When I was a teenager, I temporarily joined a music band. They needed a bass guitarist and being very good myself they readily accepted me for the interim since I was to go back to college. As a band, we were very ambitious and had big dreams. We actually believed that we would be the next big thing. We wanted to get the popularity and success of The Beatles. We were stars in the making and nothing would stop us.
The band had five members. There was a lead vocalist, a keyboard player, a drummer, I was the bass guitarist, and there was the acoustic guitarist. The lead vocalist was the only female. I was the youngest.
We had all met in different circumstances. Initially the band had started with Claire, the lead vocalist, and Vince the acoustic guitarist. The rest of us had joined one by one. The keyboard player had been the last to join us after the previous keyboard player had moved to Britain.
During the gigs that we had in town, our biggest problem was getting the sound right. Vince, who also doubled as our manager, had a friend who owned a sound system and he would lease the equipment to us at discounted rates. Unfortunately, none of us was very knowledgeable about setting up the systems. Therefore we would set them and tune them up according to whatever we thought was right.
Being the youngest and the one with the least experience in the industry, I did not have much say. I was also rather coy among the older band members. However, I could always tell that the sound equalization was always terrible. The sound amplifiers were often stationed wrong and the end result would be distorted sound.
Maybe due to our bad sound during performances we were not able to make a huge name for ourselves as fast as we thought we would. Initially, when we had formed the band and started performing, we had thought that we would be an instant hit in the locality. That was not to be. We realized that succeeding in a band was not all that easy. Competition from rival bands was rife and the audience was unforgiving. Many were the times when we were booed off stage.
Our biggest challenge however was getting funding. Maintaining a band is expensive. There are a lot of costs involved especially when you hit the road.
The older band members were especially having it rough. All of them were depending on the music to make a living apart from me and the drummer. For me, I was just practicing my hobby as I waited to go back to college. I was still living with my parents and so I was not desperately in need of the money.
To survive, the members had to look for alternative jobs that could help them support their music. This often caused them to neglect training sessions and often we had to cancel and reschedule performances.
I finally went back to college and my place was taken up by another very enthusiastic bass guitarist.
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