I am in a band

We're just a group of friends who have been together for a long time and every so often come together to put on a show and amuse our friends. Why am I mentioning this? Because we played a show on Saturday night and my ears are still ringing.

I find it more than a little amusing that we have the audactiy to book a gig in a bar, invite our frineds to come out and see us, and then play a third set of some seriously loud and abusive cover tunes. Full dsiclosure: yes, we are a cover band. The premise is that we do interesting takes on new-wave 80's stuff, play some reliable and just-below-the-radar classic rock (Byrds, Velevt Underground), and then some straight-up loud indie rock. What's odd is that we pack all of the loud inaccessible material into one drunken last set that is somehow twice as loud as anything that came before it. After getting the crowd grooving in set 2, we completely drive them out of the bar in set 3. Now that takes stones. But hey, the bar usually does well and that's all that matters to them.

I guess I'm writing about this because it points out an interesting conundrum. We (the guys in the band) have all been playing music for a very long time. We were the kids with the large tape/cd collections who always had headphones on and talked incessantly about the rockstars (when we were younger) and legitimate artists (as we got older) we most wanted to be. As is usually the case, that didn't work out for any of us but playing is still a big part of who we are. We put this little band together to do what we like to do: play the songs that we would want to hear on a night out. The catch is that as music snobs/elititsts, our tastes tend to diverge from those of the average bargoer. Now that we have been doing this for a while and have considered moving on to more interesting venues we have to take a serious look at the kind of music we want to play. It ultimately comes down to us either:

a) Playing whatever the hell we want in the same shithole bar that could care less as long as people are drinking, or

b) cut out some of the weirder shit that we love and make the sets more accesible in order to play better more exciting venues.

Believe me, the absurdity of it all is not lost on me. A COVER band having an existential crisis? Fucking ridiculous.