"Hey, guys, I was thinking maybe we could try this song that I wrote..." - The Rolling Bandmate Funny Story/Horror Story Thread

Can't you get the ball rolling, Nick, by telling a story of your own?

We never let up on our old bass player for the time he introduced a song titled "Portugal" by saying, "We're going to take you now to a little island nation known as ... Portugal". The thing is, I think he really was trying to be tongue-in-cheek by doing the cheesy intro, but he was totally serious about the "island nation" part.

Hmm, I guess I should:

"Funny" story: Sarah and I were in a band together in college. There weren't really any practice spaces in the town where we went to college, so we practiced in the basement of the house for the frat our drummer belonged to (it was the "punk frat," whatever that means). This turned out to actually be convenient, since our drummer apparently couldn't be bothered to wake up in time for practice (at 2 PM) and so we would inevitably arrive for practice, find that he wasn't there, and go upstairs to wake him up. He was the heaviest sleeper I've ever met, and it would literally take at least 10 minutes for all three other bandmembers to rouse him to a state approaching consciousness, using methods including shouting, physical manipulation, fluids, etc. Sometimes his 16-year-old girlfriend would be in bed with him too, which made things interesting. He was a really great guy though, and a good drummer.

That was not particularly funny; it was amusing at best. I apologize.

I'm sure there are a few if I can dredge them up. The only thing I can think of off hand is this guy I was in a band with in the early '90's, he was the singer/bassist, and I guess must have had a bad relationship or two in the past, b/c all his lyrics were kind of, I dunno, embittered towards women in some way. We were all kind of vaguely unhappy about his lyrics, but no-one could really articulate why. One practice, we were working up a new song, it came to the chorus and he came out with some couplet, I forget the first half, but the second half was something like "you've got my chick in your pocket". The rest of the band stopped playing there and then and the guitarist started yelling at him "you are not. fucking. singing. that." we split shortly thereafter.

Ha ha, I was kind of in the opposite situation in the band I talked about upthread: all of the bass player's songs were really "socially conscious" and pretentious. He had one called "Ishmael" after that book about apes and one with the chorus: "Jesus Christ was born in a manger, (part I forgot), I don't need a savior." Then in one of his songs he wrote this part for Sarah to sing/speak about cities crumbling and it was all poetic-pretentious and she hated it. But instead of confronting him, we just made fun of him until he snapped and accused me and Sarah of ganging up to take over the band because we were a couple, which unfortunately happened while we were paying an hourly rate to record. We had a very passive-aggressive relationship.

I posted some stuff back when this board was a sleepy ghost town on this thread.

("There's nothing wrong with me," that's the missing line, which I think adds another level of asshaberdashery to the whole thing.)

(I'm pretty proud of "asshaberdashery.")