Gather round the forum, TB'ers, this one's fun! (And please, forgive the length of the yarn)
G is a guitar player (blues, fairly skilled) and singer (soul, nice voice) who has spent the last ten years working as a solo act in bars and small venues, player cover sets and making a little money for his trouble. We started this project because he wanted to actually play out the original stuff he's been writing and stashing over that time frame.
Our drummer is a very technically proficient guy with a quiet attitude. He's not the type to tell you off, but he is the type to shrug off anything he feels is unnecessary or unhelpful. In that respect he's both easy and difficult- if you speak the language, he'll do whatever you want. If you don't speak the language, you're not going to get anywhere. FWIW, I'm more or less in this category too. I'm a grown man and a grown bass player; I'm a team player but do need to be given some space to do my thing or I'm not going to be able to give my best work.
G wants to be a BL but has never been in a band. D and I are both pros in the respect that we don't need a heavy hand or a lot of direction - play the track, give us the feel you want and we'll knock it down. We're on time, we're rehearsed, we're level headed and open communicators in the room, all that good stuff. So far the experience and patience from D and I (we're both at or over the ten year marker) have made G's lack of experience as a BL a non-issue.
We have a list of songs we've been working on, and have had the limitation of being too jammy. We show up, warm up and then work on songs and the songs never seem to stick to an arrangement because G won't nail anything down. Last week D took the initiative and walked us through arrangements for two songs. I believe wholeheartedly that was a necessary step, and had refrained from doing so because I didn't want to have to deal with a potential headache (that's on me). We played them and liked how they sounded, I sent out an email with the arrangements written down so we could look it over and discuss/ lock it in, everything is good. The goal for practice this week is to record those arrangements so we can have something to work with.
Well.
Guys.
That didn't work out.
G went from being a talented performer and inexperienced BL to a complete diva. At the mere mention of recordings he started getting flustered and making excuses and just generally caving under pressure. This is after multiple mentions in email/ text/ phone calls that we want to get a low-key working recording for our own purposes. After a brief "disagreement" in which D and G talked right past each other about how to record ('I want to do A,' 'hey that's great, I love it, let's do B,' 'okay then, A it is,' 'Awesome, here goes B') our whole practice got shot to sh*t. I drove 3 hours through an ice storm for a two and a half hour practice in which we couldn't even nail down one good take, because G and D couldn't get theirs heads out of the G D buts long enough to get something to stick.
To make matters worse, as soon as things starting going in a direction G didn't like, he started to try and completely re-work the arrangement through incremental changes, and I have reason to believe he did it as a form of sabotage. Instead of taking the time to stop things, address what he wanted and make wholesale changes, he would stop the song, make one change, stop again, make another change and so on and so forth until nothing was the same as the original arrangement and I was obligated to write a new line on the fly. This was doubly frustrating because we have already spent weeks dialing this song in and after last practice the consensus was that is was done and ready to record. D and I both suggested, in light of how poorly things were going, that we should move on to another song and get our wind back. No dice. G kept bringing it back to the one song we couldn't agree on.
Things in the room got tense and unproductive, so I called practice (used some hand/wrist pain issues as an excuse). I don't like doing that, but my experience says that when you're over two hours of working time and still stuck in the same rut, it's time to call it a day. I called D after and talked it over and we're on the same page with regards to G - he's got the music side of things, but he needs to step up in his non-music skills if he wants this thing to work. All of the issues we had today came back to one of two things - inexperience in the band setting (working with others) and ego (not listening to others, not centering and getting down to work when things aren't perfect).
Here's the ask - how would you go about dealing with G? My plan as of right now is to call him up and talk with him about being in a band as opposed to being a solo act and to remind him that D and I are highly skilled volunteers who really don't need the hassle of a BL who doesn't know what he's doing. What I'm unsure of is whether it would better to try and coach him into being a better BL, or to convince him to step away from the admin side of that role and stick more to songwriting. Coaching him up is easier on his ego but requires more effort and patience on my part, convincing him to step back is a harder sell that (if successful) could lead to immediate resolution of the issue. I'm not about being in a 'drama' band (been there, done that), so I'm comfortable with resolving or quitting and stealing the drummer.
