, and had a good ear for charting songs.
We spent the winter in the woodshed. We practiced in the bass player’s single garage at his house in Newcastle, whose walls and ceilings he had covered with waste closed-cell foam from which thousands of ear plugs had been punched out. It was like practicing in a giant beehive, and it was our job to make the honey. We were busy little bees twice a week, for three hours a night.
And we went at it steadily, from November 2008 to March 2009. Our goal was to get four sets ready — forty songs or a little more. We started with the previous band’s set list, but ended up trimming some moldy oldies and replacing them with songs we liked better. About half the songs were missing charts, lyrics, reference recordings, or all three. So in addition to being apprentice guitar jockey, I became the band secretary. Within a month or so I had plundered everyone’s CD collection, bought some CD’s new, and pulled audio out of YouTube videos for the stragglers, and had a reference CD of every song on the list. In another six weeks I had all the lyrics, and chord charts for about half the songs. The rest of the songs never did get charted, as we had already worked out the changes to our satisfaction.
Because I was the man with the golden ear and a year of music theory in his distant past, in addition to making the charts I sometimes had the difficult job of telling the other guitar player — the boss of the band — that he was playing his parts wrong. This ticked him off because no one likes to be wrong, and because he had been playing some of these songs for fifteen years and didn’t want to re-learn them. My solution was to look him straight in the eye and say “You’re the boss. Do you want to play it the way we have been, or do you want to do it like it is on the album?” And wait. And smile. He’s getting better at bending, and now when we go to see other bands we share a grin when we see them play the wrong chords, the way he used to play them. We make a good team.
During this time I had lots to do. Of course, I was following Rule #1 (”Don’t quit your day job”); practicing twice a week, learning the changes, the breaks, and the endings, and earning my share of lead vocals and guitar solos; compiling and printing charts and lyrics; issuing reference CDs to the band and eventually setting up a private web site so everyone could download new MP3’s as soon as we put a song on the list; and finding every club in a forty-mile radius that booked cover bands. Again, Craigslist came to my rescue. All I had to do was find one band on the musician’s bulletin board advertising a classic rock show. From there I Googled the band and the club, and made a list of all the clubs the band was playing and all the bands the club was booking; then I would repeat the process with each new band and club I found, until I had a list of over 70 clubs we could hit up.
I don’t know the real statistic, because bands that don’t make it live and die in the dark, and nobody knows but the guitar player’s mother (who he lives with). But I would guess that two-thirds of all bands never make it out of their garage. My bass player told me about a band he was in that was doing a good job getting their music ready, and broke up over a fight about what to wear for the promo pictures. But we were one of the lucky ones: somehow we made it through the winter and didn’t self-destruct. After about six weeks of me saying “Tell me when you’re ready to start booking,” and the bass player saying “Not yet, we’re not ready,” they turned me loose on my list of clubs.
For kicks, I did the math: Four guys practicing six hours a week is twenty-four hours. Round it down to twenty to allow for non-music time and missed practices, and multiply by four weeks in a month, for 80 hours per month of solid music rehearsal. Multiply by the five months it took us to get ready. By the time we played our first job, we had 400 hours of rehearsal in — 100 hours each — and we hadn’t made a dime yet. Rule #2 is “Never figure your hourly wage. It will only make you angry.”
Our first gig was in April 2009, at an Irish/Cajun restaurant (no, really) on the East Side. Space there was so tight that our drummer couldn’t set up his full kit, and if I wanted I could reach out and snag Cajun french fries from the nearest table. But they liked us, we got paid, and I rebooked the following Monday. Rule #3 is “Rebook or die.” There are only so many clubs booking cover bands, and if you only play a club once, you lose. Which leads to Rule #4, “The bartender talks to the boss.” I always tip the bartender an extra ten out of my share. I tell them it’s to thank them for their hard work, which is true. In addition, I don’t know if their loyalty can be bought, but I’m willing to try. It’s good to have a friendly face in every club, and the hope of a good word when the manager’s wondering who to book next.
Our second job was at a pub on Rose Hill that was doing so little business that our guitar player was sure the only way they kept the doors open was selling drugs on the side. We played, and we were loud — maybe too loud. We got paid, but it was impossible to pin the manager down for a rebook. After two months of “call me next week,” she told me they weren’t booking bands anymore.
Out third job was just down the street from our second, at a club with a well-known name; a place my guitar player had spent ten years hoping he could play. He was amazed when I brought in the booking. But the club was a shadow of its former self, in the same location but only half the size. Our drummer had been there in the old days and says it used to hold a couple hundred people, packed nut to butt. It had a ten thousand watt sound system, a mirror ball, and a big checkerboard dance floor. It stayed empty while we played our set. We had taken a gamble on this one and agreed to play for the door instead of a guarantee. I won’t tell you how low the door was (See Rule #2 above), but it was so bad the club pitched in fifty bucks pity money. I didn’t take my share that night because I had booked the job and felt responsible, and there wasn’t enough money to split four ways. This was one we chose not to rebook, so we were one up and two down. I hear that club is closed now, but may reopen. I know of two other clubs which shut down while I was trying to book them. My list is getting smaller, which makes Rule #3 even more important.
Speaking of money, we would love to get a hundred bucks each for three or four sets. But in today’s climate we sometimes have to settle for half that. By the time we load up, travel, load in, set up, play, tear down, load out, drive home, and unload, it takes us eight hours to play our four sets. At fifty bucks each, that makes — uh, never mind.
Fast forward to August 14, 2009. We’ve played another half dozen jobs since the beginning, including some rebooks. One club cancelled on us when they changed owners, but I got the save and we’ll be playing there soon. In the meantime we’ve gone from eleven songs in an hour and ten minutes to twelve songs in 60 minutes flat, learning to cut out the dead time and keep the dance floor full. I have gone from standing in one place like a musical robot desperately trying to remember the next set of changes, to jumping around like a damn fool. People seem to like it and makes me feel good. When we do the unison breaks on “Gimme Three Steps,” I cuddle up so close to the bass player I can smell his cologne. Let me tell you, he smells like a man should smell. We have the best smelling bass player in town, and nobody knows but me. On the other hand, I smell like sweat and nerves. I have to change my shirt after every set, or the sweat-soaked collar of my T-shirt rubs a raw spot in my neck. I wrap first-aid tape around the end of my glasses’ ear pieces to keep them from sliding off my face during the middle of a song.
Tonight we are playing a restaurant-bar in Redmond with a good reputation; they book bands twice a week or a little more. We load in around 6:00 PM, take our time setting up and getting to know the house PA, and are ready by 8:15 for our 9:00 start. We kick off with twenty-five or thirty people in the place, only six or eight of them friends of the band. By the way, Rule #5 is “Having a kick-ass rock show is not enough. Unless you also have fifty thirsty friends, you’re nothing in this town.” Which makes us nothing in this town, I guess, because for us right now a good draw is twenty-five and a bad draw is three. But tonight fortune smiles on us, and we don’t have to provide both the show and the audience.
The first set goes well; it’s all old familiar songs for us, and lets us shake down and settle in. The second set has five new songs in it — old to the world, but new to our set. “I Just Wanna Make Love To You” (Foghat), “Swingtown” (Steve Miller), “You May Be Right” (Billy Joel), “Sweet Emotion” (Aerosmith) and “Rock & Roll All Night” (Kiss). We tear into them like they mean something — or maybe just because we’re not sick to death of playing them all winter — and the crowd responds, getting out onto the dance floor. They also like some of our tried-and-true numbers like “Jumping Jack Flash” and U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Nobody knows or cares how far down we had to transpose it to bring it from Bono’s range to mine. We make it work. I sing it like I’m hollow, and God is blowing across the open hole.
We end the second set with a bang on Molly Hatchet’s “Flirting With Disaster,” and the dancers grumble when we announce our break — a good sign. By 11:00 we have attendance up to about 75, keeping everyone who wandered in and only losing a few dinner customers who paid up and left. Among the happy throng is Toby, who is celebrating his twenty-first birthday and who is being treated to one of everything by his friends who really should know better.
We open the third set with “Mustang Sally” — one of those songs that every band in town plays. We’d like to trim it from the set, but it never fails to get people out on the dance floor, so our opinion doesn’t matter. A few songs into the set we try tonight’s big experiment: A three-song Beatles medley, “Get Back,” “Come Together,” and “Day Tripper” back-to-back, each song counting off while the last song is still ringing. We play them louder and harder than the originals. What we lack in finesse we make up for in enthusiasm.
To put it mildly, the crowd goes apeshit. We have a third of the room on the dance floor, which is all that will fit. There is more beer being spilled out there than was sold at our first job. The dancers are singing along, so loud we can hear their unamplified voices over our amps and monitors, and grinding together as if they were trying to conceive a new crop of Liverpool Lads right there on the dance floor.
A few songs later, things get a little out of hand. Toby, in the middle of a do-si-do with someone old enough to be his mother, comes swinging back into my music stand, which falls over onto the guitar player’s pedalboard. We pretend nothing happened (Rule #6: “Never stop playing in the middle of a song”), and I pick it up during a drum break. A few minutes later, Toby bumps into my guitar rack and sends two guitars crashing into the wall, but fortunately not all the way to the floor. I keep playing, gritting my teeth, as other dancers set it upright again.
But Toby’s not done yet. During the next set, he does an ass-plant onto one of the house monitors, breaking the cable connections in the back, and rendering the monitor useless. Well, shit. With half our monitors gone, we will struggle to hear our vocals for the rest of the night, and I get to have a nice talk with the owner about what happened to his equipment and who should pay for it. Trouble like this I don’t need.
It’s at this point that Toby decides that we need some help, and grabs one of my guitars out of the rack so he can play along. The music stops immediately, and everyone within twenty feet makes a beeline for our favorite thief. Rule #7 is “Screw Rule #6, THAT’S MY GUITAR!” We get the guitar away from Toby and move my rack out of his reach. The other guitar player wants to open up a can of woopass on him — he’s probably thinking about his own guitars, which cost five times as much as mine. We joke that he plays P.R.S. (an expensive brand of guitar) and I play P.O.S. (Piece of Sh*t).
But everything is cool. I lean into the mic and say “I’m sure Toby’s friends are going to keep him out of trouble,” and everybody gets a clue. From then on, they keep a human barrier between Mr. Disaster and our front line, and the show goes on. I heard later that Toby ended his birthday losing all that expensive liquor in the alley behind the club. Poor kid. He won’t remember how much fun he had or how much trouble he caused.
I wake up the next day with the noontime sun in my eyes. My knees hurt like fire; my throat feels like it was scrubbed out with steel wool; and my left ear is still ringing slightly. On the mantle in the living room there’s a scrawled check from the club, beer stained from where it sat on the bar. It’s still readable though, and it should cash. It’s wrapped around a crumpled wad of bills — singles, fives, and a few twenties — our share of the door charge. I wonder how much we’ll have to give back to fix the monitor.
I have everything I ever wanted. And did I mention my teenage daughter is fronting a metal band?
Life is good. We play again tonight. You can find us on Craigslist.
Tags: Music, Rock and Roll
Ah… the road, the music, and breaking down and loading up when you’re drenched with sweat and just wanna sit down, rest your dogs and have a double over ice.
I love it. I miss it. So glad it is part of your life!!
loved your post. I am gonna have to show this to my (future) bf heh. Hope you’re having a great Sunday. – Danielle