I just found out that Catdaddy Pirates’ former guitar player removed me from his friends list on Facebook. While I hate to admit it, my initial reaction was summed up when I said “good riddance”. This sounds childish, of course. Honestly, I’m rather confused by the whole thing. His departure was a surprise. We’d had disagreements, sure, like in any creative collaboration, but there was never anything nasty of confrontational. I thought the band was steaming along and would be playing out in a couple of weeks. But then, a few days after telling us that he wouldn’t be anywhere near ready to play in a couple of weeks, he told us that he needed to make some money pronto and couldn’t wait for us. Then he severed all ties and stopped responding to e-mails. Now he removes me from his friends list.
I’m sad to see him go. I thought the band had amazing potential. But our friend was simply wound too tight. Every other day he was offended by something else either I or the drummer had said or done, and it usually caught us completely by surprise. We were always walking on eggshells around him, and the band was mostly paralyzed because we spent inordinate amounts of time stamping out his many small brush fires.
I suppose what confuses me the most is that he removed me from his friends list, but not our drummer (who is the person he told me he had a problem with). So I can only assume that there’s something in my make-up and personality that he had a problem with, and he just didn’t have the cajones to bring it up. Oh, well. Personality conflicts are inevitable when you put strong personalities together. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. In the end I suspect the biggest problem with the band was simply that I had my own ideas and wasn’t interested in being little more than the bass player in the J. C. Rice Band. My idea of real collaboration is not that I do just what someone else wants. A true collaboration involves a lot of give and take from all parties, and I always tried to facilitate that and make sure that every one of us had input. What I wasn’t willing to do was to roll over just to make the peace. Maybe, in the end, that was the real problem. I’ll probably never know for sure.
All I know is that after the drummer and I conceded over 75% of our set lists to the wishes and tastes of our guitar player, we then found him complaining about the other 25%. That was revealing. We’d completely inverted the band from a Classic Rock format to mostly Blues just to suit him, and it still wasn’t enough. However it sounds, I’m not bashing this guy or trying to point fingers. I just don’t know what else we could’ve done to accommodate him. He was already dictating most of what we were doing musically.
I’m just trying to understand. Usually when someone turns their back on me and acts like I’ve committed some great wrong to them, I’ve actually done something. In this instance, I can’t recall a single thing I did to warrant hostilities. It saddens me when friendships are lost, but it especially grieves me to know that this one was simply thrown away. I’ll always be scratching my head where this gentleman is concerned. He was an impossible nut to crack.
Whatever he might think of me, I wish him nothing but the best. I hope that as he scours the countryside looking for whatever it is he’s so obsessively searching for, he’ll recall at least some of the moments when he played with Catdaddy Pirates and the magic was flowing. Our band could have been significant. And I hope he doesn’t begrudge us picking up the pieces and moving on to the next project. Quite frankly, I still have significant work to do. I’m sorry things didn’t work out. But it is what it is.
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{{{Wic}}}
Sorry things did not work out….and ppl think women are whimsical and temperamental. Whoever started that rumor never met a musician. I have seen that happen many times here with Dave when he was involved in playing .
Life and music go on and I am sure you will do very well and go on to even bigger and better things…
B*B
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bast
My name is Fred George.I got this link sent to me by a mutual friend of mine and JC Rice’s. Is this the same JC Rice I have known for over 30 years? I think not. I have worked in this area for a living with my guitar since 1978 so I know a little about it. You guys have since he told me about the project weekly strike me as a garage band with a dude that knows the web prety good (your site is nice). It seems to be a cheap shot you took at my bud as I am aware of some of the drama like not being able to start a song at the same time or little things like that a Profesional musician can only take so much of.
If anyone reads this JC is a class act.
Fred, I thought a lot of J. C. Rice, and was under the impression that we had a good friendship that would be a long-lasting one. His abrupt departure was a great surprise to me. That weekly project that strikes you as a garage band was a weekly live rehearsal at a venue in Ybor City. It was NEVER intended as anything more than preparation for gigs. It was a free place to practice, and J.C. was enthusiastic about it. Or he claimed to be, anyway. And, you know, if working up a show and trying to nail down the rough spots sounds like a garage band to you, then we definitely have different ideas about what it means to be a Professional musician.
If you’ve discussed some “drama” with J.C. about us supposedly not being able to start a song at the same or some such, I can only say that you are misinformed. There were certainly some issues we needed to nail down, but we’d only played together for a month or so. If J.C. is implying somehow that the rest of us couldn’t keep up with him, I have a hard time understanding how he seems like a class act to you. The arrogance of such a statement is simply breathtaking.
In the end, I have no real issues with J.C. This post wasn’t intended as an attack on J.C. Rice. If anything, I was just scratching my head, because what J.C. told us about where his head was at wasn’t anywhere near the reality of what was going on. He abruptly left the band with no real explanation and cut off all communication with us, acting as if we had done something to him. That struck me as childish.
For the most part, if I begrudge J.C. anything, it’s that I wasted almost two months trying to get this project up and running (and quit a working band to do so), only to be frustrated that J.C. learned ONLY the songs he had chosen for our set lists, all while telling us that he couldn’t possibly be ready by our target date for scheduling shows. Then, with our first gigs a few weeks down the road, he abruptly told us he needed to “make money now” and jumped ship, later implying that it was us, and not he, that wasn’t ready. Rest assured, we were waiting on J.C. to get up to speed. It wasn’t the other way around.
It pains me that if J.C. Rice has anything to say to me, he’s directing it through third parties. We could have parted on much better terms if he’d simply talked to us and explained his reasons for leaving the band, instead of just pulling his parachute and acting like we’d done something so dark and sinister to him that he wouldn’t even speak to us about it. We’re all adults here. There would have been no hard feelings. Sometimes things just don’t work out. All J.C. had to do was call me and we could have talked about it like grown-ups.
In the end, I really don’t know what we did to earn such enmity from J.C. He never told us. But from what I’ve heard from a mutual friend about J.C.’s recent ranting on Facebook, it’s very clear to me where the drama in the band came from. It’s also been made very clear by the absence of drama since his departure that we were a bad fit to begin with. I wish him well, and I hope all goes well for you guys. I hope J.C. is happy.
This is the last I’ll ever write about J.C. Rice. Maybe I should have kept my frustrations to myself. But if you can’t rant on your own blog about things that are bothering you, where can you? With this, I’ll close the chapter on J.C. Rice and move on. Honestly, it’s an issue I’m more than a little tired of hashing out.