So Much Band Drama

 

Today I worked on campus, had two meetings, and went to an early music concert. One of the fiddlers from my band was there, so I was talking to her about our band drama (more on that in a second), and then I saw that three rows ahead of us there was someone who looked very much like our guitarist. Was it? I've never known her to have any interest in the music of Bach. If it was her, did she even hear me? 

After working a whole day in my still under-the-weather state, I was just going to go home and relax, but an email arrived reminding me that the East Side Club was having an emergency meeting to discuss replacing the awning over the front entrance, and there would be free pizza and beer. You could also log in on Zoom, so I was thinking I'd just go home and do that, but then I thought, "I've been on a computer all day. Time to interact with people in real life." So I went and got my free glass of Spotted Cow, but all that was left of the pizza were some tiny scraps of very cold cheese pizza. I sat at a table, and nobody sat with me. The meeting took about ten minutes, so I could have just gone home if I hadn't had that beer. The club director said she'd be making some more pizza, so I convinced Travalon to come after work, and one woman did come over and talk to me for a bit. They brought out a fresh pizza just before Travalon arrived, so I snagged a piece for him and took a teeny piece for myself. It was really good, with bacon on it and kind of spicy. Everyone else wanted some pizza too, so I didn't take any more. By then they were out of Spotted Cow, so Travalon had to have Moon Man, which is an IPA, and he doesn't like those, but it was that or Bud Light. Then they brought out a sausage pizza, so I had one more teeny piece, and Travalon took a few pieces. It was cut into tons of square pieces, not the usual slices. We did have some more dinner at home after that, since dribs and drabs of pizza wasn't quite enough.

So... the band drama. On Sunday I thought we had a great practice, where our bass player had gone through our online database of tunes and picked out about twenty that worked with the dances she wanted to do and put them into medleys. She said we needed to learn to play them a bit faster, like 108/110 beats per minute. Our guitarist objected that we didn't know all these tunes, so the bassist seemed puzzled: why were they in our database? The fiddler who also likes early music said they are tunes we hope to learn someday. Well, it was two months until our gig, so why not learn them now? I thought all of this seemed very reasonable, and it seemed that our bass player was going to be our caller and rehabilitate our image, maybe get us off the blacklist. However, on Monday our guitarist highlighted the tunes we didn't know yet in our bassist's email and said it was too many tunes for the length of the gig, so we shouldn't bother with the ones we didn't know. This made the bassist so mad that she said she was done with us, so take her image off our social media page. Hardingfelde emailed someone about calling for us instead, but that person forwarded our message to the caller who originally got mad at us, and she apparently forwarded it to the bassist, who said we will never find another caller who wants to work with us, so just let her take over the gig because she can find some musicians who would be willing to do what she wants. Hardingfele emailed us, taking off the bass player, and I replied that I couldn't blame her for being mad at us. So far the guitarist hasn't weighed in, but the fiddler thinks we can still salvage things. I just went to our social media page, and I see that the guitarist has not updated the post saying we'd be playing this gig, and the cover photo prominently features the bassist. Denial ain't just a river. We will never get another dance gig, or maybe any gig other than playing for Make Music Madison, when anyone can say they're playing in public. Will this finally be the end of our band?

Famous Hat