You know the rest.
My very last band has exploded, along with my dream of one last bid to play out with a full band and showcase my music.
I’m gonna take the heat on this one.
I was the only one of the four of us that had an agenda.
Hell, these guys were just wanting to hang and have some fun playing music.
I managed to take the fun out of it for everyone. I also made it an atmosphere that led to mistakes, even my own, and get this, on songs I wrote!
I insisted we play my music along with covers, regardless of what anyone else wanted.
“Bad boy Maddogg!”
Seriously, I’m a dumbass.
Pretty sure I was fooling myself to think I still had the juice to pull it off. I will miss the guys as we have now gone our proverbial separate ways.
That is why it is so freaking hard to put a band together in the first place, yet alone a band where all the members are on the same page right from the get-go.
Creative differences.
Like Gloria Gaynor says I Will Survive.
If that song doesn’t get you up and shakin’ it, take a pulse.
I will continue in my Maddogg personae and play out at the nursing homes and rehabilitation centers in the Miami Valley.
That’s not work.
I think it might finally be time for me to finish my next book. Unlike my first effort, where I completely synthesized the short story with an impactful economy of words, my next book is a novel.
I have managed to exceed my personal deadline by two years, but no more excuses. The time commitment for a band, or even playing out as a solo act regularly, takes most of my time while my wife does basically everything else.
No more.
No more sleep issues (I haven’t had sleep issues since I retired), no more all-day practices at home, no more going round-the-clock because I have a song idea that I think is fire. No more missing possible dates with my best girl, No more feeling inferior because my bandmates had to carry my equipment, and sometimes ME, and that is anathema to a macho Mexican male.
It just is.
And hopefully a lot LESS pain in my stump from just being on it all the time. I would spend up to an hour on my feet playing and singing with my guitar and it was taking days recovery time between practices.
That is why I was “in training” because (again with the macho Mexican male bullshit) I swore to myself and my bandmates that I “refuse to play rock and roll sitting down.”
So I was practicing at home in my office by standing up with my guitar for increasingly longer periods of time.
Sometimes (most of the time now it seems) I am my own worst enemy.
I am now pursuing selling my songs and I am fortunate to have family members “in the biz.”
I’ll keep you posted.
Stay well.
