A band I once joined was trying to be one of those "so we can play anywhere" bands. I explained while the concept is good, how they were doing that was not. Your genre "swing" can't be so wide that you go from Patsy Cline to Metallica. With that attitude, 50% of your audience is going to hate you on EVERY song. So I sat down with their set list and started marking things off with an indelible laundry marker (so they couldn't ever be seen again!) and started building a fresh list. Here's how I explained it, and what we all agreed to.

Right down the middle you have your "middle" group. That would be songs like "Peaceful Easy Feeling". Those will sell in a rock room or a country room. There were 25 songs in that group. Then down the left side (country) we had "On The Road Again" and "I Fall To Pieces". We had 20 of those. Down the right side (more toward rock) we had stuff like "Old Time Rock And Roll" and "You May Be Right". We had 20 of those. So on our plate was 65 songs we could use. We played the entire middle list every night. Then based on, as Notes said, whether or not we saw cowboy hats and big belt buckles shaped like Peterbilt truck cabs, decided how heavy to lean left or right. We kept exactly 65 songs in our current memory bank, and for example when we learned "Every Breath You Take" something would come out of the "middle" list. That way we could keep some air of freshness without having to rehearse twice a week to do it. And this was before email so we couldn't be sending song files back and forth. It was back in the time of cassette tapes and cheap players that could play between keys so I always had to specify the right key. But like so many low profile bands there were huge internal problems so it didn't last. Like one night nobody could find the drummer. We called his house and nobody had seen him all day. Turns out he went to a bar at 2pm and got so hammered he fell asleep laying on the front seat of his truck and when someone finally saw him and woke him at 11pm it was obviously way too late. Then we had one get his 3rd DUI and as part of his plea he was not allowed to be in a bar, so HE had to go. One moved to Florida, etc... I got tired of that professionalism deficit and just let it die rather than recruit and have an emergency "on call" list.

There was a band here that lasted about a year. It was a bunch of metalheads that wanted to recruit a girl singer I know and in fact had brought her into a Fleetwood Mac tribute I put together (and never played live with). They wanted her to be the heavy metal high screamer in front of this band. Part of her leverage was that they would have to do a set of Mac and Nicks music before they did their set of hard and thrash metal. Can you imagine the kind of crowd that would hang around to hear Landslide and Whiskey In a Jar? The players were so inflexible about the orchestration that the guitar player never set down his Ibanez with the dirty pickups or play without his pedal chain, so everything was dirt and grit behind those sweet voiced Stevie Nicks songs. They didn't last long. That girl had a great voice, plays keyboards and guitar, and does a solo act, and I knew her well from those tribute band rehearsals, and she was FAR too good for them. I actually want to get her into the thing I am in now. That will be part of the off season discussions.