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Would you join a band with much younger guys?

#21
One of my gigs is with a blues/blues rock/soul band in which the drummer is 65, I'm 61, the guitarist/singer is 42, and the female singer/keys is 28. We have a ball together. It helps that we all like a lot of the same music and the female could be the bastard child of Etta James. It's a lucky mix in that we all respect the others' ideas. Doesn't happen with all bands. We cover from 1951 Memphis Slim to Cold Blood, Joss Stone, and Tedeschi-Trucks. It can be done.
 
#24
It's not age so much as musical taste, maturity and life situation. I'm older, like a lot of new music, but I had kids late. I prefer to play with people who have or have had kids. That way they know what to expect from my situation. I also don't want to be that old guy at the party though. As long as we can communicate, you don't talk like Beevis or Butthead, and you are fun to hang with, age is just a number....
 
#29
sounds like they were cool with you being old enough to be their dad, maybe you were a bit hasty? They might be the next Beatles, and you didn't even jam with them. Plus you're missing out on meeting younger than you girls......

When I stopped my band career in 1997,I managed quite a few bands for a while. By far the best musicians out of the 7 or 8 bands I managed were a bunch of 16-18 year olds playing Alice In Chains etc.

I know the age gap might make it awkward, but musically there's no reason why it can't work
 
#30
I have done it, with mixed results. I was passed over by an original band that I really wanted and part of the reasoning was that I was 10 years older than them. I'm also not a party dude, so that probably worked against me. I'd play with anybody who's got the right chops. I play percussion in a band next to a guy who is 20+ years older than me.

On-topic: offering too many reasons for declining a gig besides logistics is always going to be misconstrued, somehow.
 
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#31
In my limited experience it seems that bands are a bizarre mixture of social and professional situations without clear distinctions between the two.

3 months ago a drummer and myself were cycling through guitarists. I'm 22, the drummer is 25. We tried out almost ten guitarists, ranging from 18 years old to early 50s. At both a musical, social, and professional level the guy we clicked with the most is 26 and from long island (I lived in Brooklyn from 2000-2011).

But we sure as hell didn't say no to anyone solely because of their age. We said no to guys because of factors determined after meeting and playing music with them at least once!
 
#35
Tony Lombardo was in his 30s when he joined the Descendents and the rest of the guys were still in their teens.

48thStreetCustom said:
And at my age, I know I don't want to be the old guy at the kegger frat party, so to speak.
Click to expand...

I recently did a fill-in gig where I felt like that. I'm 46, everyone else in the room was under 30. I didn't think it would be an issue, and maybe it wasn't for anyone else, but I was uncomfortable as hell.

But I think it's more about differences in phase-of-life than it is about the number of years between you. People who have no kids yet and still rent their homes just live very different lives from those of us with "career" jobs, mortgages and teenagers in high school. But the last band I was in, everyone else was at least 60. Retired, kids out of the house. Almost a 20-year difference there and we got along fantastically because our current lifestyles weren't so drastically far apart and thus we could still relate well.
 
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