In the spring of 1982, six friends got together in an East Village apartment to start a country-punk band. They had a guitar, a bass and some sticks and spoons to bang on. “We tried Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette songs and our voices wrapped around each other as everybody found their natural level,” wrote Amy Rigby in “Girl to City,” her 2019 memoir. “We wailed through a version of ‘Hey Good Lookin’ that lasted long enough to cook an entire spaghetti dinner. It was the most fun I’d had in my life.”
That band was called Last Roundup. You’re forgiven for not knowing the name. Though the group had a relatively brief existence and never had anything close to a hit, Ms. Rigby’s memoir — a lucid, unguarded account of band life — is one of the best I’ve read. And I’ve read tons.
In fact, I’ve spent the last year plundering music biographies, memoirs, magazine profiles, documentaries and podcasts for stories of start-up bands. I did this after Chris Scianni, an old friend, got in touch and asked for my help in writing about his decades of hustling in the music business. In high school, Chris and I had both been in bands — we shared a drummer — but mine was a bunch of goofballs burdened with too many opinions and too little patience for rehearsing. He was truly talented and dedicated, the best guitar player any of us knew, obsessed with Buddy Guy, Keith Richards and Joe Strummer.
As we caught up over lunch, I recognized that Chris has another exceptional gift: He is a band builder. That thing we both did as kids? He kept doing it — he’s had a band that was signed to Sony; he played in the tennis star John McEnroe’s band; and he has jammed with Bruce Springsteen at the Stone Pony. He has also spent his adult life keeping an eye out for collaborators to help him go places he wouldn’t be able to reach on his own.
The more we talked about it, the more I came to understand that Chris’s band-joining impulse is the perfect resistance to these stupefying times. Chris and I decided to create a zine about starting a band, dedicated to a simple message: Life’s problems, big and small, recede when you get in a room and play music with a few friends or friends of friends or, why not, complete strangers.
Make it up as you go along. If nobody else wants to sing, you sing. Be a zealot about keeping your instrument in tune but nothing else. Force yourself to write one new song a week, no matter how dreadful the first ones come out. Reach out across the divide of awkwardness to the closet geniuses in your life, like that ex-co-worker who has a thing for modular synths. Be especially kind to your drummer, if you have one, because drummers are impossible to find. Or maybe you’ll have to learn the drums. Book a gig. Make stickers and hand them out on the subway. Stop chasing what everybody else is chasing. Create your own center of gravity.
I told myself I was doing all this for my teenage daughters, both of whom are musically inclined but have been tentative about forming their own bands. It’s not something teenagers do as naturally as Chris and I once did.
For one thing, live music, once ubiquitous, is now almost quaint. And kids who can sing or play an instrument start professional training today around age 3. We’re inundated with evidence of other people’s superior talents and superhuman work habits. On YouTube, you’ll discover you can’t play guitar half as well as a teenager who does a multilayered rendition of “There She Goes” with a delay pedal while skateboarding down her street. Sticking your neck out as an inspired beginner takes courage. Yet that’s also how the best stuff always starts.
I know what some of you are thinking. What if I’m old? What if the last time I picked up my guitar, my kids marched out of the house? These are reasonable concerns. If making music will never be your thing, find co-conspirators for something else. Your band could be a book club, a knitting collective, a pop-up theater, a game night, or a pinball laundromat mahjong club in Gowanus (which does not yet exist, as far as I know, but act fast). It could even be starting a zine.
Even after we published our zine, I couldn’t stop collecting stories about the origins of bands. I’ll go to the music section of a bookstore and flip right to the part of each book where they start their first band. It rarely fails to be inspiring — the coolest bands were ridiculously uncool in their early incarnations.
At its first paid gig, for high schoolers in Summit, N.J., the Velvet Underground literally fell to pieces: “Our set was only about 15 minutes at the most,” the drummer Maureen Tucker has recalled, “and in each song something of mine broke.” Robert Smith of the Cure was mortified at first by his own voice, and when he tried being lead vocalist at a gig, he sang the words to “Suffragette City” while the band played “Foxy Lady.” At early rehearsals for the band that would become Radiohead, Thom Yorke, the singer, told the keyboardist Jonny Greenwood, “I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture.” It turned out Mr. Greenwood had switched off the power on his keyboard because he didn’t know how to play the chords.
What made these kids push through such cringe-inducing incompetence and keep going? The safety net of having other kids on their side. It inspired them to not only persevere and get better but also to keep taking risks in pursuit of their own distinctive sound.
If there’s one thing that digital technology is exceptional at, it’s fueling the ambition of the solo practitioner. We barely need anybody for anything these days. A practically infinite (and utterly obedient) orchestra lives in our iPhones. But relying too much on these tools keeps us in creative silos. It denies us the connection we all crave, which is the real meaning of music and the best reason to start a band. People want to connect. A band is not just a mechanism for doing that, it’s a model.
It can also be a path to a deeper creative life. That’s how it worked out for Amy Rigby. Since Last Roundup split up, she has made a career as a solo artist; the critic Robert Christgau called her “one of the great unknown American songwriters.” Connecting with those original collaborators had turned Ms. Rigby, a self-described “goofy amateur,” into an artist.
“Certain people let you feel free to be a true part of yourself,” Ms Rigby wrote. “Not the only part, but one facet that lies dormant until somebody else says: ‘Come on out, it’s OK.’”
Hugo Lindgren, the editor of the zine Let’s Start a Band, is starting a punk-covers band with Chris Scianni called Steinbrenner.
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