Pick up the phone or play on your own!

Three elementary school kids are covering complex Frank Zappa tunes on kazoo, trumpet and keyboards in front of their enthusiastic yet bewildered fifth grade music class. Kazoo is what young guitarists with broken arms play until they get their casts off. Suddenly we discover that kazoos are a lot like arms; they can break.

While I keep playing my cheesy little synthesizer (badly), Eric Orenstein, now a sophomore at BCC, continues trumpeting to the best of his ability, and Aydin Hamami, now a sophomore at Whitman, desperately goes in search of a comb and wax paper to make a replacement kazoo. Certainly a unique version of "Peaches en Regalia."

Hamami's and my music teacher oversaw our musical group H.O.G. (the acronym of our last names), but we decided we didn't need his supervision and ditched him. Suddenly rehearsals never happened, and by the time middle school rolled around, we had disbanded.

Five years later, I ran into Hamami at a Mexican restaurant near my house. Apparently he's a decent guitarist now, and we expressed a mutual interest in jamming. However, after a few rounds of phone tag the calls stopped. Six months have passed; I still haven't heard from him, and he hasn't heard from me.

"Captain, we've lost all ground communication!"

This non-communication runs rampant in high school bands, which are predominately composed of adolescent males. We are basically cavemen with underdeveloped verbal skills and more comfortable caves. Our unique combination of arrogance, insecurity and laziness prevents us young musicians from actually playing music with each other.

As for cavemanliness, I am the worst offender. I don't have my own email address. I have never sent an instant message (or a text message for the matter). I hate the phone; when I am the only one at home, nine times out of ten I will just let it get picked up by the voicemail, which I don't know how to check. And over the years I have developed the ability to convey a wide range of needs, wants and desires with monosyllabic groans or grunts.

Unfortunately, the average high school male is not much better than I am, and musicians seem to be particularly flaky. I play guitar in a band organized by BCC freshman and bassist Adam Shama. We practice once a week, in theory. In reality, during the past four months, we have practiced maybe four times. "We're still in that band?" Shama asks when I call.

Filling the job description

Should a band actually manage to get together to rehearse, even more communication problems arise. Individual instrumentalists fall into their respective detrimental roles as follows:

The guitarist takes the musical reins and tells the rest of the band to accompany him. "Guitarists are more interested in shredding than communicating," says Shama. (To the uninitiated, shredding is when a guitarist solos by playing lots of really high notes really fast and really distorted.)

The bassist is generally content to play in the background as long as he gets one gratuitous bass solo, which is usually as painfully bad as it is inappropriate. "Bassists are generally the most mature," asserts Shama, a bassist himself.

The keyboardist gets fired. I would know.

The drummer, having been given no direction, will play disjoined beats with poorly executed fills and general disregard for tempo. Every once in a while, the guitarist will try to show the drummer how to play the drum part, forgetting the fact that he (the guitarist) does not play the drums.

Caveman triumphant!

This stagnant creative isolation got me thinking. "This is stupid!" I shouted in my head. I resolved to better my ways. I got Hamami's phone number (which I had to get from my mom's address book; I don't have my own), sat by the phone, picked up the receiver and began dialing; great, his message machine!

But I had called him last. Phone tag - he's it.