I always find it fun as my monthly deadline for this welcome column approaches to search for a catch phrase or a hook that I can use and riff on, if you will.
It turns out that I have been having a problem with one of the bands I’m in and I was intending to use the analogy “herding cats” to tell you about it but in my large number of seconds of cogent preparation for this column, I decided that “herding cats” was too cliché so I gave my research assistant (you know the one that lives in Mountain View by the bay) the task of coming up with an alternative that would describe my level of frustration and degree of difficulty in dealing with this assemblage of musicians masquerading as a band.
Up to the task as usual, Google delivered a very appropriate alternative, “minding mice at a crossroads”. This is an Irish phrase that seems to have a couple of meanings depending on the context. One is the obvious one, a bunch of mice at a crossroads will scatter at will so there is no minding them.
Another connotation is that the one who has the task of minding the mice is incompetent of doing much else. Both of these definitions work for my band problem…….and apparently for me.
Let me be upfront here. I like to gig. I enjoy playing in front of people. Big crowds, small crowds, senior citizens, toddlers, I don’t care. Being one of the retired folks in the band, I have taken the responsibility of trying to book gigs. If I do say so myself, I have done a pretty good job of finding work and most of them are paying gigs. We’re not talking full time or going on tour but rather looking for two gigs a month or so.
Starting in early July, I was hustling up some gigs for the summer and fall. I had found some at a San Jose brewery we have played at before, an East Bay pizza joint and at a new venue on the Peninsula. All these band buyers were very flexible about dates. An amateur band bookers dream, right? Nope, I couldn’t get a band quorum even with the flexibility of dates from the venues. Actually, this got downright embarrassing after a point and the band ended up turning down 3 or 4 gigs and cancelling one after booking it.
Luckily, I was able to maintain a good relationship with most of these venues although one bridge is burned at least for a while.
One of the issues is that this particular band has 7 players and while we could potentially play shorthanded sometimes, there are a couple of critical pieces that are necessary for any quality performance. Missing our lead singer or rhythm guitar player won’t work. If a venue offers an opportunity to play on a Friday in 3 weeks, I can’t say yes or no until I can confirm with 7 people, very hard to do in a timely manner.
I’m sure this type of situation is fairly typical with bands that don’t have someone’s name in the band’s name like Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys or Flatt and Scruggs. If Bill said they were playing a gig, they were playing the gig but in our semi-amateur world that is not the case. We need to accommodate all the band member’s lives.
I am figuring out that it is going to take some “learnin” on my part to make this easier. Rehearsals are considerably more easily scheduled as you can keep calendars and plan in advance. It is gigs popping up on the short-term horizon (3-4) weeks that are difficult.
I enlisted some help from another band member and we worked with the others to determine what the gig schedule horizon could be and got commitments that if we book a gig in that 3-4 week window, everyone would be available.
So moving forward, I’ll get my gig fix more regularly in the coming year or so that’s the plan. I’m clear, though, that I’m still ‘minding mice at the crossroads” with both definitions in play.
See you next month.
