The first proper shows I played were not with a band of my own. They came through a second music school, the kind that puts groups together for you and books them into bars and small venues around town. You would turn up and play with whoever they had assigned you to that month, a rotating set of people you half knew, and you would play covers, because covers are what a room full of strangers in a bar wants to hear on a Friday.
None of it was mine. The songs were not mine, the band was not really mine, half the time I could not have told you the surname of the person playing bass next to me. We played other people's music to people who were mostly there for the beer, in rooms that smelled of beer, and we got better at it the way you get better at anything you do every few weeks in front of people who are not paying much attention.
And I loved it. That is the part I did not expect. On paper there was not much to love, a covers set with a pickup band in a half full bar, but standing on a small stage with a guitar and watching a few people at the front start to nod along did something to me that has not really worn off. It was the first time I understood that playing music was not the thing that happened in a practice room. The practice room was preparation. This was the thing itself, the room and the people in it and the small chance that on any given night it might actually catch fire.
I do not think those shows were good. I think they were necessary. You need somewhere to be mediocre in public for a while, somewhere the stakes are low enough that a bad night is just a bad night and not the end of anything. The bar circuit was that for me. By the time I started playing my own songs in my own bands I already knew how to stand on a stage, how to start a set, how to keep going when the sound is bad and the crowd is thin, and I had learned all of it playing music I did not write for people who did not know my name.
It got me hooked, is the short version. Everything after came from that.
Love,
Marten
