This past weekend, my pal Kip and I were chilling on the patio when who should appear but Kip's son, who proceeded to complain about how hard it was to get people to come out to his band's shows.
Oh, the poor guy, I thought. Maybe we can help:
ME: Did you hang up any fliers?
KIP: Have you handed out your cassette at other people's shows?
ME: Did you do an interview on the local college radio station?
KIP: Have you hung out at the mall every night for a week inviting every cute girl you saw to your show?
Kip and I could have gone on and on listing the many ways a band in the '80s was left to promote their shows.
We'd met on the Chicago rock scene back in the '80s, when every light pole in this city was covered in band fliers. Back then, you could hardly call it a scene, though. Things always seemed so fractured that only the fortunate few managed to build an audience.
Despite our best efforts at self-promotion (listed above), Kip and I became veterans of playing to 12 people in some of the largest venues Chicago has to offer, but it wasn't for a lack of trying.
Back then, you see, your band was your life and everything else came second. Your family, your girl, and your employer knew that or else the whole thing would collapse, which it often did.
But when your band had a show coming up - even if it was at some Elks Club out in the sticks - you had something to look forward to, to work towards, and to conquer. Hell, if Cheap Trick could get signed in a bowling alley, then we could get signed in an Elks lodge.
Back then, though, we never left the city. For fuck's sake, I had left everything I knew behind to live in Chicago. Why would I want to play the fucking suburbs?
The pages of Illinois Entertainer, with their voluminous ads for suburban hair metal bars, were enough to confirm my suspicions.
Even so, when it came to hyping your shows, there were two publications that every rocker thought of instantly: the aforementioned IE and the Chicago Reader.
Sadly, despite our best efforts, neither Kip or I ever succeeded in pulling down any of that coveted IE or Reader ink beyond having our shows listed in the calendar section along with the great unwashed.
Ah, but if your musical talent consisted of banging two sheets of metal together while shouting profanities in pig latin, the Reader would give you two whole pages of coverage while the almighty IE doled out prime real estate to any female-fronted suburban synth-pop act featuring at least one former member of Off Broadway.
So it was no freakin' wonder how many a talented band in this town could go years without ever breaking out of the mid-week budget show dungeon.
"Rock Against Depression Night" anyone?
Truth be told, it would have been nice to have a Facebook or a Twitter and not waste all that cash on pointless 8" x 10" glossies, puffed-up promo packages, and first class postage.
Multiply that by every other band on the planet and one can only imagine the daily tsunami of cassettes that greeted Sue Miller (of Cubby Bear and Lounge Ax) or Joe Shanahan (of Cabaret Metro) each day.
In fact, Joe just got back to me last week about a demo my band sent him in 1988. Didn't have the heart to tell him we broke up in 1991, so guess who's getting the band back together?
I kid.
Sure, we had MTV, but the more I think about it, the more I feel robbed by not having access to the web in the '80s.
As a result, nothing happened without the permission of one of the many gatekeepers in this town.
Because of this, everything took so much longer to happen than it needed to and many a band broke up out of complete frustration at getting no response from anyone about anything.
As someone who made it out to shows at least five times a week, I was struck to my core at how great some bands could be at making music, but not have the first clue about any other aspect of being a band.
In some cases, this sort of blind naivete seemed to work to the band's advantage, leading others to take on such tasks out of their love for the band's music, but, in most cases, such bands died silent deaths witnessed by no one.
I would just get done wondering whatever happened to some great band I'd seen in a college basement to ten people when suddenly the guitarist from that band would appear months later in a band playing to packed rooms around the city.
Of course, that band would be nowhere as good as the first band and I would find myself driven to ask them "What happened?"
They'd invariably respond that the first band got tired of playing to the bartender and that this new band already had a following, but you could tell this gig had come with a price and that they were out for themselves now.
They'd chosen commerce over art and that was that.
Maybe thinking that having the internet at our disposal back then would have changed anything is idealistic at best and selfish at worst. After all, as many of us know, the internet brought with it a new set of problems that led to where we are now: Hell.
A hell where every band on the planet is vying for just a few seconds of your time, like vagrants on the street. There is a desperation now that wasn't there before. Music is free, after all.
So maybe the internet isn't the answer to every band's dreams and maybe it wouldn't have saved any of those bands that deserved better than they got, but if it could have saved even just one band, maybe that one band would have been all it would have taken to, you know, change the world.
Sure, we had MTV, but the more I think about it, the more I feel robbed by not having access to the web in the '80s.
As a result, nothing happened without the permission of one of the many gatekeepers in this town.
Because of this, everything took so much longer to happen than it needed to and many a band broke up out of complete frustration at getting no response from anyone about anything.
As someone who made it out to shows at least five times a week, I was struck to my core at how great some bands could be at making music, but not have the first clue about any other aspect of being a band.
In some cases, this sort of blind naivete seemed to work to the band's advantage, leading others to take on such tasks out of their love for the band's music, but, in most cases, such bands died silent deaths witnessed by no one.
I would just get done wondering whatever happened to some great band I'd seen in a college basement to ten people when suddenly the guitarist from that band would appear months later in a band playing to packed rooms around the city.
Of course, that band would be nowhere as good as the first band and I would find myself driven to ask them "What happened?"
They'd invariably respond that the first band got tired of playing to the bartender and that this new band already had a following, but you could tell this gig had come with a price and that they were out for themselves now.
They'd chosen commerce over art and that was that.
Maybe thinking that having the internet at our disposal back then would have changed anything is idealistic at best and selfish at worst. After all, as many of us know, the internet brought with it a new set of problems that led to where we are now: Hell.
A hell where every band on the planet is vying for just a few seconds of your time, like vagrants on the street. There is a desperation now that wasn't there before. Music is free, after all.
So maybe the internet isn't the answer to every band's dreams and maybe it wouldn't have saved any of those bands that deserved better than they got, but if it could have saved even just one band, maybe that one band would have been all it would have taken to, you know, change the world.