You Never Go to Their Shows!

Your local bands don't like you. For a society that readily bends over at the altar of hero worship, this is a bitter pill to swallow. Though it's painful, the truth will set you free. Here's a quick list of the reasons why your local bands hate you and why you should stop giving them free post-show hand jobs:

 

Friends and fans don't buy enough tickets.
The Catch-22 in the early phase of bandhood is that venues don't want to book bands without audiences, and bands can't accrue audiences without being booked. The common approach to this conundrum is the pay-to-play stratagem—booking agents at places such as Chain Reaction and House of Blues hand the band a stack of tickets to sell to their friends so they can play a weeknight show in a half-empty room. Of course, after coming to a few of these afterbirth affairs, friends start looking for excuses such as appointments with mobile dog groomers to explain why they can't make it.

People never want to pay for your swag.
Bands spend a lot of money producing their own albums, screenprinting T-shirts and hand-cutting posters. Just because you went to middle school with the singer does not mean you can expect free merch, so don't ask for it!

Everything is wrong with the venue.
Local groups often run into technical issues in smaller venues—poor acoustics, excessive feedback, no beer tickets. This can cause a lot of problems, especially if the sound guy or bar manager is a hulking lummox with neck tattoos and a no-nonsense attitude. The band will cleverly disguise their own piss-poor performance by blaming everything on the sound after the show, while publicly taking it out on the folks who bought tickets by throwing up their hands midset and refusing to work under such conditions.

Girls won't sleep with them.
While it's true actual rock stars get a lot of action, it's not a perk right out of the gate. Many new bands are dismayed to find out that though they did everything in their power to put on a kick-ass show at a downtown Fullerton bar—donned vinyl platform boots and shot confetti into the crowd, etc.—they still needed game, which lots of them don't have. In fact, many musicians take to the stage because they don't know how to relate to people. For some reason, they think standing in front of throngs of drunks will change this. When it doesn't, it leads to resentment on the part of the band, and the audience suffers for it with subpar EPs and demos. From a May 6 Heard Mentality blog post.

 

This column appeared in print as “Why Your Local Bands Hate You.”