A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that a character in a novel, a singer, did everything right for her career that most budding musicians don’t do and that’s why their bands fail. Easy enough to say, considering the character in question was fictional and could be as successful as the author wished her to be. In real life, playing music is hard work, and it requires unique and often fragile combinations of talent, will and powerful egos to take it anywhere beyond one’s front porch. Let’s face it, if it were that easy to do, we’d all be rock stars.

So, rather than allow a glib statement to sit and fester, I’ll try to elaborate, not as a working musician (which I’m not) but as someone who loves music, goes to a lot of shows and really wants your band to succeed. Space forbids me from suggesting everything I’d want from your gig (like not stopping the show until someone brings you a drink from the back of the club, or no cuddlecore versions of Hendrix songs), but if I had to pick a top three, they’d be:

1. Don’t name your band something drunk people won’t remember.
2. If you expect us to pay you, then your band is your job. Rehearse often, on time and without distractions. Play (reasonably) sober. For the love of God, get tight.
3. Playing well and sounding good are not the same thing. You can write great songs with killer hooks and shred like Yngwie* and most club boards will make you sound like you’re playing outboard motors with bags over your heads. At every gig, the sound guy is part of your band, so treat him like it. Buy him beer, get him laid, whatever you have to do to get the right mix out of his board, do it.
   

Getting the Mix Right: This last point cannot be emphasized enough, whether you’re playing live or, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, cutting a record in the studio. The band may know what they want to sound like, and the producer may know what he means for the record to sound like, but it’s the engineer who makes it happen. The person who knows the room and the board, what mics to use and where to place them, the world of difference between playing through a 30-year-old Vox head and a 29-year-old Marshall head. Engineers do the heavy lifting in any session but rarely get their props.

Enter Mixerman, a veteran L.A. recordist and guerilla blogger who spent the better part of a year documenting the world’s most disastrous series of recording sessions and has now collected those entries in a book called, appropriately enough, The Daily Adventures of Mixerman (Hal Leonard, 2009). Those who followed the blog (and there were many who tuned in for the next bombshell) will find out how it ended. Those who are coming to Mixerman for the first time will find his saga at once horrifying, fascinating and brutally funny. And as a bonus you’ll receive a crash course in the process of making records and learn why some people should never be allowed to do so.

Bitch Slap (not the band’s real name—Mixerman is very careful not to name himself or anyone else directly) is ready to cut an album. In the two years since their label discovered them, they’ve been hanging fire and writing songs while their A&R people “develop” them, and they’re ready to go. They’ve been given an unlimited budget and the best personnel around, including ace engineer Mixerman and top-flight producer Willy Show, so named because he doesn’t even make an appearance until two weeks into the sessions. There’s only one problem: these guys are awful, as musicians and as human beings. The singer is a narcissist who obsesses on his hair and his collection of vintage jeans. The guitarist is depressed to the edge of comatose. The bassist wants to sing and can’t and is pretty bitter about it. And the drummer is utterly devoid of rhythm, feel and basic common sense. In the absence of the producer, it’s up to Mixerman to corral their egos, chase their girlfriends out of the studio and somehow get these guys to sound like a band worth the millions of dollars that have been pumped into them.

The sessions are a long and torturous exercise in Murphy’s Law. Everything that can go wrong does, from entourages and film crews in the recording space to the sudden appearance of a mountain of cocaine in the studio lounge (Mixerman calls coke “gak” and dope “fatties”—apparently there’s a rule on his blogspace against referring to drugs by name, and it’s a little annoying). The studio assistant is somebody’s nephew. The editor is a self-proclaimed “Wegro” with a gambling problem. The band’s manager and weasels from the label keep coming in to hijack the sessions. The band abruptly goes on a cruise without telling their girlfriends. As if all this weren’t enough, throw in a growing sense of dread and paranoia as Mixerman begins to suspect that his daily blogs have been discovered and are being followed by the band and the label. And still, week after week goes by with the album no closer to completion.

The pains that Mixerman takes to conceal his own identity and everyone else’s have called the veracity of his journal into question. Is this really the making of a single album by one ill-starred band, is it an amalgam of Mixerman’s worst experiences mashed up into one account, or is it a work of pure fiction? On message boards Mixerman plays his cards close to the vest and won’t say, but I lean toward the middle option—it’s too much to be a straight narrative, but rings too true to be untrue. It’s hardly important, however. Mixerman’s account is, at its core, a revealing look at a part of the music business that rarely makes its way into the fantasy.

John G. Nettles

*I’m not actually a Malmsteen fan. I just like saying “Yngwie.”