In 2006, three starry-eyed teenagers with almost no musical background or any sort of relevant experience whatsoever created, participated and perpetuated a disturbing sort of delusion- they managed to convince themselves that they could play music together, well enough to play shows and live lives of rock stardom. (I was one of them.)

We were terrible. We wrote cheesy, unimaginative songs you might describe as pop-punk or pop-rock. (Some of our early lyrics went along the lines of, “I met her at a bar / I didn’t have a car…”) None of us could sing, but we were stubbornly convinced that it wasn’t a problem.

We were relentless. We got to play our first few gigs by exploiting the goodwill of our friends, and by bugging everyone we knew. We would pounce on gig slots that freed up at the last minute. We organized our own shows when we couldn’t find any. We begged, pleaded and conned our friends and families into turning up at our shows.

We put in a lot of effort on getting the ‘icing’ right when we didn’t even have a particularly decent ‘cake’. we dressed in coordinated outfits, wrote up lengthy, descriptive blurbs. My guitarist spent a lot of time photoshopping our gig photos to make us look cool. I spent countless hours designing and refining our MySpace page (where all the cool kids hung out in 2006), making sure that the fonts, colours and phrasing was just right.

Strangely, somehow, it worked. We played almost a hundred shows over a couple of years. We even got paid for it on several occasions, sometimes in the hundreds of dollars. We raised quite a bit of money for charity.We played on the streets of Orchard Road, in seedy bars and pubs, in schools, in the blazing sun, in the freezing cold, at flea markets, indoors, outdoors, in clubs, in a disco with pole dancers, and even for a bunch of people on stationary bikes. We had over 2,000 friends and over 80,000 plays on MySpace. We managed to get one of our songs in a compilation by a national magazine. People would recognize us in the streets sometimes.

We had haters. Plenty of them. Back then, I couldn’t really understand why. On hindsight though, it makes perfect sense. People couldn’t understand why we were playing as many shows as we did, or how shameless (and, admittedly, kind of arrogant) we were in promoting ourselves. We were musically very incompetent, and for the most part we behaved as if that didn’t matter in the slightest. We didn’t “deserve” to be where we were.

Or did we? We weren’t very good at music, for sure. We’d always get strangely apologetic smiles and polite nods from people with proper musical training. We played out of time, out of key, sang out of breath, out of tune. Our fans and supporters must have been people with ears even worse than ours. But somehow, us doing what we did and being who we were, made a difference to them. I remember, on several occasions, young guys (and girls) coming up to us after shows and telling us that we made them want to pick up music- those moments were always golden.

The main reason we were “successful”, I think, lies in the inertia of others. I mean, we weren’t blindingly successful or anything, but we did play loads of shows and had lots of wonderful experiences. I’ve met many musicians and bands vastly more talented and hardworking than we were who haven’t had nearly as many opportunities as we did. We had a sort of dogged persistence and rather blind optimism and inflated sense of self-worth- and while we were often torn down for it, we did manage to get away with more than we “should” have.

Why do we have an idea of how successful a band “deserves” to be, anyway? We hear this all the time, and I’m sure we’re all guilty of thinking it ourselves- some unknown band “deserves” to be more popular, to have more views, while bands that are already successful don’t quite “deserve” to be where they are. Well, life is “unfair”. To quote Rocky:

Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!

There isn’t a direct co-relation between talent and success. The skills you need to be “successful” are different from the skills you need to be good at what you do. You need both skill-sets if you want to be blindingly, sustainably successful in the long term.

I like the cake-and-icing analogy- if you want people to eat your cake, you’re going to have to make an effort to make it look good. A delicious-but-ugly cake will always be under-appreciated. A beautiful-but-average-tasting cake will always be over-valued. That’s just the way it is. You can deny it, or be pragmatic and realise it’s something you’re going to have to bear in mind.

Some of our shows were absolute train wrecks. Sometimes we’d find ourselves bitter and disappointed afterwards- feeling like we betrayed our friends who paid money to come see us. It wasn’t a good feeling. We’d realise that we should’ve practiced harder, and more often. Our inflated sense of self-worth would be stripped away when held up against reality. That said, some of our shows were rather magical- it’s hard to explain, but you can feel it- everyone in the room in sync, creating and participating in a unique shared experience. And I honestly feel that those moments were worth everything else.

If I knew then what I know now, if I could have started over, I would have practised a lot harder. Blind self-confidence gets you further than crippling self-doubt, but it’s also unnecessarily painful- not just for you, but for others. I do regret that we sometimes embarrassed our peers- it didn’t occur to me then, but every lousy show we played would have been a little black mark on the report card of the collective music scene- we may have turned some people off from local music when we showed up at gigs unrehearsed and unprepared, and that’s not a very pleasant thought.

We got away with what we did by exploiting the inertia of others. We got away with playing shows that we “shouldn’t” have been allowed to simply because other bands weren’t putting themselves out there as intensively as we were. If there were more good bands campaigning for gigs as aggressively as we were, we wouldn’t have been able to play as many shows as we did. It wasn’t our fault that we were more “successful” than we should’ve been- if we’re going to blame anybody, we ought to blame the lack of competition.

It’s been several years since then, and I feel like I’ve grown and matured a lot as an individual. For one, I don’t think I have nearly as much blind confidence as I used to. That’s mostly a good thing. At the same time, self-doubt keeps me from pursuing my dreams with the sort of burning drive I remember having. I feel this way with my writing- my writing never feels good enough because I am very aware of all my flaws and weaknesses, far more than anybody else possibly could be. The same with my music- I’m definitely a much better musician now than I was then, yet I am far more aware of my mistakes and weaknesses than I ever was. I’ve moved from “unconscious incompetence” to “conscious incompetence”. The goal is to keep moving, until we reach “conscious competence”, and finally, the holy grail of “unconscious competence”.

I’m pretty sure I’m able to figure out how to make this work, to put together everything I’ve learnt and figured out over the years, to grow as an individual and to build something greater than myself that means something to others.

I do miss playing music.