PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Pop Music

The point of my frequent ramblings on that topic centers on that exact point. I always ask this question in reply to a comment with that sentiment.

Is it not possible to play music you personally like and enjoy playing and do it SO DAMNED WELL that the audience enjoys it as well as they'd enjoy "that list"? I have watched band after band play "that list" based only on the cliche of "The audience loves that song". Sure they do. They love that song done WELL! I used to date a girl who had a really awful band that was guitar, bass and drums and only her singing. THAT awful band, essentially a base trio with a singer, did "Come Sail Away" (without synth or harmonies), "You Can Leave Your Hat On" (without horns or harmonies), and a few Fleetwood Mac songs (because she lived vicariously through Stevie Nicks - to include dying her hair blond and always wearing all black) (without a keyboard player or harmonies). "You Can Leave Your Hat On", with JUST a guitar??? I have seen SO MANY BAD BANDS butcher "Don't Stop Believing" because nobody can sing it. If you can't, then just don't.

She once asked me to play a show with them for some private party. I agreed pretty much because she was my girlfriend at the time and, well, you know... The other guys hated having me there because it meant a little less money for them, but after hearing the way I filled the sound out with keys and BGV, like adding the horns to You Can Leave Your Hat On on my sampler, the bass and guitar players asked me to join full time. Frankly they were not good enough and I would have been embarrassed to be a full time member of that band. The irony is that had I joined the first thing I would have done was replaced the two guys who asked me to join.

Not all that coincidentally, she dumped me soon after. LOL!!!

You can wow the crowd without playing "that list". They will love anything that you play well enough to where not liking you isn't even an option.

On topic, though ever so tangentially, despite the fact that I really don't like bands that use 70% backing tracks, I think over winter I am going to work up a 12 song set of techno-ish covers from the 80s. Howard Jones, Thompson Twins, Thomas Dolby, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club kind of stuff. Just me and a bunch of hardware. I have software, all kind of MIDI routing gear, drum machines, synthesizers, 10 guitars I don't need... All it would take is a big dose of unlazification. And I would learn to program drums better. That's the kind of thing I would prepare, play out 3 times in small bars as an opening act, and quit. (It would be pop music, just pop music from 35 years ago.)

Like back in the early 90s when I put together a band called Roxanne that learned 11 Police songs JUST to open 1 show. Or the time in the mid 80s when a club owner I knew asked if I could find him a band to do 45 minutes of original music in front of a fairly avant garde art rock kind of band and I said "SURE!! Let me get back to you in a couple of days after I make some calls." I got some people together. The 4 musicians were all fat guys like me, and the singer was a 6 foot tall string bean type. We wrote 10 songs that were pretty much weird, throwaway songs nobody wanted to claim. I put the singer in a striped t-shirt and a beret and asked if he'd grow a pencil thin mustache. The 4 of us fat guys wore brown robes with white rope belts, and I called the band Frenchie and the Friars. We played our show, made $60 bucks each (decent in 1985!) and never played that garbage again! LOL!! Sadly 2 of those guys are dead now. And I am likely 10 years at most from following them off the stage.

That's just some of the strangeness of me!

PS - I delude myself into believing that if the software is only sending data and clock to the hardware devices then I am NOT using tracks. I only consider it tracks if it's recorded music or voices.