I miss playing in a band regularly so every now and then, I check the musician classified ads. The disappointment never ceases to disappoint though. You wouldn’t believe how many weird losers are skulking about there, parading their lousy material that was poorly recorded in their single bedroom apartment and then uploaded to bandcamp or youtube for their five or six friends/family members to check out. It really is thoroughly depressing. The other day I came across an ‘alt-cabaret’ duo in Victoria looking for a few more members. The duo consists of an ugly middle-aged couple dressed like pseudo goths but their ad made them sound fairly established and professional so I checked out their bandcamp page and wow, it was horrid. It sounded like the old 4-track recordings I used to make with my first band when I was 16: lots of noise and poor performances, out-of-tune instruments, and horrendously weak vocals. The music and lyrics they had written were so bad that I can’t imagine someone sitting down, coming up with that stuff for the first time, and thinking “wow, I’ve got a song here.” If that were the fruit of my labour, I would be abjectly depressed. I would think, “I’m really in a slump here. That was terrible. I need to take a break from this or at the very least, start fresh with much, much higher standards.”
I think that’s the saddest part, that these losers don’t realize they’re losers. That in itself is the true mark of a loser, I think. If you don’t realize that your songs suck, your band sucks, your recordings suck, and your promo photos suck, and if you think anyone at all gives a shit about your band despite all those things, you must be so checked out and delusional that it’s not even funny.
After writing that, I was reminded of a similar band out of Victoria back in the early 2000’s. It was surprisingly similar in nature to this sad alt-cabaret duo: this older band was also a duo, also a couple, also totally out of touch, and also terrible. They were called The Perish. The main guy was about 30 and always wore a cheap alien mask during his interviews and tried to be clever and funny but he just came off like dumb white trash who was pretending to be an artist. You know, I think Bill interviewed the guy once at a Tim Horton’s or something, and the guy wore the mask the whole time. I’ll have to confirm that with him but can you imagine that? Man oh man. Even the thought is tough to stomach.
Anyway, The Perish were so bad and so laughable that they became the laughing stock of the local scene. They were living legends, and in the worst way possible. I felt awful for them because they were such easy targets that they invited the ridicule, and didn’t have the faculties to recognize why they were being mocked or how best to respond to it. They just dug their heals in and it got worse and worse, and eventually The Perish disappeared. Luckily for you, some remnants are still on youtube:
It’s shocking that bands like The Perish still exist now (although the alt cabaret band is nowhere near as legendarily bad). You would hope that modern day losers would learn from the mistakes of their forefathers but this seems to be a rock that people will trip over again and again, until the end of time, most likely. Sigh.
I should probably give up searching for a band that I would like to be a part of. This kind of disappointment and vicarious embarrassment is too hard to take on a consistent basis.
crimson highway 