FOR MUSICIANS ONLY Losing My Audition by George Ziemann -- April 18, 2008 After playing with The Hurricane in January, I got the bug to go out and play again. I looked through Craigslist, found something that seemed compatible, answered the ad and went to audition. That was about a month ago. I haven't heard back from them and they're still running ads. I'm guessing that I didn't pass the audition. They were a nice enough group of guys, and the guitarist is the one who said the magic words leading to the rebirth of my Les Paul. I really have no complaints, so I'm not going to say anything negative about the band, except maybe for the fact that they never bothered to email or call to say, "Sorry, you're not what we were looking for." I even left a mic stand behind to give them a reason to call me and that didn't work, either. This was the first time since 1976 that I auditioned for something and didn't land the gig. The weird part is that I really hope they find someone else and don't call me at the last minute. If they did, I'd probably take the gig, but the truth is that they're not exactly what I was looking for. I had to spend a lot of time searching for copies of their songs so I could get the chord pattern, because it was jam-packed with songs that I had heard but never played in a band before. They weren't in the 1200 songs that were already in my iTunes playlist. The common ground we did share seemed to mesh pretty well. There just wasn't enough of it. I still wouldn't mind being in a band that plays covers, but there are a lot of things I think about that don't seem to cross most other musicians' minds. Playing the Radio Hits There is a prevalent theory among musicians that if you're going to play cover songs, you should play the radio hits. That's what people are familiar with. That's what they like. That's what they come to hear. This is why every bar band in the country plays "Sweet Home Alabama" or "Gimme Three Steps" or both. Ironically, this rule of thumb is immediately violated because no matter how many times the drunk guy at the back of the room yells "Free Bird!", no one wants to play it. Conversely, no one wants to hear "Stairway to Heaven" unless Jimmy Page is playing guitar. To me, the major flaw in the "play the hits" thinking comes from the time when AM radio played the Top 40 hits and FM played everything else. If a song landed on the AM playlist, it was so overplayed that everyone got sick of it, much like making the Clear Channel playlist today. We all pretty much agree that Clear Channel sucks, because that's the same lame overplayed crap that used to be on AM radio. In the 70s, people bought albums. We would listen to the whole thing, sometimes even both sides. The core audience was familiar with the entire album, not just one song. Most self-respecting rock bands stopped playing a song when it hit AM radio. 30 years later, that's what cover bands are basing their set lists on. I thought "Proud Mary" would never die. Haven't figured out exactly when it disappeared, but it's been replaced by "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," which is on the infamous Clear Channel list of songs they suggested not be played, along with a bunch of other songs that seem to be on every cover band's list. If you're in a cover band that's basing song selection on radio airplay, which is what Top 40 is all about, every song you play that's on the CC list seems to contradict the logic behind the entire premise. Many songs made the Top 40 because they were great songs and we really did like them the first 500 or 1000 times we heard them. Many others made the journey to the Land of Airplay Overkill because the record labels shelled out big bucks to make it happen. The radio charts have always been corrupted by payola. The Top 40-based playlist also suffers from the problem that simply being in the Top 40 is not a true indication of a great song, or even necessarily one that you might want to remember. I don't see anyone doing "Mmm-Bop" or "Sugar, Sugar," and they were number one hits. When is the last time you saw a band do a tune by The Monkees? How about Hannah Montana or High School Musical? Chartbusters. Let's be honest. Cover bands play the songs they like and find a reason to justify leaving out what they don't like. The radio argument is lame. It just doesn't hold up as a song selection criteria. ASCAP and BMI These two organizations collect royalty fees from every bar, restaurant, coffeehouse, dentist office and hair salon in the country. Identifying which songs are being played in bars is an inexact science, to say the least. Just a wild-ass guess here, but maybe the people who go around to make sure you've paid up are the same people responsible for calling the royalty gods to tell them what songs they heard bands play that week, provided they even recognized them. For all we know, that's the guy yelling "Free Bird!" To be honest though, in 35 years of playing music, doing sound, hauling gear and just generally spending way too much time in bars, to my knowledge, the appearance of an actual ASCAP or BMI person has never happened to myself or anyone else I've known. However, just on the outside chance that it could happen, there are some artists whose pockets I simply do not want to help put money into. Reality Check Having said all of that, these are things to consider when you put your list together or are looking at revamping it, not when you audition for or play with a band that's been together for a while. The list is the list. Either you know the material or you don't. But there's another factor that's more important. Some people call it chemistry, I like to call it magic because I've got this whole wizard theme going, but it's more like telepathy -- tuning in to each other's wavelength and communicating without words. I suppose that in some circles, this probably actually counts as magic, but if you can't do this, you're probably in the wrong band. I couldn't do it the night I auditioned. The first time Hank Tomlin talked me into getting on stage to play, it had been four years since I'd even owned a keyboard. We sparked on some Allman Brothers and a couple of weeks later, I'm in the band. Played with him for three weeks before we ever had a rehearsal. It was still the wrong band. Hank is a die-hard blues player. Even though we connected on the rock-oriented material, in the end they had to fire me to hire back the guy that they fired to hire me because he really was a better blues player. Somewhere around the tenth song of the night that's a standard 1-4-5 blues progression in the key of E or D, I'd be struggling to think of new lead riffs that I hadn't already used. Having invested in gear all over again, I started my own band, playing radio hits. First, we threw together 50 songs that we knew and went from there. I didn't give a damn thing I've talked about on this page any thought. Of course, I was only 40 at the time. Didn't know much about the RIAA, ASCAP, royalties, or payola. Napster hadn't been invented yet, Metallica hadn't turned on its fans yet, along with the other artists who started singing "The Pirates are Stealing My Stuff." That all matters to me now. It changes everything.

FOR MUSICIANS ONLY... "For Musicians Only" is a category of articles written for the musicians out there in Readerville.