Is there really anything that needs to be said about that tune? Proto-metal, butt kicking hard rock at its finest that still gets borrowed from today. I know I mentioned deconstructing the songs I’d post with a thread but at this point they’re becoming thematic accompaniments to the core ideas I feel like posting about. I figure I’ll do a collective retrospective deconstruction when I run out of stuff to blab about. This time around I’m still going to go off about band based communication.
There are five main points I want to address:
Introspection
Clarity
Tone
The Power of First Impressions
Professionalism
Ultimately a band is a group effort, but the first level of communication has to be internal. Ideally any potential musician should have already taken the time to sit back and contemplate the big questions about their lives, their goals, and their music. The big challenge is being truly honest with yourself, and then being capable of clearly communicating that to your band mates. What I notice most is that a lot of people are hung up on external validation, they don’t want to potentially upset or offend others, which seems nice, but if you’re lying to yourself to please someone else you’re just delaying an inevitable breakdown. Unfortunately (or fortunately) there’s no shortcut to enlightenment, it’s not like there’s an actual endpoint anyway. In my own case it only took me, oh… 15 years to figure out and acknowledge the most underlying issue within my music.
The other big challenge is admitting to yourself that you
feel differently than how you
want to think. Your conscious mind is something you have direct control over, your emotions and especially your gut instinct, not so much. Yet it’s one of those things where we seem to be conditioned by society and mass media to believe the opposite, that because we have control over our conscious mind we should also be able to establish direct control over other intangible aspects of our being. To an extent that’s definitely true, tempering your emotions is a very useful skill, but a proper application of that ability requires the recognition of those emotions as being uncontrolled elements applying influence to your being.
So once you’ve done your introspective soul searching and found your peace of mind it’s a matter of finding the words necessary to express it in an undeniably clear way to your band members. Good luck – especially if one or more band mates are not ready, far enough, or flat out refuse, to do their own introspection. Worse case is you have a complacent personality in the group who just says what they anticipate the others want to hear; which just leads to tension and resentment. Then you run into the classic conundrum of ‘Do I keep a band with my friend, or try with some random dudes’. From a technical standpoint if you have to choose between a virtuoso with a bad attitude or your buddy who can’t play more than power chord riffs – choose your buddy – they’ll eventually develop greater technique. On the other hand if you’re trying to start a band for a specific purpose and you’ve established a clear vision for yourself and your friends are simply trying to coddle rather than truly support, then the randoms might be better options; especially if the intentions are clearly communicated from the start, even if it might end up feeling like a weird employer / employee relationship.
Tone is something I get comments on - ALL THE TIME. How many times have I been called condescending on this site? How many times have people complained that
they feel I’m talking down to them, I consider it more from the side, perpendicular perspectives or something. But there’s a reason for it, and its how I choose to communicate through the written word. Based on that choice and the fact that I normally choose to make broader generalized comments, it’s created a particular reputation. Whether completely accurate or not is irrelevant, I don’t have control over how other people interpret my words, same as I have no control over how listeners hear my music. As a result I need to be able to accept that the majority of people will not always see things the same way, but more significantly, my own personal feelings on the matter are generally irrelevant to their interpretations of the ideas I present. At that point I have the choice of being accepting of the new feedback or I can let myself take it personally and get defensive. The positivity or negativity of the new perspective shouldn’t become a factor in my own reaction. One of my old jobs explained it best – we only had to address the concerns within the letter, never the tone – so if someone raged for 2 pages about how evil we were because of a late fee, all we address in the reply was the late fee.
As lame as it seems, first impressions count for a lot. How you choose to present yourself and the attitude with which you do so will have a lasting effect on how your peers see you and your reputation in your local scene. The choice ultimately resides within the individual, but unlike the inability to control how listeners react to your music, the reputation of a band or its individual musicians is very much a controllable element within the group. I’m not saying every band should hire a
PR person or have a member with a proper marketing background, but at the same time a little knowledge from those domains will not compromise the integrity of any artist’s work (same as some basic small business / entrepreneurship knowledge).
And that brings this entry to my final point. Professionalism. Ultimately if you want to be taken seriously outside of the circle of family and friends who’d rather lie to your face than bruise your ego, you don’t necessarily need to be a pro, but you need to be able to act like one. Copping any sort of attitude with a promoter or bar staff will get you moved to the bottom of the list of potential bands or straight up black listed. Being ignorant or rude to fellow musicians in your scene for whatever reason will limit your opportunities to perform. Ultimately, any sort of drama allowed to be recognized by the public will diminish your possibility of success, however you chose to define it.
That reminds me of a story...
----
(I’m pretty sure I’ve posted it elsewhere on the site before but whatever)
Back in the warehouse days, sometime around late 2006 I imagine, we were in the middle of our regular Friday night super freak out shenanigan and taking a little smoke break. The only other band in the warehouse was some punk outfit in a room across the way on the 2nd level. We can hear them struggling with the start of a song. From the sound of things the singer also plays guitar, he’s counting it off then playing at a slightly different speed. EVERY time. We can hear him starting to flip out and get belligerent with his band mates. So we decide to turn the screws a bit more, 2-3-4 we kick into their riff, and proceed to smoke it.
Two years later I’m starting a new job and working with this dude sporting a big green Mohawk and we get to talking tunes pretty quickly. We live in a relatively small town, ran in relatively insular circles, and sure enough, we’d both had jam rooms in that same warehouse. So I start telling him about that particular evening and he start ROARING. He’s laughing so hard he’s almost out of his chair.
DUDE! That was us!
Apparently the band was first and foremost about being a dirty drunk street punk. Drinking was the focal point of pretty much everything. It might be shocking to learn the band imploded shortly thereafter. The main guy apparently stiffed a few of the other dudes their fair share of the record they’d all paid to have produced and pressed.
Also the dude apparently completely
lost it when we started out playing their riff, I think it ended their night before they were able to get through their first song hahaha But with the way they communicated within their unit, it was never going to amount to anything anyway.