BandMix.com is not a dating site. Technically. You post a bio — the instruments you play, your influences, your gear, a video or an mp3 to prove you're not lying about any of it. Then you wait, or you reach out to people who seem like they might get it. It's LinkedIn for people who peaked at open mic night. It's Match.com if everyone's profile picture were their pedalboard, and everyone's bio still believed the tour bus was coming back for them.

I've reached out to plenty of people. Almost none of them wrote back. Of the ones who reached out to me, I've made exactly one genuine connection in all this time — a vocalist named Mark, who I'd like to publicly note is a normal, functional human being, and who therefore does not appear anywhere else in this article.

Everyone has some flavor of Foreigner's Juke Box Hero — convinced, to a man, that they're the one the spotlight's been waiting for, forty years after the spotlight moved on without checking in. Every single one of them is in a basement. Every single one of them wants to play the song exactly like the record, note for note, forever, and God help you if you suggest otherwise. I've had job interviews — for jobs that pay real, life-altering money — that were less stressful and less personally insulting than some of these "let's jam and see what happens" afternoons.

Here's the part nobody on that site wants to say out loud: the middle-class, earn-a-living gigging musician is a pipe dream at this point, and has been for a while. The venues that used to pay a band to fill a Friday night mostly don't exist anymore. What's left, more often than not, is a very specific character: a retiree with a decent investment portfolio, plenty of free time, and just enough disposable income to rent a basement full of gear — who cannot really play, has no intention of paying anyone who can, and genuinely believes what's missing from the equation is your dedication, not his wallet or his chops. If you want to know who's actually capable of assembling a band these days, it's rarely the talented and almost always the retired and frugal. Everyone else auditioning each other on BandMix is cosplaying a career path that closed a while ago.

Once you accept that, the only two things actually worth showing up for are getting better at your instrument and finding someone worth being friends with while you do it. Nobody on this site seems to have accepted that. Everybody's still auditioning for a record deal that isn't coming.

Here is a small, true sampling.

The Robin Trower Duo

A drummer and a bassist, deeply, spiritually committed to Robin Trower. We exchanged emails for weeks establishing this shared devotion. I showed up at the bandleader's house ready to play, and the room was thick enough with pot smoke that I briefly considered whether I'd need a permission slip to breathe in there. The drummer, it turned out, was too nervous to actually play in front of another human being — an interesting quality in a drummer, the one instrument in the ensemble that is, definitionally, loud and in front of people.

When it became clear the whole thing wasn't going to work, they informed me, with real conviction, that I simply did not understand how to play like Robin Trower — unlike them. This was said by two men, one of whom would not play his instrument, in a room that smelled like a Phish concert parking lot in 1994. I did not, in fact, need Robin Trower's blessing to know how that afternoon was going to end.

The Holdsworth Guys

I made the mistake, in my own bio, of mentioning Allan Holdsworth as an influence. A drummer and a keyboard player, self-described avant-garde jazz enthusiasts, saw this and had to have me. The drummer lived in Conifer, Colorado, which — for anyone unfamiliar — is not so much a town as it is a suggestion, an hour into the mountains with nothing around it but trees and the creeping suspicion that you've made several bad life choices to get there.

Once inside, the keyboard player and I were in one room. The drummer was in a different room entirely. We started jamming — no plan, just noise, which I actually enjoyed, cobwebs and all. I suggested "Ain't No Sunshine" so I could sing a little. The keyboard player apologized afterward for his mistakes on it. I hadn't been keeping score. Nobody asked me to.

Then they wanted to test me against Scott Henderson — a guitarist I'd genuinely never heard of — by putting on one of his live recordings and having me improvise "out passages" over it, cold, while they played along like they'd rehearsed this moment for years. To my ear, they hadn't. I didn't realize until later that this whole afternoon had been an audition. For what, exactly, I still don't know — an occasional pilgrimage to a house in the woods, once or twice a year, to play along to somebody else's record? The keyboard player, it also emerged, lived in Portugal most of the year. A week later I got a text. It began with "Unfortunately." I have never once received good news that began with the word "unfortunately," and this was no exception.

The Basement Three

Three guys, a basement, a setlist consisting of ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and exactly one Rush song, like a seasoning they were afraid to use twice. I passed, and not only because the material bored me. The bass player had what I'll generously call a "complicated relationship" with music made by Black artists — he never said it in so many words, because men like that rarely do. His face said everything his mouth was too careful to. Some auditions end because the chemistry's off. That one ended because I didn't feel like being in a room with him.

The Littleton Three

This one almost worked, which somehow made it worse. A three-piece in Littleton needed a guitarist after their last one ghosted them — an occupational hazard on this site, apparently, like a cold going around a preschool. I told the bandleader up front I wasn't interested in auditioning. He agreed. We rehearsed a Saturday afternoon, three easy blues tunes, nothing that should have troubled anyone. Afterward I asked if they wanted to keep going. They said yes. I took down numbers, left my amp there in good faith, and drove home feeling, for once, like an adult transaction had occurred between adults.

Monday, I sent everyone a set list of tunes to work on. The bandleader informed me I wasn't actually in the group yet. I picked my amp up on Wednesday, like retrieving a car from an ex.

For the record: the bandleader, also the drummer, had survived a couple of strokes and could no longer play at the level the material demanded, which is a genuinely hard thing and not something I'd mock him for. The keyboard player was just getting back into playing after years away. The bass player's range topped out fast. And me — the guy who showed up, played the songs, left his amp as a show of good faith — I was told I was "too jazzy." For three blues songs. In Littleton.

The Keyboard Player With the Tip Jar

Then there was the retired keyboard player I found on Craigslist, who hosted jazz jam sessions at his house most Saturdays and Sundays, 9 a.m. to noon — thirty miles each way for me, a genuine commitment before you've even picked up an instrument. At the first session, there was a tip jar sitting out, which struck me as an unusual touch for a house jam among fellow musicians. He explained he was retired and needed the extra income. Over a few weeks I learned he'd also been fired from several jobs as a music educator, and when I gently suggested substitute teaching, he explained, after a lengthy detour through everything he felt the entire field had wrong, that he'd never actually finished a college degree. A rock star's confidence, minus the rock star, minus the degree, minus, as it turned out, most of the jobs.

Weeks later, I struck up a conversation outside his house with a new bass player who happened to live close to me — a nice break, given the thirty-mile round trip I'd been making for a house full of strangers. I mentioned we should get together separately to play some jazz fusion, and that I could help his son with math along the way.

That afternoon, I got a long text. I'd been disrespectful, apparently, for contacting the bass player outside his sessions. He'd found him. I couldn't have him. And then he told me that without these jam sessions, he would kill himself.

I'll set that part apart from the rest of this, because it isn't a punchline and I'm not going to pretend it is. If someone tells you they're suicidal, that gets taken seriously, full stop, regardless of the argument surrounding it. What I will say is that using a line like that as leverage over who I'm allowed to keep in touch with is its own kind of warning sign, independent of whatever was actually true. I never went back.

Get Over Yourselves

Not literally — nobody needs to be legally banned from an instrument, however tempting that sounds after the Robin Trower duo. What I mean is: everyone on this site believes they're the hero of the record, decades after the record stopped selling. Nobody wants to make a song their own — they want to be the guy who already made it his own, forty years ago, on a recording they didn't play on. Ask for something original and you can watch the enthusiasm drain out of the room in real time. Ask them to just show up, play a simple tune with a stranger, and treat it like the modest, unglamorous, worthwhile thing it actually is, and you'd think you'd asked them to give up the last of their pension.

Nobody's getting signed. Nobody's quitting their day job. The rock star years, if they were ever really coming, aren't arriving on a Tuesday afternoon in a Denver basement, and no amount of gatekeeping a jam session is going to change that. What's actually on the table is smaller and, honestly, better: getting a little better at your instrument, and finding one or two people worth doing that with.

You don't need BandMix for that, and you definitely don't need a tip jar or a Robin Trower theology exam. Herb's Hideout runs real jam nights downtown most of the week. Roxy on Broadway has a relaxed, standards-based jazz jam on Wednesdays. Swallow Hill Music runs instructor-led open jams built for exactly this. None of them require an audition, an hour in the mountains, or a text message that starts with "unfortunately."

I keep looking anyway, because that part's still worth the drive. Somewhere out there is one more Mark. The rest of them can keep their basements, their pot smoke, their tip jars, and their Robin Trower opinions. I'll be the one who shows up, plays the gig, and doesn't need a lecture on stardom to know how the afternoon went.

If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text at 988.