The past 15 months of trying to play music just one time with other people who are old like me has taught me a valuable lesson. Unlike every other type of human being, musicians actually get more flaky and self-sabotaging as they get older. To that end, I am asking the United Nations of the World to put an end to the unjust practice of allowing men over 40 from playing in rock and roll bands of any kind. (Women are allowed but on probation.) Are there any questions?

Why?

At the start of 2021, after the worst year of all of our lives, I decided I was going to start a hardcore band for my mental health. I haven’t been in a band for 10 years, having spent that time siring children and selling my soul to tech startups, but I figured it would be like it was – find some people who make music and try it out, practice a couple times, play in shitty bars and houses for a year or two, then break up. To that end I recorded a bunch of truly awful but spirited lo-fi tunes on a four-track, renting drums and amps, recording all the pieces live, and screaming into a RadioShack mic about hating golf. That took me 6 months.

Demo tunes uploaded, I set out to find bandmates. I don’t actually know any musicians where I live, so I posted on Facebook groups for punks and for general musicians. I posted on Craigslist. All crickets. Finally, like everyone else who is lonely, I paid a tech company a subscription fee for the privilege of sending strangers messages in order to get them to care about me.

Is this Ageism?

Every “band-seeking-member” post out there has a sentence along the lines of “We are all hot, sexy, 26-years-old, skinny with full heads of hair, so if you are not those things, please creep off back to Myspace.” That used to fill me with rage but now I think it is good, at least the ageism part.

I sent 200 messages on a site called Bandmix (est 2004!) to people over 35 who play any of the instruments and who expressed an interest in either punk or metal. I expressly said I was looking for old people, assuming everyone would be like, “Huzzah! Finally! A chance to break out of my ancient bone cage and touch again the face of Shiva!” Mostly I got polite no-thank-yous or “Maybe?”

When someone said “Maybe” I sent them my Bandcamp, and if that didn’t cause them to ghost me, I set up a time for enough of us to meet to constitute a “practice.” Of course the hard part was finding a drummer. Drummers without at least two current projects are rare, but I myself really cannot be the drummer of any band that isn’t a Beat Happening cover band so we had to at least have a drummer and one other person present.

After 9 months of trying to do that, it has happened exactly 3 times, and one of those times I did end up playing the drums because the drummer backed out earlier that day. That especially sucked because that drummer was amazing – a real lifelong hardcore bad ass who worked in a fish packing factory and could do a blast beat in his sleep. After our first session went perfectly, was everything I could hope for, he just texted me and said:

It’s the “perhaps” that really messes me up, in retrospect. Which brings me to the next point.

Wouldn’t older people have good reasons for backing out of things? Like life stuff, kids and jobs?

It is my experience that most people over 40 actually have a ton of free time once their kids are in school. But of course that time is made ever more precious by the swiftly decreasing wall of it visible on the horizon as it plummets off the edge of the known world into the endless nada. Would you really want to waste that sweating in a beer stinking basement, grinding out unpleasant, amateurish noise? Wouldn’t you rather be fishing with your nephew through a golden-leaf river surface, sharing the loud silence of the animal world and showing him how men can listen, can express love? Of course you would. Leave creativity to those with nothing to lose.

After the COVID winter put a halt to all meetings, I tried again this year and was rewarded with the final indignity. I started with a truly deranged Craigslist post titled “Seeking Old Unprofessional Drummer to Cause Widespread Chaos.” Of the three responses, one was someone wanting to play free jazz (fair play but not for me), another was a very kindly gentleman who when we got together could not in good faith play a Ramones (or even The Donnas) level backbeat or any other beat that involved directly hitting the snare drum. I should have actually stuck with that guy because the third guy snapped the last vestiges of my pride into jagged bits.

He seemed cool, opened his emails with Gabba Gabba Hey, was in his mid 40s but had been in bands somewhat recently and so could and would play very loud and fast. After emailing him demos, he didn’t respond for 10 days, finally coming back to the email thread as if no time had passed. I sent him a couple of dates, he picked one. I said “great see you then!” Then I booked an expensive practice space, wrangled the bass dude and a guitar dude, and cleared my schedule. The day before the practice, he replied to the same thread with “Haven’t heard from you, so I made other plans. Sorry”.

“Wait!” I said, “I thought we were good? What happened?”

“OK I can make it” he replied.

Phew!

Then the bass player backed out. 

Fine OK, dang, well, OK still got a drummer and a guitar player. Then the day of the practice, three hours before we were supposed to be at the expensive practice space that it was too late to cancel…

I have read these words over and over since this moment and I really have no notes whatsoever. It is flawless, perfect, the million-fold katana blade of insults. It’s the chemical warfare of insults, no winners, no survivors. 

What about reunion tours?

This goes double for reunions or the thing where a band plays their one dumb hit album from 1997 in its entirety or whatever. Please stop it. You are the Funko Pop of your former self. Your bobblehead jams fool nobody, and please only the most helpless, their brains wet with nostalgia. Fortunately albums died around 2009, so once we get through this decade we’ll just be subjected to Pamplemoose recreating their most viral videos or whatever or whatever.

Thank you for sending me your best efforts, which you have clearly labeled as Demonstrations, mere sketches upon which we, as an ensemble, might build a communal diorama of sound. Upon a secondary review, they clearly indicate that you are totally bereft of either talent or originality. And even though I have no chance of ever being a professional musician, even though there really is no such thing any more, and though, as I age, my chances to participate in creating new art become more and more scarce, as the part of my life where the wildness of my soul could be incarnate in performance slips into drab bragging and obese muscle memory, I must rescind my participation in your group. This makes me sad, for were you to instead explore a genre of music merely a hairsbreadth away, but infinitely more derivative, I would be delighted to accompany you in that endeavor! Yours most suddenly, Gabba Gabba Fuck You.

Let this be a warning to Millennials, who are now entering this crucible of middle age. You have between 0 and 28 years left of your pre-40s, after which you will be required by international law and our culture’s custom to abandon rock and roll of any variety.

I have nothing else to contribute to the revolution. What can I do instead? 

I wish I knew. I will be out here doing my best to convince my fellow members of Generation X to join me in building a titanic space ark, which we can board and be fired in the direction of the nearest inhabitable solar system, stocked only with stale OK Cola and Scooby Snacks, rigged to explode at the first note from “Under the Bridge.”

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. Even sites owned by billionaires and millionaires have Patreons so please don’t hold that against us. And we’re paying all of our writers, photographers and graphic designers. So please consider our Patreon. If you can't afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It's free and we're asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.