The most enduring local bands do not necessarily have the greatest talent, but the greatest compatibility of temperament types. You can’t have a band with four charismatic leaders. There is a leader—often the person who felt the need for the band in the first place—and the others. No matter what they call themselves, they’re Giant Ego and the Yes Men, or Spotlight on Me and the Interchangeable Sidemen.
I suppose there are some musicians who put together bands because they enjoy playing music. Rather than ending with fireworks, they quietly peter out because the players can no longer find the time to practice or do the work involved in booking and performing. Or like Hootie and the Blowfish, they make their money, buy their houses, and retire early to play golf.
But more often there is always one person in the band who is the Problem, or as I like to call him, the Giant Asshole, the Ego from Hell, the Big Baby, the one who cannot comprehend that not everything is about him because, to him, it most surely is.
That’s why he’s in a band. For the attention-starved, it is necessary to stand in a spotlight and inflict your music on an indifferent audience and thus feel superior to those whose only talent is being the audience.
In one band I liked, three of the four enjoyed playing music, but all had day jobs. Music was a hobby. A record contract was a very distant dream, like winning the lottery.
The fourth was a full-blown Lost Boy in Neverland. He considered the band his full-time job, a luxury made possible by a girlfriend with a job. He did the booking, wrote many of the songs, fronted the band, got stinking drunk every show and fought with the bartenders. He complained endlessly that he had to do everything—the others never did anything—to advance the band. He was the hub and everything to do with the band revolved around him.
Then someone else in the band actually did something that advanced the band to the next level. You would think Mr. Hub would be happy. Instead, he fired the guy. When the dust settled, the psychology became clear. Hub’s need to be the catalyst of progress in the band was his only goal—more than having the band succeed. It was his excuse for never having to get a day job. Despite his complaints, if someone actually did anything to help the band, it diminished the band’s dependence on him. Thus, the band had to be destroyed.
Another band I enjoyed had two brilliant co-songwriters who could create genius together but not apart. The different bands they continually built around themselves were incidental.
The two couldn’t have been more different. One hated playing out and wanted to let demo records be the only road to the record deal. The other wanted the band to be lifted into stardom through playing out as much as possible and becoming a word of mouth sensation, much like the Dave Matthews Band did. To divert themselves from killing each other, they turned on their sidemen instead. They agreed
— because they had to in order to stay together — that the problem was always the other guys. They invented faults and dramas to continually break the bands up without ever dealing with each other.
Then there was the Giant Asshole who played in a regional touring band, but he wasn’t the frontman who got the attention and a bigger cut of the money. So he started his own band, but he still needed a guy who could do all the things he could not—sing, talk to the audience, and yet not appear to be the frontman, even though he clearly would be.
Giant Asshole determined where everyone stood on stage, the song choices, what nights they practiced, which songs would go onto the costly CD where his guitar tracks would be layered in the dozens. He even determined who was allowed to collect the money at the end of the night.
The only thing he couldn’t control was the tendency of the audience and the media to focus on the guy who was singing. This is often a problem with guitar players and vocalists, whether it’s Jagger and Richards or Axl and Slash. Who represents the band? When the photograph in the paper shows only the vocalist, when the reporters tend to quote only the vocalist—the guitar-player wants to kill him. Like Eddie Van Halen, fire enough vocalists and you don’t have a band anymore.
