Edited Date/Time
1/27/2012 1:59am
I know there are lots of musicians here, but who all has been in a working band? I've just been playing local shows at festivals/bars for about a year and a half now, about to start up a 2nd band here soon. Anyone ever make it past the bar scene?
Every gig that had .......Free Beet Tonight ...on the bill board...was packed!
The band name is a joke.....always wanted to start a band by that name though..... but I did do some singing back in the day.
Yeah, davis224, I played for a living for years.
I even played at the damned Budokan once!
Never got rich, but had a good time and have lots of great memories.
When it got to be more business than fun, I quit.
I've been trying to start a new punk band called "POOF" (Pissed Off Old Fuckers), but I'm having a hard time getting any other old fuckers to commit.
Here's something we recorded in the early nineties, that my old singer put together recently:
I was a loner in high school so I just played guitar, dont play much anymore.
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It's a cover from David Bowie's "Hunky Dory" album.
I don't remember exactly what year I did it, but it was in the mid-80s, at the Dole Pineapple warehouse in Honolulu.
We also played some clubs while we were there.
Fast Eddies, and a couple others.
Maybe we played together.
I played in clubs like Wave Waikiki, the Jazz Cellar and C5 (you probably played at least one of those places) and a couple times at the enlisted men's club @ Pearl Harbor (we were supposed to open for Ice-T once @ Pearl, but he canceled at the last minute-his backstage food and beer were great!). There were also local promoters that organized shows at park band shells and Aloha Tower Pier that were great fun.
If you know what I mean.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/The-Fireside-Relics/124158827630899?cl…
The band I'm in now is starting to see a good amount of success. We've toured pretty much the entire east coast, got flown down to Miami and put up in the SoHo house to play a few shows, did a stint down to New Orleans for Foburg fest about a month and a half ago and got to play with RaRaRiot. We got some nice funding to record the second album, just finished it. Will most likely get put out in the fall.
If you want to make a living off of it there can seriously be NO downtime. You live it. It is your life, and you have to want it. When I'm not gigging or on the road I'm doing studio musician work. Always making contacts. Always online promoting, making phone calls, networking etc.
Nobody is going to just walk up to you and hand you a record deal anymore. Just doesnt happen.
Pit Row
I used to have one just like it, but lefty.
It got stolen, and more than likely became firewood when the thieving motherfucker realized it was left-handed.
A little advice on going all original:
You've heard that getting "discovered" is a matter of being in the right place, at the right time, in front of the right people.
It's totally true, and to accomplish this, you need to be in a lot of places, a lot of times, in front of a lot of people.
The good clubs will not pay you to play their venue, but they'll book you in shitty time slots on shitty weeknights, and they will not book you on a Friday or Saturday until you start bringing enough people in on Tuesday that they make a ton of cash, and even when you pack the place on a Saturday you'll get a fraction of the gate, but you have to do it.
What my band did when we first started out, was learn a bunch of covers, and auditioned at an obscure club a few towns over that already had a regular crowd, and got a Thursday through Saturday "Top 40" gig that paid well.
We made enough money from doing that gig once a month to pay our studio rent, upgrade our equipment a little at a time, and properly promote our shows at the big name clubs.
We never told our regular fans about the top 40 thing, but we handed out fliers for our real shows to the folks who came to the top 40 thing, and built up a pretty good fan base that way.
It took a couple of years of doing this before we could stop the top 40.
In the mean time, we were networking with other local bands and renting halls, lights and P.A.s and doing self-promoted shows.
All of this was done so we could afford to play virtually for free at the venues where the industry folks hung out.
Eventually, we were able to budget in some recording time.
I'm off for a weekend of desert riding in the morning and I've got to hit the hay...
Maybe I'll pontificate some more when I get back Sunday night.
Last thing though, when you choose a name for your band, have marketing in mind.
You need to have a catchy name and a visually attractive logo, because no matter how good your music is, most of the money you're going to make will be from merchandise.
try that one, I don't think band pages can be anything but public, I don't see a privacy option when i switch to that page. I logged out and the link worked for me, told me to log in, but I could still view the page.
Your Facebook page has photos, but I didn't find any vids or music clips. You need to get on that, and maybe add some photos that show you on a larger stage (even if you need to "stage" the photos), I get a real "bar band" vibe from your Facebook and if you want to move beyond that, you need to remake your image.
Other than NEVER play in a band with a chick in it, that's all I have for now.
I've got a show this saturday, I'll try to find a sober-ish cameraman with a steady hand...
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