Those offended by Todd's Musicial Miscellany

My story and I'm stickin' to it.

1. The original Lousy with Flowers drummer happened upon this web page, and reportedly had some negative reactions towards the bassist, for the sentiments Joe related regarding said drummer's rhythmic aptitude. It wouldn't have been so bad had Joe not been really good friends with him (Joe was even in the guy's wedding!). Doh!

2. The lead singer of Lousy with Flowers never expressed any negative sentiment to me about my comments here (and I hold no negative sentiment towards her, she's a thoroughly pleasant person), but her husband sure got bent out of shape when he happened by this page. He reinforced that LWF was a "nowhere" band, and how dare I make such comments about his wife. I agreed that LWF was a nowhere band. We were a college band. We were entertaining, but we weren't headed anywhere musically. That's precisely why Julie's artistic and musical reservations were so ironic. To my knowledge, no one else had such hangups. We were all happy playing the goofy tunes that we thought our friends would find entertaining. Just a difference of direction, really. Julie wanted to do more originals, but she didn't ever bring us any original stuff to push us in that direction. Ah, those ubiquitous "musical differences." :-)

3. Andrew Cooke of the rec.music.makers.bass newsgroup was offended by the adult musician's page, and thinks I'm a "pompous ass." (In fact, he's proud enough about it that he'd like me to make it clear that I used the phrase "pompous ass" toward another poster first and Andrew threw it back in my face. Kudos.) As a 34-year old beginner, Andrew took exception to the tone of the page and found it hypocritical in light of my own rant against the elitist tone of another RMMB poster's tone towards suburban-Chicago cover bands. Andrew also thinks that I just favor folks with the same background as myself, which is certainly true when it comes to music. Now he goes off the deep end extrapolating this and making dangerous parallels to racism, and false assumptions about the number of lessons I took as a child, the brand of car my parents had, and uses a cruise review I'd posted as another reason not to like me, but makes for an amusing read if it's still around.

4. A guy named Don emailed in 2008 opening with "Hi, delete this if you don't have time to hear a rant almost as useless as your adult musician theory. I am in a band with such an adult learner, and it is rough, but...The statement that musicians who start early are better is self-evident. I have to wonder if the motiviation for writing such an article on the subject is to somehow justify some wierd intra-band politics you must have gone through. If the only guys you can find to play with suck for various reasons, then don't play with them. Otherwise just try to assist the adult learners as best you can and put up with the fact that you can't find anyone better to play with, or just try to have fun like they are trying to do. "
   My response to him indicated that those who motivated that piece are no longer people I play with, and that sometimes you get roped into band situations as favors to friends or coworkers. It's difficult to have too much fun when the band say, spends 90 minutes of rehearsal working on Mustang Sally, and despite your best efforts coaching them... it still sounds like poo. I totally agree with his "find a better band" statements though! Adults are a lot harder to break of bad habits than teenagers are, and they tend to have far more tender egos which makes criticizing them a lot harder than the efficient teenage "yer playin it wrong, douchebag--listen again."