Slim Pickings
I play bass for fun and side money. I’ve been to three band auditions that I saw ads for on Craigslist. The first one, everybody was too stoned when I showed up to even tune properly. I have nothing against the green, but it was supposed to be a paying gig. It was an hour and a half and we got through two songs. Don’t nobody got time for that.
The second one was a “3-5 paid gigs per month” bar band PRO GEAR REQUIRED. They were all in their 40s minimum. PRO GEAR apparently meant that they bought Marshall stacks and Gibson guitars because of the brand name. Two guitar players, and between the two of them they seemed to know about seven chords.
The drummer was so out of shape that he needed a ten-minute break after two or three songs. If they were getting paid gigs, I’d love to know where.
The third one was an “original” band that supposedly needed a fill-in bass player for a few weeks. I show up to the audition and it turns out that the only remaining member of the band is a cheap knockoff of Slash who doesn’t play any instruments. After ten minutes, I knew why the rest of the band had left. In five years he’d written six songs, and all of them were clear knockoffs of other bands.