“Let me check with the guys”, The Rock n Roll Bassplayer replies.

The End.

It was about a year ago this week:

“That’s really fucked up of him to not tell us before doing it!” I paraphrase the complaint at the following band meeting. “I understand he wants to remove all of his work but he should have given us advance notice first so we had time to make other arrangements.”

One year later, those arrangements have still not been made.

The website background was black and the former images on the website were red X’s when I received the message from Rimshot (drummer), “We have to get this website fixed ASAP!”

“My company has a graphic designer guy” I offered. “He is also a heavy metal musician and can probably relate to us, artistically. Maybe we can hire him to fix the website if the price is agreeable?”

“Whatever the cost is, it needs to be fixed,” he replied, digitally.

At that point, I consulted our Decision Maker, who is our founding member and principal songwriter, GearHead. Obviously since I am only the third bassplayer in the band’s history, I have never run the show and I respect that. It’s also a sticky situation politically, as I have a lot of friends and connections (probably far more of those than anyone else) that pre-date my involvement with the band, and equally, I cannot have my Decision Maker pissing off my buddies and having him get them mad at me.

So I consulted with GearHead, asking him if I should speak to my company’s graphic design guy and he replied “Yes, get a price estimate from him.”

So I did. He would charge $25 per hour to give us a professional looking website and that probably translated into about $100. I gave the estimate to Gearhead, who replied “He’s hired!” In the meantime, the guy went ahead and performed a hastily prepared background for the website at no charge, loosely based on how the site had previously appeared, until we could meet and have it designed correctly.

Moment laters, I received a call from Rimshot. “Wait, don’t talk to that guy yet!”

“I just did. We just hired him.”

“No, we didn’t. I’ve got someone to do it and they are going to do it for FREE.”  It was explained that one of the chicks he was banging was a graphic design student and she would help us out and it would also help her out with giving her real-world experience.

I sent a message, copied to both GearHead and Rimshot, that read, “Please speak amongst yourselves and determine which of you is our Decision Maker and please have that person get back to me before I have to backpeddle with Brian in the IT Department and tell him he doesn’t have the job and isn’t getting the $100 now.”

GearHead called roughly five minutes later, interrupting me at my customer service day job. “You have the wrong idea,” he said, as usual when I’m angry about something, which is generally being the messenger and flak jacket for Gearhead’s ever-changing decisions, among other reasons.

“You told me to tell him he was hired.”

“That was before I found out we could get it done for free.”

“Are you sure she’s going to follow through with this and she has the ability to do everything we need?”

“Yes,” he said.

The chick that Rimshot was banging showed up at the Band House on a weeknight to conduct what resembled a focus group, in the corporate world, and shared some of her ideas about what she planned to do with our site.

She smiled and gave me a hug as she left.

I never saw her again.

That was a year ago. Our website currently has a black background and I have updated things with what little outdated HTML skills I still have remaining from a community college class I attended in the late 1990s.

My relationship with the graphic design guy has been a little awkward and weird ever since.

My response was a simple “Let me check with the guys” which means, in plain honest English, “I am not the decision maker here. Let me check with the authority figure who is GearHead, our frontman, principal songwriter, and resident prima donna. I pretty much say ‘yes’ to just about everything when it comes to playing shows because I love to perform live. I will check with him and get back to you.”

I forwarded the message to Gearhead. Moments later I received a reply from GearHead. “You know I love to play shows but the 12th is a Monday. Please have him tell us the occasion?”

Without checking the calendar (that is called ‘faith’), I replied to Biker Man “Isn’t that a Monday night?”

“No dingbat. Are you looking at an old calendar? The 12th is a Saturday night,” Biker Man replied.

I checked again with GearHead, who replied in the affirmative, noting that the show would be an excellent opportunity to raise $200 toward the recording costs of The Album.

I told Biker Man we would be available to perform our service of rock n roll music on December 12th.

“Ok, so now… How much material do you guys have available to play? Can you do 90 minutes? I just want to have two bands play that night.”

I forwarded the message to GearHead who replied “Yes, we can do 90 minutes. Tell him that. We won’t let him down again.”

It is important to address the issue of letting him down, as the above reply connotates that we have let Biker Man down in the past. We have established a relationship with Biker Man over the last couple of years. We were one of the first original material acts to ever play The Biker Bar. We have not, and never will, cover “Mustang Sally” or “Born to Be Wild” like many of the acts he hires must do as a matter of contract. Biker Man took a chance, we performed mostly our own original material and somehow, it worked very well. Everyone got drunk, we sold CDs and shirts and The Biker Bar became a reliable source of $200 a night income, the proceeds of which have mostly been transferred to Pro-Tool, our studio engineer, to finance the recording of The Album.

On two occasions, however, we have let down Biker Man. The first time it was my fault. I arrived drunk, got even drunker and then went onstage much drunker than any middle aged female accountant has ever been at their company’s holiday party. I committed many playing errors, removed my pants onstage and consequently the music was a proverbial train wreck ala The Replacements back when they still used to drink, forcing the bartender to shut the band down after 25 minutes of the performance. I was mildly scolded the following day and we recieved only 50% the promised pay. Sins were forgiven, however. We moved on. The second letdown was a day we booked a show the night after a lengthy recording session. We booked the show to pay the bill for the recording session the following day. Our drummer was exhausted from the day’s labors and was physically only able to perform for 45 minutes out of the 90 minutes that were expected from us. He payed us the full $200 he promised and GearHead took the severe tongue-lashing and angry wrath of Biker Man. We have a band rule now. We never record and play a show during the same weekend. It’s a good rule that I recommend for any aspiring rock n roll band.

The show on Saturday, December 12th a The Biker Bar has been confirmed.

“Yes,” GearHead replied, digitally. “I spoke to him for an hour the other night.”

In dealing with GearHead (and just about everyone in the underground pseudo-business of rock n roll), the separation of truth from bullshit is an important part of any negotiation. Call me cynical but I have good reason to believe, based on past experiences,  the translation of the following reply I received was, in plain honest English, “No, but I plan to mail the rough mixes to him. However, we did speak on the phone this week. We mostly discussed pro football but I also told him that I had mailed the rough mixes to him as well… That was a white lie that I hope no one will notice and no one will care about after I mail them five days from now, assuming that I actually do.”

I am hoping to enjoy a captive audience of non-rocker laymen (or laywomen) who do not understand the inner workings of rock n roll music. Seasoned musicians, and perhaps even wannabe musicians, can skip to the next paragraph but I think the term “rough mixes” may require a definition. A rough mix is an unpolished half-assed recording that is half-assed mixed and half paid-for; a digital music file that is burned on a CD which is then sent to a half-assed record company as evidence that the band is actually working on an album and we have gotten beyond two guitars riff strung together with a basic rock drum machine track and a theoretically possible working title of only one song. It is semi-concrete evidence that progress has been made on The Album and helps the other half of the partnership can determine if our new music is “shit” or otherwise.

At this point I will give you, the reader, a brief history of Thee Rock n Roll Band and its sole proprietor, MiniMogul, over at Little Durango Records, a ceremonious subsidiary of the broader umbrella called Bigger Durango Music, Inc. I like to think of Little Durango Records as being an underground bunker located near the pretty part of the Rio Grande in the state of New Mexico, not the stream of piss called The Rio Grande which passes through El Paso, Texas and occasionally dribbles into the Gulf of Mexico periodically. I suspect that Little Durango Records is a back bedroom of a humble home owned by a guy who also rents a post office box. The latter is usually the case with “independent record companies”.

Sex, drugs, rock n roll, copy machines, auto repair shops and stamps!

The unsung heroes in the pseudo-business of rock n roll are the copy machines, the auto repair shops and the postage stamps. Without all of those three, the rock n roll band remains in the garage or basement and without them, there will be little sex or drugs and we are left as humble 30+ year olds with Peter Pan Syndrome, living lives where no one gives us free sex or drugs or showers us with the gifts of complementary drinks, which is sad, of course. The postage stamp, with a little help from email, is a catalyst for our involvement with Little Durango Records.

We had audacity. We still have audacity, actually. We thought we were worthy of having our debut album release on an independent label. Mind you, when I joined, we were a local original act with 12 fans, not including the usual drunken regulars, who showed up anyway, at the seedy places we played. We did have a damn good looking website, courtesy of Bacon (our most recent ex-guitar player), whose day job skills as a graphic designer came in handy for making us look like a serious band that might even even have a fanbase. We used our audacity and Bacon’s graphic design skills to convince ourselves and others that we were worthy of shopping for an independent label to release our first full-length album.

When I exaggerate during ornery moment, I sometimes say that I mailed 100 press kits w/ CD-R to any indie label with a PO Box. The more accurate estimate of mailed press kits would be about 45, following about ten visits to the post office. Riding this wave of spontaneous honesty even further, I will accurately estimate that we received zero bites from any of the record companies I mailed. The truth is we had two minor nibbles. The first was an indie label I had worked with previously for a solo artist who was one of their more successful artists as a fairly anonymous bass player. After several follow-up inquiries, I was told “We have been so busy. We haven’t listened to your CD yet. We are still interested, however. We will contact you after we’ve had a chance to listen to it.” The second was the only indie label who had sent back a denial response. “We like the vibe and the songs but the recording, sonically, is not impressive.” Sales skills were summoned at that point, when I argued that similar had been successful on larger labels with songs that were not as good as these. I dropped names. I won the label over. The debut album from Thee Rock n Roll Band was released on Little Durango Records the following year, to a fanfare of about 200 people in attendance for the CD release party.

We are about 60% finished with the follow up album, at this time, which will also be released on Litte Durango Records next year. More about that later.

Starting with GearHead. The particular talent that GearHead brings to the table is his gift of songwriting. Otherwise he’s a fairly mediocre guitar player and singing abilities are debatable as well. However, Thee Rock n Roll Machine runs on songs, in my opinion, and he brings the gift of tunes to play that are far more than merely connected-together jam riffs. His politically leanings are vaguely Republican-ish, as he has voted for the Right in every election since I’ve known him. However, he is pro-abortion yet anti-condom, and I do not detect any sense of a tradition family values in his personal history. His character is slight more difficult to figure out. He is not an honest man. He has the gift of bullshit but he is also occasionally honest and also a prolific (although sloppy) liar. He does not cause any kind of negative gut reaction, at least any negative gut reaction that is not  the result of the Burger King he forces the band to eat on tour. More about his need to control the road dining logistics later. I promise.

Sessions is a new addition to the act, replacing Bacon who relocated back to SmallTown, USA about a year or more ago. Sessions has a regional history and is one of the better guitar players around. He is also in another band which makes some money. That is a cover band. We try to keep that detail on the down-low. As best I can tell so far, they teach professionalism in the school of music he graduated from. He is always pleasant and polite. He could also have decaying bodies buried beneath his home for all I know. He is still somewhat of a mystery.

This is the part where I have to come clean with my biases. At this point, I have a mostly non-existent relationship with Rimshot and it has been that way for more than a year. In my years in the band, I had a negative gut feeling about the guy from the beginning. For about two years, I was assurred this was a misunderstanding on my part and in the end, I finally determined that he is a classic sociopath character. Our relationship is mostly a vague awareness of his existence and limited to conversations like “Is there an electrical outlet behind you?” and ignoring the casual insults he directs at me. That said, people can experience very different behaviors from the same people, and for some reason GearHead has a big brother relationship to him and is able to keep him somewhat in check. All that said, he is a colorful color character, has the trademark sociopath charm, can be entertaining while being self-destructive in the stereotypical tradition of rock drummers who die young (or become Christians or inmates later in life).

The Baby is a very new character, a somewhat devisive character too. More about The Baby later.

The short answer is that I play bass for a indie band located in a city in the American southwest. I moved to the southwest from the midwest during my final days of being a teenager (thought techical an “adult” legally) on the premise of playing rock n roll music. I am now in my early 30s. My discography goes back about 10 years. I have recorded with an indie solo artist and I currently play in an indie band who are in the process of finishing another indie released album that will come out in 2010. Simultaneously I have held customer service call center jobs for the last ten years following a stint of excruciating factory labor during the late 1990s. I have earned almost no income from playing rock n roll music.

Why is this blog an anonymous blog?

There are a few reasons I have chosen to make this anonymous blog. The biggest reason is that my niche of readers would probably be much smaller if I revealed myself in this blog. I play in a subgenre of a genre with a somewhat limited fanbase. I hope to blog material that will be somewhat more universal, where you could relate if you are only familiar with heavy metal music or if you are just a non-musician reader, you get a glimpse of the life. I have been a blogger for several years. I have blogged under my pseudonym stage name for the last several years. I have found that it impossible to tell a real story under my own identity since most of the readers can easily figure out who I am referring to in stories I tell. I believe in most cases, the subjects would not be offended (and perhaps even be entertained) but would also not wish to be identified either. The final reason is that anonymous blogs are fun. I have enjoyed reading anonymous blogs and trying to figure out who the authors are.

Why does this blog exist?

I will personally state that I believe musicians do not live or experience life the way other more ‘normal’ people do. Although most of us never enjoy much in the way of monetary compensation, our lives are rich with stories that are universally experienced by other musicians. The same is true of taxi drivers, waiters and casino workers. I have thought several times while in the van traveling from one major city to the next, “I wish I were writing all of this down.” With some regret, I have failed to chronicle some excellent tales and story arcs that I could never invent as a work of fiction. I hope to entertain people with this blog, allow them a voyeuristic look into a life they are not familiar with and entertain other musicians who are like me and can relate to the experiences.

What will the blog be about?

As I stated above, the band I perform is several years into the game. Many of the stories are in the past and not chronicled but I think they may be alluded to, in retrospect, in an interesting way to provide context for the story. I also believe I am headed toward a major change in life (as I stated above, I am now in my early 30s) and I think it is very important to keep a journal like this.

Will this material be fact or fiction?

Names will be changed, places and people will be vague with identities that are concealed and pseudonymed. However, the material here will all be true. I won’t be pulling a James Frey stunt.