dxd vs Wayne the germ.
For those not playing at home, when I was about 17-18 I started a band called deadxdoll with my friend Zeda (not her real name).
We asked a guy we knew, Ian, to join as drummer, and he always said yes but never showed up. In the interim, whenever we went out in public, which was often in those wonderful work-free days, we would ask all and sundry to be our drummer as a joke. We knew from the outset that Ian was our drummer of choice owing to shared musical interests and his understanding of the preferred direction of the band.
Enter Wayne. Wayne was some random bogan who used to hang around at local music things and who was friends with many of our friends. As was the style at the time, we asked him to be our drummer as a joke - and he actually showed up for band practice a couple of times because he was pretty pushy about it.
Wayne used to come to Zeda's house and re-arrange her Dad's drums into some sort of slanty super-bogan arrangement and then 'tune them' by loosening the skins. Zeda's Dad was a technically very proficient musician and very fond of his instruments and wasn't terribly happy about this.
When Wayne played, he used a lot of slow-paced tinny hi-hat sort of noises because he always thought that we were trying to be some kind of Veruca Salt clone/indie band; I don't think he ever asked about our influences or anything, he just assumed that becasue we met him at a tigers show we were that way inclined ourselves. He also kept appalling time.
Needless to say, it didn't work out - and it wouldn't have, even if it weren't for serendipitous arrival of Ian, who we'd seen and collected numbers from to get the drumming thing actually happening, or the fact that Zeda's dad had asked us not to allow Wayne to use his drums anymore as he'd put them all out of kilter and he was having trouble getting them back to normal.
When Ian first showed up for band practice, we started playing one the songs we'd made up and Ian kicked in within a few seconds with these magnificent kind of rolling drums with heaps of floor tom and depth and we knew we'd found our drummer - he didn't even need to hear it the whole way through, he just knew exactly what we wanted and went with it. It was so incredibly perfect.
At some point down the track, I started seeing Ian. When all this came about, I remember avoiding Zeda for a few days because I was convinced she'd be mad at me for jeopardising the band if we were to break up badly - it was kind of a big thing for me.
Unfortunately, Wayne has never taken his departure from our band terribly well. A few years ago, he made a comment about my motivation in removing him from the band and replacing him with Ian - apparently I manipulated the whole thing as a means of hooking up with Ian - which I found intensely offensive. I told him so at the time and he refused to retract it, so I wrote some snarky post on livejournal and we haven't spoken since.
As far as I was concerned, this was all in the distant past, but I have been told in the past couple of days that Wayne is back in Perth, and spent New Year's Eve talking to various people with whom we are mutually acquainted - unprompted - about what a mega-bitch I am and how our band would have been nothing without him. Apparently it is pretty much all he talks about.
I'd like to say that I could let it go and be a bigger person. But I can't. I'm pretty pissed, so I have been making snippy facebook status updates and if I ever see him in person I would be very tempted to punch him in the face (except my poor fist might become diseased).
We asked a guy we knew, Ian, to join as drummer, and he always said yes but never showed up. In the interim, whenever we went out in public, which was often in those wonderful work-free days, we would ask all and sundry to be our drummer as a joke. We knew from the outset that Ian was our drummer of choice owing to shared musical interests and his understanding of the preferred direction of the band.
Enter Wayne. Wayne was some random bogan who used to hang around at local music things and who was friends with many of our friends. As was the style at the time, we asked him to be our drummer as a joke - and he actually showed up for band practice a couple of times because he was pretty pushy about it.
Wayne used to come to Zeda's house and re-arrange her Dad's drums into some sort of slanty super-bogan arrangement and then 'tune them' by loosening the skins. Zeda's Dad was a technically very proficient musician and very fond of his instruments and wasn't terribly happy about this.
When Wayne played, he used a lot of slow-paced tinny hi-hat sort of noises because he always thought that we were trying to be some kind of Veruca Salt clone/indie band; I don't think he ever asked about our influences or anything, he just assumed that becasue we met him at a tigers show we were that way inclined ourselves. He also kept appalling time.
Needless to say, it didn't work out - and it wouldn't have, even if it weren't for serendipitous arrival of Ian, who we'd seen and collected numbers from to get the drumming thing actually happening, or the fact that Zeda's dad had asked us not to allow Wayne to use his drums anymore as he'd put them all out of kilter and he was having trouble getting them back to normal.
When Ian first showed up for band practice, we started playing one the songs we'd made up and Ian kicked in within a few seconds with these magnificent kind of rolling drums with heaps of floor tom and depth and we knew we'd found our drummer - he didn't even need to hear it the whole way through, he just knew exactly what we wanted and went with it. It was so incredibly perfect.
At some point down the track, I started seeing Ian. When all this came about, I remember avoiding Zeda for a few days because I was convinced she'd be mad at me for jeopardising the band if we were to break up badly - it was kind of a big thing for me.
Unfortunately, Wayne has never taken his departure from our band terribly well. A few years ago, he made a comment about my motivation in removing him from the band and replacing him with Ian - apparently I manipulated the whole thing as a means of hooking up with Ian - which I found intensely offensive. I told him so at the time and he refused to retract it, so I wrote some snarky post on livejournal and we haven't spoken since.
As far as I was concerned, this was all in the distant past, but I have been told in the past couple of days that Wayne is back in Perth, and spent New Year's Eve talking to various people with whom we are mutually acquainted - unprompted - about what a mega-bitch I am and how our band would have been nothing without him. Apparently it is pretty much all he talks about.
I'd like to say that I could let it go and be a bigger person. But I can't. I'm pretty pissed, so I have been making snippy facebook status updates and if I ever see him in person I would be very tempted to punch him in the face (except my poor fist might become diseased).