Question worth Pondering

There was a Craigslist ad from Josh, a guitarist seeking a drummer. After sending him a link to the page of videos on this blog, he wrote back:

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Why is it that all your bands broke up after you started playing out?

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Great question. I think there were two major "things" that have hindered the progress of both LCR & Uncle Rico.

1. Lack of connections with area venues to book a gig. 
• I tend to not be an overly social kind of guy and going into a venue and talking to the person that is responsible for booking a band is not something I've been able to do. I can email that person and communicate that way very easily, but the actual face-to-face 'selling' of a band to a stranger makes me uncomfortable. Thus, for both LCR and UR, when both of those tasks seemed to fall upon me, I wasn't able to schedule a gig. That's honest.
2. The rise of issues that had nothing to do with the band interfering with the band
• I can only speak for me. I am 44 and I have many balls up in the air. Life is busy as I juggle commitments related to work, family / kids / wife, and things I want to do in life. I know that there is more to life than playing drums in a band. I'm not going to go out and replace Neil Peart or Lars Ulrich or Tommy Aldridge or any of my other drumming heroes.

Disbanding was never something I really wanted to happen. Both LCR and UR sounded good and were progressing.

• For LCR, we decided to take a short break and to resume practices  after the holidays. Unfortunately, what began as a short break morphed into a large break. After several months of being dormant, we made it official and disbanded.
• With UR, it was a combination of the amount of time spent practicing and playing in a band outweighing the desire to spend that time on the commitments I mentioned above. 

There are no bad feelings between myself and the members of LCR and / or UR. I enjoyed rehearsals. Collectively, there was a kindred spirit, due to all of us being around the same age. We all had at least some common ground upon which to build a set list. We all have families and 7/8ths of us have kids in various ages (elementary through college). The fact that there were at least some of the same songs on the LCR and UR setlist points to that. It also was good for me as a musician to not be pigeon-holed in "only" the bands that I would choose to listen to when given the choice. For example, LCR played "Stuck in the Middle" and "Switching to Glide" which were tunes I knew marginally but you wouldn't find them on my regular playlist. Likewise, some of the tunes UR played, for example, "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Hot Stuff", were not ones I would have selected, but I adapted. I enjoyed playing "Sunshine" with UR and "Paranoid" with UR.

That's how I answer Josh's question.