Handy Guide to Musicians

Ah, the rock and roll life. The girls, the money, the glamour. The world tours, the cars, the record deals. None of which you will ever have. Nor me, of course. Us mere mortals have to make do with the usual toilet circuit, with appropriate toilet musicians.

So, if you want to play derivative pub rock in front of exactly nobody while you lose your job, your social life, relationship (if any) and your ability to tell left from right in less than three tries, you're going to need someone to do it with you. That's where (urgh) other musicians come in. Musicians are much like orcs (go with me on this one). They're ugly, often violent, associated with axes (see!) and you wouldn't want to leave one alone in a room with a small child. And, finally, of course, they form into tribes. I've played with a lot of musicians and auditioned even more, and I think I have identified these groupings.

1 – The Unreliable.

"Don't worry, I'll be there. Maybe."

Gender: Either
Instrument: Any, though this tribe contains more drummers than you would expect statistically...

Members of the Unreliable tribe operate on a different space-time continuum to the rest of reality. Time and space have no meaning, and deadlines and soundcheck times are regarded as interesting suggestions that would be worth looking at if there weren't so many other important things to do. There are a great many variations to their M.O., ranging from turning up late every time by a predictable margin (easily counteracted, as we did with one drummer, by lying to him about what time practices were), to those who (presumably) consult their horoscope before a gig, and if Saturn is just the wrong side of Capricorn, emigrate to Ghana.

I have heard all the following explanations for lateness or no-shows at practices, or even gigs. I am not making any of these up.

"Yeah, but Arsenal were on the TV so I watched that instead."
"I thought Dover was 20 minutes from Birmingham by train. Turns out it isn't."
"I snorted some tainted cocaine and couldn't remember who I was."
"Oh yeah, I moved to Devon. I was going to tell you but my phone didn't have any credit."
"I drank two litres of vodka, crashed my car, broke my thumb, but then met a mysterious Rastafarian who healed me with his touch. Then I got arrested."

2 – The Bitter Failed Pros

"Haha, I'll laugh when you fail."

Gender: Usually male.
Instument: Any

The music business can be a cruel mistress. For every man who makes it big, a hundred will be left by the wayside, bitter hollow shells. And for some reason they will audition for your band. And only audition. They will never join your band, or any band. In fact most of the time they won't even unpack their instrument. They will just sit in the corner, drink beer, and mock the feeble, pathetic attempts of the naïve young things in front of them to conquer the music business with their out-of-tune caterwauling. They will recount (usually fictitious) anecdotes of the bands they toured with and the groupies they shagged, none of which you will ever come close to. Of course, this bravado hides the fact that they are not in a band, and you are.

3 – Paranoid Lunatics

"No you can't hear my songs. You'll steal them."

Gender: Usually Male
Instrument: Usually guitar or vocals.

The Paranoid Lunatic tribe is an offshoot of the Failed Pro tribe, but the Paranoid Lunatic has taken his failure to "make it" in a different way. He has decided that his shattered dreams are not a result of his lack of talent or highly defective personality, but because mysterious forces, possibly aliens, have intervened to ruin his career. He thus treats all bandmates with suspicion, regarding them as agents of the evil record industry who want to steal his song ideas, ruin his reputation and render him homeless. Every rehearsal becomes a stressful ordeal, as he must hide his genius, but not so much as to be thrown out. Eventually, he can take the strain no longer, and leaves, citing his bandmates' "ulterior motives" and add those bandmates to his long list of mortal enemies. This comes as a surprise to the bandmates in question, who just wanted someone to play bass on their Queen covers.

4 – Riot Grrrls

"I wrote this one about my mum. It's called 'I hate you and want to kill us both'."

Gender: Female
Instrument: Guitar, Bass, vocals.

A rare female-only tribe of musicians, Riot Grrrls learn the minimum amount necessary to play 3 chords and devote the rest of their time to learning how to shout into the microphone about things that bother them or just for its own sake. Their musical tastes generally run from Bikini Kill to L7 and back again. Most of the time they don't appear to have any reason to be so angry, apart from a residual teenage dislike of their parents, which is often the chief theme of their songwriting. Whereas many males enter rock music in order to attract girls, the Riot Grrrl either hates men for political reasons or already has a boyfriend, the more disreputable and disliked by her parents the better. Their wardrobe consists of torn jeans, faded t-shirts featuring obscene slogans, and things with spikes on them. Their instrument, by law, must be covered entirely with stickers featuring the aforementioned obscene slogans and anime characters wearing very little clothing.

5 – The Wasted

"Whuuuuuuh?"

Gender: Any
Instrument: Any, although once again drummers feature prominently.

Now the world of rock and roll may have a veneer of anarchy and chaos, but it in fact has a great many rules. One of those rules is that your career must proceed in the following order:

1 – Learn an instrument
2 – Join a band
3 – Become rich and successful
4 – Enter a "Booze and Drugs Hell ™"

Some musicians, however, will break this order, and get themselves wrecked on all manner of substances before becoming famous, or even learning to play their instrument properly. Likewise, it is considered bad form to get high as a kite an hour before auditioning so that the audition coincides with your comedown from whatever dubious substance was upside your head. This condition caused one poor soul who shall remain nameless to lurch into the rehearsal room, demand that we turn off the lights, make no attempt to tune his bass, plug in into the keyboard amp by mistake, thump his strings tunelessly, complain that he couldn't hear the drummer that he was standing right next to, swear at us, and lurch out again.

6 – Mr. Jazz

"You guys don't have any songs in 9/14 time? Are you all mongs or what?"

Gender: Male
Instument: Any

There's a distinct chicken-and-egg question that needs to be asked about jazz musicians who audition for rock bands. Are sociopaths attracted to jazz music, or do the smug, vacuous melodies, interminable tedious meandering solos, and complex, unpleasant-sounding time signatures rot the areas of the brain associated with social skills? In any event, any jazz musician auditioning for or playing in a rock band considers himself to have failed, and to have to play with such lower forms of life as (spit) rock musicians damages their egos so much they must demonstrate their superiority both musically and by being a haughty, superior waste of carbon to everyone. Despite his self-assured sense of superiority, Mr. Jazz often has surprisingly poor timing, and is fond of forming side-projects that get nowhere.

7 – Genre Bigots

"This isn't emo-trip-straitedge-techno-metalcore! It's more like emo-trip-straitedge-metal-technocore! What kind of jerk plays that any more!?"

Gender: Male
Instrument: Guitar, Bass

Good musicians are always in demand. Thus to some extent they can pick and choose their bands until they find one that's right for them. This is fine as it goes, but some individuals take this too far. They only own a handful of CDs, usually by bands so obscure they haven't even heard of themselves, but nonetheless have very strong views about the kind of music they'd like to play, even if it's only audible in their head. These individuals (you can substitute the word "tossers" if you prefer) are usually around 17 and suffer from acne. They also combine bagfuls of attitude with a spectacular lack of creativity, motivation and maturity. This leads to some interesting conversations at auditions:

Us: "Shall we jam to something? Maybe a cover?"
Loser: "I don't do covers, man. Covers are for pussies."
Us: "Fine, we want to write our own material anyway. Do you have any riffs or anything you've been working on?"
Loser: [long pause] "No."
Us: "Then we'll play something and you join in then."
Loser: "I've heard your stuff already. It sucks. I just wanna play grindcore."
Us: "But we don't play grindcore. It said so on the ad you answered."
Loser: "You guys suck."

Perhaps some day they will find the three other people on earth who share the same taste in music as they do. Perhaps they will buy another CD, maybe even by a band someone's actually heard of. Or maybe they will be the musical equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to forever trudge from audition to audition in search of the mythical Sludge-ragga-giraffecore band that they're convinced must be out there somewhere for them.

8 - Failed Guitarists

"That's a nice looking guitar. Can I play it? Please??"

Gender: Male
Instrument: Bass

Being a guitarist can be tough – there are so many around that it can be hard to get a gig even if you're really good, so some opt for what seems to be the easy life, and pick up a four-string. I mean, that's 33% less strings, so that's 33% easier, right? They are easy to spot, especially at auditions. They have a cheap bass, purchased within the last six months, which they play in a furious style, at the rate of about twelve notes a second with little regard for timing. They sprinkle their conversation with references to the bands they used to play guitar for, and drop unsubtle hints about how they would like to play guitar "just for a couple of songs." If one of the band's guitarists plays a piece of music that they can't manage on the guitar, or, even worse, turns out to be a better bassist than them as well, then the death wails of their ego can be heard above even the most frenzied drumming.

9 - Flawed Geniuses

"I've written this 13-minute epic, and... Oh, it seems I forgot to put any clothes on again."

Gender: Any
Instrument: All of them. Sometimes more than one at the same time.

Nature has a habit of balancing out people's traits. That pretty girl who turned you down is probably as mad as a sack of eels. The brightest kid in the class is fat and ugly. John Prescott somehow ended up as Deputy Prime Minister, so he must have some talents, even if they only extend to blackmail and hypnosis.

So when you come across a musician who is clearly touched by the hand of genius, run away and hide, because they will have a serious flaw in their personality or general genetic makeup. It may be immediately apparent what the problem is the second they call you "braindead toilet-face", but some flaws are hidden and will only surface at the worst possible time, such as five minutes before your first gig, where they announce that unless they are allowed to play keyboards in a pink catfish costume, the invisible squirrels in their socks will unscrew their feet.

10 – The Prima Donnas

"From now on, I want you all to play your instruments backstage. You're blocking the audience's view of me."

Gender: Any, but girls do it best.
Instruments: Vocals (girls), Guitar (boys).

The Prima Donna tribe have a select choice of role models. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Prince, Yngwie Malmsteen, all people who have got what they wanted and got it in style. Because the Prima Donna clearly has as much, if not more, talent than any of these people, she (and it is nearly always she) is entitled to the very best. Whilst the guitarists struggle to untangle their leads and get their pedals working, and the drummer assembles a kit the same weight as an aircaft carrier and twice as complicated, the Prima Donna complains that no-one has yet offered her a drink and that her microphone is the wrong colour.

Of course, there are two facts that the brave or foolish may point out to the Prima Donna:

1: You are not playing Madison Square Garden, you are playing the back room of the Dog and Vomit in Romford in front of an audience consisting of reluctant members of your family and inebriated street vagrants. Therefore demanding your own makeup artist and a rider of Chateau Neuf du Pape may be considered slightly excessive.

2: Mariah Carey "didn't do stairs" and as a result now "doesn't do record sales", Whitney Houston has been in and out of rehab so often she has her own shuttle bus, Prince gave his last album away with a newspaper who supported the Nazis in World War Two, and Yngwie's last gig was in his garden shed, where he was booed offstage by woodlice. And they were all way better than you.