Thursday evenings used to be one of my favorite times during the week. Not anymore. Now I have to turn the volume on my television way up to drown out the sound of badly played Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bon Jovi. To the cover band that plays at the bar behind my house on Thursdays nights, you are awful. I hate you. I don’t even know the name of your band but I’m sure it’s something like, “Full Throttle” or “Maximum Overdrive” or “Under The Gun”. I haven’t seen what you look like but I’m going to guess that the singer is bald, has a nicely trimmed goatee and wears a black t-shirt that is way too tight for him. Your drummer wears a flannel with the sleeves cut off, weight lifting gloves, and cutoff jean shorts with a hole in the left thigh. The bassist has long curly red hair, weighs 99 lbs and sweats more than I do when I hit the sauna. The guitarist is wearing a faded Jimi Hendrix t-shirt that he was wearing when he met his wife in 1988 and is wearing matching faded black jeans with the same work boots in which he spent the earlier portion of his day.
Now I understand that your band is an escape from your 9-5 job, nagging wife and your rebellious kids who don’t respect their father because he spent their college fund on a Fender but I want you to realize the reality of this situation. You play at a bar on Thursday nights. A bar that doesn’t even have live music on the weekends. They would rather play a jukebox than have your band play live for their weekend customers. I would hope that the people heading out to the bar on a Thursday night are going there to get drunk out of their skulls because any sober person will despise your band for ruining “War Pigs”, “Livin’ On A Prayer”, and “Old Time Rock and Roll” forever. On top of that, ending every Thursday night suck fest with your cover of “Drift Away” makes me want to move away and out of my apartment. Some day I will make my way down to that bar on a Thursday night, earplugs in ear, so I can see if my suspicions are true. Maybe I’ll even get my picture taken with you so I can post it here, or even better, maybe your band will have a Myspace page.
