Be Careful What You Wish For

It's one thing to send-off a half-cocked e-mail one random Thursday morning inviting three people who don't know each other to join you in a band.  It's quite another thing when they immediately say yes.  To be frank, I did not appreciate the possibility that such a thing could actually happen.  I mean, each one of them knew me and had spent enough time around me to know much, much better.  Further, each of them knew that I had no previous band experience whatsoever and not a single one of them had ever heard me sing.  Personally, I think this speaks to the desperation that develops over the long, Minnesota winter.  After months of dark and cold and the complete absence of bratwurst grilled to crispy-juicy perfection on a backyard grill, the desperation and deprivation are measurable with a geiger counter.  It is the stuff of icy, sub-zero Midwestern lore.  Or, as I like to say, it's what keeps the riffraff out. By mid-March the good, patient, fair-minded people of the Upper Midwest feel utterly entitled to springtime.   Yet, year after year, Spring spits in their faces and refuses to go on stage for at least another month, maybe longer.

In other words, the timing of my request was perfect: I hit them when they were down.  

But agreeing to form a band via e-mail does not a band make.  Actual human beings need to be eye-balled, musical tastes and preferences bandied-about, skills surveyed and the line-up established.  Given the delicate nature of this exercise, the choice of venue is key.  Convening at someone's home risks putting the host in the power position prematurely, while meeting at Noodles risks sterilizing the whole undertaking before anything is even under enough to take.  Clearly, the only appropriate choice is a bar -- a real bar -- not some personals ad section with a liquor license. For those familiar with Minneapolis and its storied music scene, several venues immediately come to mind for a meeting such as ours.  One of them is the CC Club, which is where we unanimously agreed to convene.  We knocked out our first decision before everyone had even met each other.  Maybe this wasn't so hard after all.

Ah, but not so fast.

In my experience, scheduling in this "middle" stage of life is one of the last remaining areas where the hard sciences have yet to make any real progress.  Fermat's Last Theorem?   Sooo proved yesterday.  String theory?  Might as well be talking kittens and yarn.  Discovering how to fit modern life into the limitations of time and space as we know it, however, may require something akin to the Large Hadron Collider. Unless we can smash minutes into each other at high speeds to discover some new time particle, we will be stuck with only 24 hours in a day while trying to accomplish 36 hours worth of obligations.

So, after controlling for soccer, music lessons, yoga, board meetings, business travel, book club and appointments with various and sundry service providers, as well as the occasional need to feed and interact with our families, we arrived at one precarious Thursday night as the available option for the first band meeting.  It was agreed to and dutifully input into iPhones, Treos and Google calendars, legitimizing its existence and at least marginally increasing the likelihood of it actually happening.

And then, at the last minute,  "Marty" (heretofore one of the anonymous e-mail recipients) couldn't make it.

So, we went ahead without him.  It went down like this:

From: Robin.Preble
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 9:52 AM
To: ["Marty"]; ["Andy"]; ["Jim"]
Subject: Future MTV Music Video Award Recipients

Hey Marty-

Missed you last night.  Hope [your in-laws] arrived safely and are settled in. 

Meanwhile, let the annals of rock history record that the other three members of a band to be named later did in fact convene last night at the CC.  We discovered that Jim owns more keyboards than is really appropriate for a middle-aged finance guy and that Andy gigged the summer after high school with a bar band in Michigan, which means he has a substantial back catalog of Bon Jovi tunes ready to go.  (Both have lots of other legitimate band experience, but I’m telling the story so I’m just picking out the parts I like best.)  We also discovered that the CC Club will never win an award for excellent service.

Unfortunately for me, where we left it is that I need to determine at least three songs that I can sing (and who knows if there are even that many) which I will then communicate to the group.  If my selections present certain challenges, those will be discussed and the list revised.  Otherwise, the plan is that we would all practice those songs for a few weeks and then convene at Jim’s to see where we are.  We decided that Sunday afternoons generally work the best for future band practice dates.

So, I think that constitutes the minutes of our first meeting.  It’s normal for a band to have minutes communicated by e-mail, right?

Robin

To which Jim replied with the following;


From: [Jim]
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 10:30 AM
To: [Marty]; [Andy]; Robin.Preble
Subject: RE: Future MTV Music Video Award Recipients

The email minutes will help in a bid for the lesser known "Most Organized Band" category of the MTV Awards.


At this point, I feel it necessary to give a shout-out to Marty.  It turns out that various twists of fate and the previously mentioned limitations of the current science on time and space created impossible scheduling conflicts incapable of resolution.  Translation: the only time the other three of us were available for practice was Sunday mornings, but that time didn't work for Marty.  Further translation: Marty is in no way associated with or otherwise to blame for the events and sounds that may be revealed in this blog in the coming months.

Which leaves us with a group of three and the task of choosing the first songs to play and sing:


From: Robin.Preble
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2010 11:09 AM
To: [Jim];[Andy]
Subject: The moment you've all been waiting for . . .

Having already approached the edge of insanity and leaned far out over the rim, I figured I might as well just jump all the way in and see what happens. 

I spent most of the weekend closeted-off in some corner of my house or another chasing down lyrics and attempting to sing any number of songs (and yes, that is different than how I usually spend my weekends.) The result of that most scientific process is the list below:

Breathless (X's cover)

Together (The Raconteurs)

Gold Lion (The Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

Don't Wanna Talk (Brendan Benson)

I Can't Explain (The Who)

Let Me Go (CAKE)

The first three are the ones I recommend that we start with, subject to objections like “there’s no f-ing way we can play that.”  The next three are the alternates I would offer in that event or in case anyone really loves one of them better.  I have to say, the idea of playing some funked-out CAKE song does have its appeal.  Let me know what you think.

With that e-mail I sealed my fate.  


After the instigating e-mail, the odds were at least 10-1 that nothing would really come of it.  Even after the CC Club meeting the odds were probably still 5-1 that it would go no further.  To be clear, I fully disclosed the fact that I had never been in a band or done any singing in front of anyone before except, perhaps, my cats, who, it should be noted, never once objected.  Granted, I had done a great deal of singing in my car and in the shower, but it turns out that kind of experience doesn't show up on the resumes of most accomplished musicians and singer-songwriters.  While everyone was interested enough in an excuse to meet for a few beers and talk about rock 'n' roll, it was still more probable than not that the center wouldn't hold.  But it did. Not only were Jim and Andy genuinely interested in seeing what would come of this, but I had picked songs and agreed to sing them.  With that, the ridiculously unlikely suddenly wasn't.


This could only mean one thing:  I was actually going to have to sing in front of other people -- out loud.