Kingfisher: A Small Account of the Struggle (6)

The Jenn Situation

I fully understood Jenn’s desire to be a part of of our project, and understood even more her reasons for distancing herself the way she did. However, her disappearance from practices hurt the band while at the same time helping it. She lost her enthusiasm for the band, which translated to her loss of tolerance with Craig’s involvement in practices.

This caused us serious problems. With the loss of our drummer, our band lost a vital organ…One we could not survive long without. And we needed Craig. We needed him to find us a drummer. We needed him to record songs for our demo. We needed him to organize practices, keep us moving forward by giving us songs to learn and deadlines to learn them. We needed him to motivate us and keep our morale up. But these were things he couldn’t do unless he came to practices. In essence, we needed him to care about the band like we cared about it.

I honestly feel he cared for the band. But I also feel he did not know for sure what his role was, and he had trouble balancing his responsibilities effectively. He ran a business, had a wife and child, and was always trying to expand his life to include his various business opportunities. In the end, he had more going on than he could adequately control. The band was not his highest priority, and I could not fault him for this.

The band idea is more of a journey with no clear cut destination. We, as participants, make the journey for the sake of the experience. We play music because we like to play music. Craig entered the the thing in the hopes that we could make money. If this was our common goal, then we would have been forced to approach it like a job, which is to say we would rehearse more than twice a week…we would have come to practices fully prepared…we would not drink anymore during rehearsals.

For the simple reason that our band was not bringing in money, Craig had no choice but to list the band 4th on his list of priorities. He would be foolish not to. That being said, our band progressed enough to need the things Craig could not be depended on to provide.