Meeting Strangers to 'Jam' with

What?? No answers!? You're hurting my Responses/Threads Started Ratio you big jerks!

Well, anyways, one time a friend and I - desparately trying to assemble a band - went to this stranger's house for practice. It ended up being us and two old guys on bass and drums who were very drunk and stinky and their families were all gathered around to watch us play even though it's the first time we'd ever met these guys. My mom was there too with her bf of the time. So it was like a huge concert in this scary house with 50-something year old dudes and 2 girls (my friend and I) in our teens.

oh god i've met so many losers through band ads it's not funny. the 'bass players' who couldn't play a fucking note. the duo of female twins who sent their demo to Creation and received an 'encouraging response'. the ex-boyfriend of my current bandmate (and what a cock he was..). so many losers. and i am pretty much the most successful of the lot, which says a tremendous amount for how big a bunch of losers they all really were..

then there was the completely incompetent drummer who couldn't play, and insisted on playing me Yoko Ono, Coltrane and Patti Smith records. and the hasbeens who thought my demo CD has 'no balls' (and where are you now, you fuckers? Phill Calvert, you can suck my dick!!!)..

i just want to reiterate that point. Hasbeen muso's are the worst in this respect. Especially loser ex-hired guns of Nick Cave.

I'd have no problem w/an incompetent Smith/Coltrane/Ono fan, myself. I bet they could push buttons on a drum machine.

I prefer marmalade.

Erm... I picked up a great deal of my session work through random ads in the Village Voice. But yeah, it is a total crap shoot. You really have to be persistent to find what you need, and be willing to do a lot of filtering and deal with a lot of idiots and waste a lot of time.

Worst experience of all was being a bassist with drummer looking for a guitarist to complete *our* band and dealing with every control freak in the universe looking to find a rhtyhm section without having to pay for it. Fuck OFF, nutjobs.

Oh, and Zebra, this scary session drummer who answered EVERY drummer ad in the VV, regardless of whether he was suited for it or not, and would turn up wearing sunglasses, indoors, at night. you know how drummers always speed up as they play? Only drummer I ever met that actually SLOWED DOWN.

But... take heart, you can have good experiences, too. I answered what I thought was a totally unpromising ad, and ended up meeting the guy who turned out to be my musical soulmate for the next three years. (Should have known it was a good sign when I knocked on the door of the rehearsal studio and Jeff Buckley answered...)

That said, most of the people I've ended up in bands long term with I've not found through ads, I've met through mutual friends. Try this approach as well. Ask around, ask people in other bands if they know anyone. A reference from a friend is worth a thousand horror stories.

a couple of years i set out to start a band (having disbanded the previous one to move away).

a friend who i see occasionally in the bar introduced me to his younger brother. an utter piano prodigy with little ability to do anything else (tell time, use the phone, buy his own goddamn cigarettes) he was prone to disappearing on camping trips up without telling anyone. finally he disappeared for good one time in the middle of the night. after he had been missing for a few days i started looking for a new keyboard player. he turned up, as it happens, in nelson b.c. and is alive and well (but still very sketchy).

a while earlier i had poached the drummer from a terrible hip hop group that used to rehearse in the basement where i slept. he was a monster of a drummer. insane chops. so we started jamming a couple of times a week. eventually i got the hint that something might be wrong when, after smoking a couple of hits of good weed he exclaimed "it feels like we're falling and falling into nothingness". poetic but unnerving. and then later as we were gathered around the nintendo: "i'm inside the video game". his voice would also occasionally alter dramatically in pitch and resonance to become very deep, hoarse, and scary -- kinda' like in the exorcist.

then there was the time i was the stranger, replying to an ad placed by a band with very cool influences listed but no real understanding of the music made by said influences. they never called me back after the first jam, likely reasoning i was too "academic", and continued inflicting their horrible music at shows and on the airwaves until they finally had the sense to leave town. when i saw them open for fugazi i was extremely jealous.

The one and only time I answered an ad was when I was in a new city with no friends. I took my guitar down to young dude's cheap basement studio on the outskirts of town. By the time I had chatted with the dude for a little while I had decided we were incompatible, but I agreed to play a little as long as I was there.

I plugged in and started gently arpeggiating along to whatever he was playing. Within a minute the power went out in the building. Somewhat relieved, I zipped up my gig bag in the dark and hied out of there.

But then he kept calling me! He thought I rocked really hard! I blew the fuse, like literally! He needed that kind of sheer destructive force in his band, man!

I was once turned down for a band because "although we like your playing, your bass looks like a coffee table."

I have never tried to find any band mates this way! I just think I'd get a bunch of people who could actually play coming round to my house. And they'd probably wanna jam coldplay songs or someting, and not listen to my protests of "no! we ain't playing anyone else's songs, and if we are they aren't gonna sound anything like the originals, now use that shoebox as a drum, we are recording all this".