quote:
Tips for Aspiring MusiciansI don’t know how to be a successful musician. True, I was in a band that actually got signed and recorded a nationally-released album — but the album died a horrible death, and the band broke up two years after I left it.
However, my experience makes me an expert on being a failed musician. And I have a lot more to offer.
Because who are you going to listen to: Some artist with three platinum albums — who, strangely enough, has absolutely no interest in creating competition — or a guy who has nothing to lose? A successful artist can tell you what you should do. But only I can tell you how to fuck up. I’m much better at fucking up. You can’t even find my album on ebay.
So with this in mind, here is how you arrusts can learn from my mistakes. Oh yeah, and don’t do drugs.
Handcuff The Guitarist. The last person who really, really wanted to listen to a twenty-minute guitar solo finally flatlined in late 1978. Much like the dodo — and said to be nearly as intelligent — the Interminable Solo Aficionado is now extinct. And considering that the dead generally do not buy record albums, it is best to ensure that your guitar solos last no longer than, say, someone would be willing to listen to an answering machine.
Now some of you may know a guy who really gets off on those old Allman Brothers jams. These stereo freaks are not people; they are, instead, guitarists, a semintelligent form of lichen. While guitarists can frequently learn to walk on two legs and even refill a bong with considerable dexterity, their main handicap is a unique ear structure. In much the same way that humans cannot hear ultrasonic sounds, guitarists are unable to hear any noises that are not guitar-related. Left to their own devices, guitarists will consistently come up with bizarre, unlistenable music.
A guitarist would happily listen to an album that consisted entirely of the grunting sound of Eskimos squashing baby seal skulls with baseball bats, as long as Eddie Van Halen was accompanying it with a solo. Depending how fast the Eskimos were smashing, a guitarist would either say “Wow, that’s some great jazz backing,” (if they’re beating seals at a furious clip) or “Whoa, what a soulful blues number,” (assuming the Eskimos are nearing the end of the day and are whomping maybe only one or two baby seals per minute). Needless to say, guitarists are a necessarily evil in most bands… but their musical opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps an entire shaker.
As such, keep your guitarist well-trained, and limit his solos to sixteen bars or less. If he attempts to extend his solo — and he will — simply hit him in the head with a baseball bat. Hey, it works for seals.
Write Two Albums’ Worth Of Good Music Before You Record Your First CD. Two of the best local bands I ever heard got caught short when the record companies came. Their demo tape kicked ass, they got attention… and they lost out because they didn’t have enough of a track record yet. Who wants to chance financing a $3,000 CD when you’ve only written a third of it? Make sure you’ve got tons of backup songs before you seriously start shopping around. Seriously.
Decide Whether You Want Fame, Fortune And Hot Chicks, Or A Nice Writeup In The Back Of Spin Magazine. Birds will spend hours circling over barren lands, searching for the tiny, nutritious morsels hidden deep in the earth and grass. When they find something tasty, they will immediately swoop down, chew it up into barely-identifiable pieces… and then barf it all over their children, who will consume it with glee.
In this business, you can be the bird or the worm. Your choice.
Because the music field boils down into two types of successful artists: Those who have massive, chart-crunching hits, and the artists who influence the artists who have hits. Offspring gleefully rips off the less air-friendly Circle Jerks. Nine Inch Nails stole Kraftwerk’s entire catalog. Led Zeppelin stole… oh, fuck… you know, Blind Cantaloupe Whatisname… blind.
Every artist who makes it big was ripping off some weirdo artist that nobody had ever heard of.
Now, the artists who write influential songs get the satisfaction of being critically-acclaimed songwriters, with a small but zealous following. They also get to live in a small apartment in the ass end of New York City, and have to do cross-country tours eleven months a year to keep the checks rolling in. Whereas the bad Xerox copies of these artists live in mansions the size of Zimbabwe, and have so much money they can happily spend up to three years snorting cocaine before they have to set foot on the road again.
Quiet satisfaction… or models having catfights to decide who gets to blow you first? Shouldn’t be much of a choice for the beginning artist. So as a band, your first priority should be to find some lesser-known, unheard-of performer and start fucking up his music ASAP.
Likewise, you should have a stable of little-known but well-reviewed artists that you hate. Mention them in every article as “big influences” when you finally score your #1 album. Watch them grind their teeth into a fine wet powder when they realize you’re making all the money and they’re writing great songs in someone’s leaky basement.
Tuning Does Not Impress The Audience. Get your shit together before you get onstage. Spend no more than sixty seconds between songs retuning. Few people will remember your A note being slightly flat — but by Golly they will remember you endlessly
droning “Check… check… check… Zisthing on? Check….”
If You’re Incoherent, And You Are, Shut The Fuck Up. Frankly, most musicians are just fucking stupid. They try to hide it by taking up causes like “Save The Rainforests” and searching Bartlett’s to find some cool quotations for their album liner notes… but in the end most musicians are the kid who cribbed all the good notes in English class. Most guys who play an instrument full-time are lucky if they read two books a year. So why do they continually assume that they can speak well? Shut the hell up, stop yer mumbling when you introduce the song, and fucking play.
Incidentally, there’s another type of musician who is seething as he reads this now — he DOES read a couple of books a month, and he plays really weird music, and he loves They Might Be Giants or Tom Waits or Zappa… and he thinks he’s WAY too fucking clever. In reality, your stage patter is lame and nowhere near amusing. Give it up. Just play the song.
Get Your Chick Status Out Of The Way First. Being in a band is like being married to three people at once. You argue with your band members; you get jealous if they play in better bands; and you get to become intimately familiar with all of their
disgusting body functions. The music is the equivalent of sex: it’s the reason you put up with these idiots, because you’re certainly not hanging around for their
scintillating personality.
However — as with all marriages — there is but one thing that can save your relationship, only one act that will keep the oil flowing through your collective engines: Blowjobs.
Now, usually you can’t get blowjobs from your band members (although this probably explains why Queen stayed together for such a long while). However, realize that if you hope to have a happy, healthy band, your mates need to be getting more suction than a fleet of Hoovers. Blowjobs provide crucial self-esteem, give tense musicians some much-needed relaxation, and, as a special bonus, also provides seven major
nutrients for growing teenaged bodies.
The problem is that blowjobs are rare. Generally they’re elusive creatures, rare in the wild… and practically nonexistent in serious relationships. As such, do you really want to make your bandmates more tense by denying them the hummers they so desperately need?
Every great band needs to understand that relationships may come and relationships may go, but a college freshman’s hummer is forever.
As such, all of you should make a pact and agree that none of you will ever notice anything that might get your bandmates in trouble with their girlfriends. If it happens on the road, it stays on the road. (And frequently leaves stains that need sandblasting to get out.)
After all, it’s not women that break up great bands. The Beatles had tons of women. It wasn’t until John started sticking to one woman that they got into trouble. The Rolling Stones, however, fucked anyone they damn well chose before, after, and quite possibly during their marriage ceremonies. And they’re still touring. Don’t believe ‘em when they say they can’t get no satisfaction.
Don’t Make Your Friends Listen To Your Demo Tapes. If you’re good, they’ll want to listen anyway and if not it strains a good friendship by forcing them to endure your suckiness. Forcing your friend to listen to your wretched anal discourse of a demo tape when you’re giving him a ride is grounds for justifiable homicide in most states.
Never Do A Cover Song. Seriously. Best case, you wind up with a hit single and
everybody thinks you wrote it, and then they’re vastly disappointed when they hear the rest of your album. Worst case, it just sucks. There is no reason to do a cover song, except maybe to make dumb audiences happy. But if they’re not happy about your originals, they’re not going to be happy about your albums.
Name The Song After The Hook, For Christ’s Sake. Walk into a music store and talk to most clerks, you’ll find about what you’d expect to find: Minimum-wage-making bastards who only work there to listen to the latest music and steal CDs when nobody’s looking. They’re superficial and driftless… but not all of them.
Now. Look at the older clerks. Watch the men with the slightly-receding hairlines tied up into gray-streaked ponytails, the ones with the slight paunch beginning to show under the company-mandated vest. Their eyes are hollow, their faces gaunt with despair. They know that they’ve made a terrible career choice that they cannot escape… and it is too late for them. Their future lies here, and the best they can hope for is an extra fifty cents an hour and maybe — some day — being third key opener at the store. To men like this, imprisonment and death is preferable to a life spent wearing a stupid fucking tie and a Dymo-labelled nametag.
Now; turn over that nametag.
There is dried blood on the underside.
You have just stumbled onto one of the darkest cabals in America.
These fanatically-driven assassins have one goal: To wipe out every band in America that names the song after something that’s not in the lyrics. Because whenever some fucking moron band thinks it’s cute to name the song for something other than the chorus or the callout hook, they have to suffer.
You see, good musicians make it easy for their fans to remember what the name is. Listen to Eminem’s “My Name Is” once, and you can find the single unaided in any record store. Determining which album N’Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” is on is a no-brainer, even by the low-grade standards of an N’Sync fan. But go with (give an example), and the poor clerks are the ones who have to sit there politely while tuneless nincompoops hum the song for them over and over again.
This is enough to drive even the sanest man to cold-blooded murder.
So these clerks have formed a pact: They watch local bands very closely, keeping track of who’s naughty and who’s nice. If a band begins to become popular and they have obscure song names, these dead-eyed clerks immediately kill them in subtle and horrible ways. Sometimes it’s a simple mugging. Ofttimes it’s poison, cleverly disguised to look like leukemia or cancer or AIDS. Frequently these clerks have minimum-wage friends who will work on your brakes.
Police have yet to make the connection between brutally-murdered victims of serial killers and musicians with bad song names.
So learn the lesson before it’s too late: Name the song after the hook… or don’t say I didn’t warn you.
UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone!
The WWYK? Discussion Board
posted 08-07-2001 07:40 AM
