"Wrong!" says a Chunklet writer who's been there.

I know you. You're a male between, what, 18 and 35? Probably well educated but slightly underachieving, kind of nerdy in an ironic-so-it's-okay kinda way, and a huge fan of independent rock music. And if you're like most people in this demographic, it's always been a dream of yours to be in a band. Not just any old local band that stinks up basements and the occasional opening slot at the student union or some dump in the warehouse district. But a real band-one that tours and draws crowds and gets interviewed and written about and inspires people as much as you've been inspired by your punk rock heroes.

Well, gather around, kids, 'cause Uncle Pat's gonna disillusion your ass.

Bluntly put, being in a working band is one of the most overrated experiences a person can have. Sure, there are some advantages, if you manage to pull it off. You get to travel a bit, meet new people, be creative, and postpone that vaunted institution known as reality for another few years. It all looks so enticing that, surely, it must be a lifestyle worth pursuing, right? Ninety-nine percent of the time, definitely not. In fact, I aim to persuade you that you're better off just going straight to graduate school or getting your career on track and remaining an honest, ordinary music fan with no pretensions of rockstardom.

Here's a breakdown of the whole being-in-a-band thing that should illustrate what a load of rubbish it is. Best wishes.

Booking Shows
Okay, so let's say you're in a band that's written a set, played a dozen or so local shows, made some connections, and put out a 7" or-if you're really resourceful-a CD. To get to the next level, you've got to take your act on the road. That's the whole point of this, after all: to get people to listen to your music. An artist doesn't paint something and stick it in a closet, and a chef doesn't cook a meal and stuff it down the sink, so naturally you want an audience for the tunes you've worked so hard to craft, and your records are simply not gonna fly off the shelves by themselves.

The first notion you must dispense with is that it's easy to book a tour. Ask anyone who's done it-it's a colossal pain in the ass. For a start, no one knows who the fuck you are. It's one thing if your band is established, but by the time you've got a bunch of CDs out, someone is probably doing your booking for you anyway. So you've got to start from scratch, calling and e-mailing everyone on God's green earth who you think can help get you a show. Trouble is that promoters and other people who put together shows are at worst scumbags who will screw you over as soon as look at you, or at best flakeoid drug casualties who are good-hearted but thick as a plank of wood. Dealing with them will test your patience to the max, and make you feel like your tour is doomed before you pack up the van. Even if you eschew nightclubs in favor of house parties or campus shows, you've still got to deal with college students-and sometimes they're worse than the scumbags and flakeoids, because students are not attempting to do this for a living. For students, putting together shows is a lark to pass the time between exams and their weekly two-hour radio spots. As such, they tend to be completely unreliable and will only humor you as long as you seem to like them. This motley collection of ne'er-do-wells, sprinkled liberally over our vast land, holds the keys to your future in rock. Persevere, cajole, kiss ass, whatever-do what you gotta do, because without them, you and your tour are going nowhere. My advice is to spare yourself the indignity and not interact with these people at all, but if you're still determined, maybe considering the hardships of the road will change your mind.

Traveling
Now let's say you've overcome the odds and somehow cobbled together a several-week tour that takes you to a host of dingy bars and dormitory rec rooms in your region. You and your bandmates chip in to rent or buy some crummy van, pack it up with your gear, kiss your girlfriends goodbye, and roll out. For the first few hours, your mind is flooded with romantic notions of Kerouac, amber waves of grain, and all the brave pioneers who came before you. But after a while it occurs to you that most of the country looks the same: painfully dull. Long stretches of fields and forests are broken up only by the occasional gas station, fast food joint, big box store, or fireworks stand. The faded backs of houses and trailers are stoic reminders of how quotidian much of American life actually is. Truckers look at you with bemusement or homophobic rage, if they notice you at all. After barreling along for hours, you finally alight, set up, play, pack up, and go somewhere to crash. Then you wake up the next day and do it again. Twenty or thirty times in a row.

The mental aspect of touring is fatiguing enough, but I can't emphasize enough how taxing it can be on the body, as well. Hotels? Forget it. Unless you're independently wealthy, you're staying at someone's house after the show. There may be an available couch or extra bed now and then, but generally you're in a sleeping bag on a hard wooden floor covered with dirt and cat hair. You sweat your ass off in the summer and shiver when it's cold, and usually wake up tired, coughing, and with sore muscles. After the first week, the camaraderie and chattiness in the van is replaced by snoring or staring into space. The worst part is loading in and out over and over. It's a lot different when you play in your hometown once in a while; you only drive a few miles and friends are always around to help carry gear. You think, "Hey, this isn't so bad." But in some distant state, it's only you and your bandmates who are responsible for lugging your shit in and out of venues, sometimes up and down multiple flights of stairs. Even the most hearty of souls wear down from the lack of sleep, repeated heavy lifting, and sweat and grime. Everyone gets sick at some point and unselfishly passes the bug around. And I haven't even mentioned the food yet. Real bands get catered with deli trays and sandwiches, or maybe fresh pasta. Chances are that you, however, will stop at a taco or burger stand and load up on greasy crap before the show; and instead of juice or milk, you'll probably end up drinking too much beer or soft drinks from the bar. By the second or third week you feel ill and disconnected, disoriented, and maybe even a little homesick, wondering why you bothered doing all this in the first place.

A lot of people start a band to avoid working; ironically, it is some of the hardest work a person can ever do.

Performing
As if the process of spending hours per day staring out the windows of a cramped van weren't dispiriting enough, equally mind-numbing is what happens once you get to your destination: waiting around for several more hours before you play. It's probably too dark to read, so pinball and billiards soothe the pain somewhat. But generally you shuffle about, change strings or drum heads, set up the merch table, and basically- just-wait around. Real bands get a soundcheck so their music will be evenly mixed during the show, and then chat with well-wishers and do interviews for a while before their set. You, on the other hand, will not only not get a soundcheck, but the bitter and condescending soundman will resent the fact that you even exist. You will hear nothing in the monitors and there will be no vocals coming out of the PA. After you play your set for 10 people (what, you didn't think anyone was going to come out early to see a band they never heard of, did you?) you hastily drag your shambling collection of amps and semi-working guitars offstage so the real band can get up there and proceed to blow you away in front of 200 people. A couple of geeky dudes from the local college/record store kinda dug your set, so they take pity on you and offer you a place to crash. They have several cats.

The next day, you wake up, sore and tired as usual, and drive to the next show. The scumbag/flakeoid/college student tells you upon arrival that the local band on the bill broke up, or the fire marshal temporarily closed the venue, or he simply forgot there was a show tonight and did no promotion whatsoever. So it's cancelled. Undaunted, you decide to drive all night to the next city, sleep in the van, and maybe do some sightseeing the next day. On the way, though, you get a flat tire or the van breaks down, you get pulled over by a cop for speeding, or someone slams his hand in the van door-breaking a finger. Or you get some equipment stolen from your van. Or someone's girlfriend back home finds out she's pregnant. Or someone's mom dies. Or the van rolls over and everyone in the band dies.

You see where I'm going with this. Scores of bad things can go wrong while on tour, and the number of cataclysmic events that can take place is inversely proportional to the popularity of the band. Which means that you-Mister "I want to start a band and go on tour regardless of how retarded and unworkable the idea is"-are destined for not only failure, but abject misery and humiliation.

Being Creative & Getting Reviewed
If you've defied fate and have come home from tour in one piece, and your band hasn't broken up or had all its shit stolen, congratulations! Now you get to do the most difficult part of all: writing another set of material and recording a new album. The first one was easy, wasn't it? Everyone worked together and contributed good ideas in a fun, enthusiastic way. But now, the concepts don't flow so readily. You all have improved your chops, but seem to be overthinking and forcing the music to come together. Buoyed by the feeling of success that accompanied the first album or single, you went ahead and booked studio time. But that time is fast approaching and you're nowhere near ready to record; you've only got a bunch of half-baked parts of songs and"Christ!"hardly any lyrics written. Practices are long and tempers are short. You get to the studio-a better one than last time-but feel lost in the array of gadgets and dials you've never seen before. The engineer is a nice enough fellow, but he's running a business, and has no problem with indulging your need to write material in the studio and experiment with different sounds. Eventually, you go way over budget and come away with a tape that sounds nothing like your band. Luckily, an indie label has offered to put the record out, but deep down you don't like it as much as the first one. You're secretly relieved when the label-actually a college dropout who inherited a bunch of money-completely bungles the distribution of the record.

A few 'zines miraculously get a hold of some copies and they like the album even less than you do. After the first single or album, which you lovingly financed and released yourself, a few local rags picked up on the buzz generated by some of your friends and acquaintances and wrote some blurbs about it. They weren't at all unfavorable; in fact, they admired your freshness and even compared you to some of your favorite bands. But this time, some reputable publications with rather wide circulations had a listen, and when they weren't totally dismissive, they took the time to lay into your derivative style, your knowledge of dynamics, and even the bogusness of the entire scene in your town. Most people would take the hint and abandon the rock ship; but no, you chalk up the bad reviews to jaded, mean-spirited hacks who can't play music themselves and are therefore relegated to writing about how much they hate everything. It doesn't matter that critics generally know what they're talking about and would much rather write a good review on any given day, and it doesn't matter that even you yourself know on some level that what you're doing is just wasting everyone's time. You doggedly press on, taking up shelf space in the pantry of entertainment with your bland, moldy cookies that no one wants to eat.

Inspiring People, Giving Back to the Music Community, Blah-Dee-Blah-Blah

Your family and friends are good people and they don't want to discourage you from following your dreams. But they're not doing you any favors by blowing smoke up your ass about how good your band is. So I'm just gonna give it to you straight:

You have no talent.

Now don't get me wrong. I love a lot of punk and indie rock, and am aware that the "do it yourself" ethic is essential to the subculture. A lot of great art-not just music, but graphics, filmmaking, or what have you-started and stayed in the amateur ranks. And I believe that everyone should try to express himself artistically if he thinks it will make him a better person. But the downside of DIY-and this is seldom talked about-is that it opened the floodgates for every swingin' dick with a guitar and 500 bucks to put out a record and try to get a show at the local rock club. Apparently, it's not good enough for people to recognize their paltry talents and limit their audience to their families and friends. No, they've got to have delusions of grandeur, and believe that they can also achieve fame and fortune, and be an inspiration to others. What a pile of narcissistic shit! It is so rare, so incredibly rare, that a musician or group of musicians has the ability to make quality music of lasting value that it's a puzzle that anyone attempts to clamber up on a stage at all. Yet there they are-this nonstop parade of buffoons who continue to annoy us and embarrass themselves because someone somewhere said it's okay for them to give it a whirl.

If you're one of those people, let me repeat: being in a working, touring band is extremely hard work, fraught with tension, illness, discomfort, and shady characters. Play music if it makes you happy, but don't get all cocky and assume you can do it for a living, or that you would even want to. The odds are overwhelming that you'll merely make a putz out of yourself and give it up broke, disappointed, and wishing you'd stayed in the audience to begin with.*

*The author would like to add that the band he was in during the early '90s was, by most accounts, actually pretty good, but that even then the experience kinda sucked a lot of the time. -ed