Deb, that is the best example I could ever find of why I didn't want part time musicians. I want guys who have no other income source who HAD to take things seriously.

I have several stories in my music past like that. I had a drummer show up for rehearsal with a tall boy in a paper bag. I told him this was his one and only warning and if beer meant more to him than his job he should take his drums home right now and not come back.3 rehearsals later he showed up reeking of beer, so I fired him.

I had a bass player who loved his cocaine. He showed up at rehearsal with every sign of being high. He was a LONGTIME acquaintance, since we were kids growing up on the same street. The singer walked over with his set list on which he had written "Is he high right now?" And I took that list and studied it before saying "Yeah. You got it right." And we called rehearsal early and I had to fire a guy I had known since I was 8 and he was 6. We were 39 and 37 when this went down. WHY do I have to teach a 37 year old man to respect the other 5 people involved to not come to work all coked up? That guy died at age 48 from a cocaine induced heart attack.

After firing that guitar player from the previous post, on one of the many calls he made to beg me to take him back I told him "You seem to have this notion that you are working WITH me. No, you are working FOR me. This is MY band, MY business. I hire and fire. I hired you. You agreed to some rules. You then went back on your word, so I fired you. And this is over. Go join a fun band and get as drunk as you want. This is a serious business and I need employees who treat is so." I worked very hard to train the guys to NEVER refer to a gig as "play". That band NEVER "played" a gig. We "performed". We "worked". We never "played". People would call me every day asking "You playing tonight?" and I would always respond "No. I am working tonight. I played last night when the band was not booked."

I just don't get that "band = party" mentality. No matter what you do you ultimately work for somebody. If you run your band, you work for who hires you, and you follow their rules. One bar that booked us was owned by a guy who was a southern rocker. In a band that played 4 Tops, Temptations, James Brown and Wilson Pickett songs, whenever we were there we played "Whippin' Post" JUST for that guy. And he usually tipped us 50 bucks for doing an "out of the ordinary for us" song. I HATE that insipid song. All night long we do dance music and then do a song in 6/8 that nobody can comfortably dance to? But it kept us employed at that place so I gritted my teeth and did that awful cliche of a song. It's a business, after all. when we got bigger and our price went up we didn't book there anymore. We offered him a deal but we were $200 apart so he stopped booking us. I would still go in there for a few beers after that, and out of mutual respect he understood that we simply couldn't take less money when there was more always available, and I understood that the size of his bar was such that he couldn't sell enough to justify paying us. The bar is long since gone but maybe once a year he calls me to say hello. Business is business. Friendship is friendship. They CAN coexist, but they don't have to.

Hmmm.... topic. We used amps in our band.