Dude, Let's Start A Band.

Starting a band is the way to go. I see all these bands on television and the Internet and it looks like an awesome life. There are lots of chicks, drugs and alcohol. To top it all off you never have to do any actual work, unless you consider sex and riding on a bus all day with chicks hanging off you work. People that think that way are assholes, because they don’t know how good they have it.

There’s one problem with my band though, I don’t know anything about music. All I know is what I learned in middle school band, where I played the snare drum. I think we were the only 12 year olds to be told that our performance was horrible by our own teacher afterwards. What a bitch. Not knowing anything about music won’t be a problem though, because my band will not be creating any music at all, we won’t even have instruments or equipment capable of making music or anything that may be mistaken or interpreted as music. And there are plenty of successful bands out there today making actual music and don’t know anything about music. Where the hell do these guys get off?

No, my band will just be me and three friends traveling across the country on a bus. We’ll have groupies, devoted fans and plenty of alcohol. Every time somebody asks me when the next album is coming out I’ll immediately slap him in the face for jeopardizing my artistic integrity. All of our live shows will be cancelled because our drummer has alcohol poisoning and we’ll all have on and off relationships with supermodels.

Now the first step to having a successful band is to have a catchy name. Today bands like Fall Out Boy have popularized names that are completely meaningless aside from having an emo sound to them. A few ones I came up with were Stab My Girlfriend, Meat for Dog, Kittens for Closure, and Toilet Paper My Tree House. Now for us the name is particularly important because if our name isn’t good then we don’t have any music to fall back on like all those other bands out there.

The second step is to find ourselves a tour bus. Now most bands use custom made coach buses with all the amenities from home: kitchen, beds, bathroom etc. We’re going to throw that all out the window, we need a special bus. That’s right, those short buses with the wheelchair lift that always took way too long just to get that handicapped kid to school, as if he’s going to learn anything besides how to not drool on himself as much. Aboard this short bus will be me, the three band mates and the driver. No managers, assistants, or agents; they all quit after repeated beatings when they kept asking me when the album was coming out; not to mention having them around is totally selling out, which was the whole point from the beginning. The most important person on the bus is the driver, it’s very important that he’s old, really old, like mid 90’s or something. That way we can use him for his infinite wisdom of the road and we can play quirky practical jokes on him and he can’t fight back.

The third step is the fans. How are we going to get fans when we don’t have any music? Well that’s what the bus is for, people will see us with a bus and because people automatically associate having a tour bus with being popular, anyone who drives by us will be our fans. Naturally they will flock to see what the buzz is all about and because we’re naturally likable people, they will be considered fans. But gaining a following today is all about the Internet. Generating false Internet hype is easier than you think, just slap “Coming Soon” on any website or MySpace, and people will bookmark it just to see what the hell it is when the music is released, which it never will be.

Bands like Pink Floyd generated so much popularity because of their long breaks between albums, which was justified because the music was so good on each one. Additionally each album was more popular than the one before it because of the hype generated during the breaks. Using this logic, my band would be the most popular band the world has ever seen. If all we do is take breaks and generate hype about our forthcoming album, how could we not be? And when everyone in the band dies in a mysterious fiery bus accident, we’ll go down in history as the best band that never was.