Researching Potential Bands

And as long as people continue to play in a band setting we always will.

I disagree with this a little. If one doesnt know what they want in a band experience they arent likely to figure it out until theyve gotten off the ground a bit and have experienced the things they dont want.
Just like relationships, only when one ends do we come to realize what we wish to avoid in the future. There is no better experience than having lived through something. Everyone has to start somewhere.

 

I just joined a fourth band where it was a duo playing poppy folk and americana music. They've only been writing for a month or so, and I was skeptical. I went and checked them out for their first show. They recruited my banjo player from my main acoustic band to join them, and he only had two days to learn the set. Obviously, it was little bumpy. However, in the end I was able to ascertain the following: They have decent/good original material, a pretty good initial following, are easy going and great to work with and most importantly they can sing really well together. The money in the beginning is not there, but I believe it will be. In the end, I decided it would be worth my time to join them playing upright. They have a lot of shows booked, including one in the largest venue in my area (unfortunately I'll be out of town for that one so I'm training a sub for the first time in my life).

In the end, my additions to your list would be the following:

Are they easy to work with?
Do they have day jobs?
Do they have transportation?
What is their criteria for booking shows?
What are their plans for recording?

 

Here's my take. Its really hard to know what you want from a band without having been in one.
Sure, you can have an idea, but until a person has been in one there is no way to know of all the pitfalls to avoid.
How could you? You cant know beforehand how to weed out the flakes or the people who will hold your band back, because you havent learned how to recognize those behaviors in bandmates.

I'll try and think back to the days before I played in a band... what did I want out of it? I wanted to write music and play it in front of people. What else was there to know? A whole lot, but without ever having the experience I wouldnt have known.

Its easy to look back and say "yeah Id avoid this or that", and "I want this but without that." But there was no way to foresee where things would go bad. Life is a learning experience, and the only way to learn is to live it.

And I would agree, that if you know what you want out of a band it might make it easier to mitigate a bad experience, but likely there will always be some bad in a first experience, otherwise we'd all still be in the first band we ever joined. Its a journey of learning and growing.

And I want to add that if one bad experience is enough to turn a person off of the whole thing then they likely werent cut out for it in the first place.

 

They gotta have day jobs. I had a guy in his 60's tell me he was "chasing the dream". yeah, good luck with that. I like my day job, i'm not endangering it by driving 400 miles for $35.00 and "exposure".

 

I wasn't keen on this one band one time. auditioned for them anyway because I just wanted to play. 3 years later we've had radio airplay, web radio airplay, been in several newspaper articles (one front page) are recording our second EP, have awesome merch, interviewed with several websites and bloggers, been asked to play with high profile bands, had bookers break there ticket sales rule to have us play and I'm living and breathing this music i wasn't so keen on.

 

not really, although it probably seems that way from the outside. what we think we want and what we actually want me be two very different things. the last 3 years have reshaped everything I think about being in a band.