A childish rant

I just got back into playing in a covers band after almost 20 years.
It was my dream after taking up the guitar again several years ago. So
I'm with these other middle age weekend warriors. I'm the new guy so I
know there's some fitting in I have to do but I have some worries.

Most songs we do fairly well. But there's a few that we do terribly
either due to screwing up the complicated arrangements or because we
posses reasonable vocal limitations. Yet the list seems to be written
in stone.  These are good songs, but we just don't do them well. I
brought in a CD of songs I thought we could do really well but my
suggestions have been ignored for now at least.

Then at our last practice, we stopped to retune the guitars a
half-step down for a few songs "because that's how they are on the
record". I voiced my reservations about this; about the break in
momentum in a live setting to tune and retune back again. And so what
if we have to learn them off the record at home this way, it doesn't
have to carry over into a performance for paying customers. They won't
care as long as we do it well. And turns out we didn't do it well - it
really sucked.

Over the years I developed a simple personal philosophy on what makes
a good band: get the women to dance. Everything is gravy after that. I
believe you can make people dance and still bang yer head. But our
song selection runs from mid 70s AOR to h e a v y tunes from Metallica
to standard slow tunes. Great for keggers but not dancing. This goes
back to my submitted CD. Everything on there, from Cougar to Kravitz
to ZZ Top is for getting those babes on the floor. But....

I feel really frustrated, my time means a lot to me. I missed my son's
basketball game to go to practice the other night so I want to use it
wisely. I'm not sure about quitting because it took so long to find
some other middle age crazy guys to be in a band with and I would hate
to start from square one. I think maybe if I stick with it, things
will either turn around or I'll network around and meet some other
folks I'll be more in sync with.

Thanks for any thoughts

g