Dazed and Confused

I was pretty beaten down. This had been a really good band, put together from scratch in a matter of a only six months, and only with very hard work. We thought my brother was with us, and so the feelings of frustration, humiliation, and betrayal were powerful. I was really pissed. And so were the guys. Because we had done quite a few gigs with my brother in the first few months after we had started to play out in live performances...audiences identified  him as being a big part of the band, after all... that is exactly how we planned it. But now, we couldn't count on him to show up, so we all decided that we'd be better off trying to go on without him. The problem was that even though we had two other lead vocalists and a third, competent, background vocalist in the band, our styles as singers didn't sound the way everyone remembered, and expected. We thought it was different, and so did the audiences and the club owners. Just one person leaving the band changed the entire dynamic.There are a lot of examples of this... The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, are all bands who broke up or struggled, after losing one key member. It just wasn't the same without that missing piece. That "magic" is elusive, and rare.

 It was also very depressing to have to struggle with a unusually fast rise turning into an equally fast demise. We tried to go on, but we knew that we had lost something special, and once we had a taste of it, it was hard to pretend it really didn't matter that it was gone. After a few months of struggling to get work...we gave it up. For me, it was like someone pulled the rug out from under me, and that someone was my twin brother. I thought that, as a club owner, he should have known better than anyone, how totally unprofessional it is to not show up for a contracted job, and how club owners never forget. And how they talk to each other. So the "bad press" preceded us into rooms we hadn't even played in, and as a result, we never would. I took it very personally. The damage done to me, and the rest of the guys, felt like something that I had to take responsibility for, because it was caused by my brother, and I just couldn't believe he had done it. It dawned on me, that for the first time in my career, I had absolutely no ideas or direction. I felt dazed and confused, and my anger was becoming rage...