Dramatis Personae
- me – me
- FV – former vocalist
- LG – lead guitarist
- KB – keyboardist
- PV – prospective vocalist
FV was one of the founding members of the band, but he left due to life circumstances. Which was fine—quite honestly the only one of us who really liked him was LG. He was whiny and controlling, shit on everything the guys wrote except one song, and wanted to crank out music like sausage instead of taking time to get it right. We were afraid to speak up around him if our opinions differed from his, and everything had to be about him in some way. (Also, he called using marijuana "to boof", which pissed me off to no end. "Boof" this, "boof" that. A minor point, admittedly.)
The biggest issue was that we were set to move into his garage and had been for a few weeks. We had planned this out. I messaged him the night before to confirm things, when he drops the bomb that we could no longer move into the garage because he was leaving his current house and moving in with his fiancé's parents. He knew about this for a while and didn't tell us—
I had to message
him to find this out,
the night before no less. That
really pissed me off, but somehow I'm the bad guy for feeling put off by this. I'm aware it's a bad thing to lose one's home but he really could've been more transparent, and something like this is something I shouldn't have to take the initiative to find out.
One Sunday morning a few weeks later, he messaged the band and said something along the lines of "I have something to say, but I don't know whether I'm going to say it now or save it for practice." Then he goes "Meh, I feel like typing it out now" and proceeds to write an absolute doorstopper of a post about the band's direction. He said we had to "upgrade to a two-burner unit" and that the album we were originally working on, which I had formed the band specifically to create, "would take two years to write and I want it to be absolutely perfect". The message was like 200 lines long. At the end his rant he said something to the effect of "Please read what I wrote. This is what we do, we're a band, we discuss things as a band". Like WTF? The next week he was gone.
So a couple weeks ago, he hits us up, saying that his "life has calmed down tremendously" and that he had time to be in a band again, so why not ask us? I had no desire to work with him again. Luckily, we had by this time been in talks with PV for him to fill the spot, so I was able to point to that as a reason for not having him back in the band. That was that.
Few weeks later, it's the other day. LG and FV are best buds, and they were talking about how FV couldn't find an established band to join and wanted to start his own. Somehow, LG suggested to him—unbeknownst to me—that he rent our practice space from us. So FV comes into the old band chat asking if he can rent the space from us. LG didn't clear this with anybody in the band (it's my name and LG's on the lease), and like I said, I had no desire to work with FV again. I nevertheless wanted to let him down gently, so I told him that the lease likely forbade subletting, but that I would ask the manager of the studio space regardless. I did this and the manager directed me to tell him no, which I did. Then he tried to join the band again. "What progress have you guys made with a vocalist?" he asked. "I'm just curious." I told him about our prospect, with whom we were (and are) still hashing things out. "You guys do you. I've shown what I can bring to the table." Just curious my ass.
The situation kept eating away at me like tooth decay, and I finally decided to let FV know that I felt disrespected by his query (again, at this point I had no knowledge of LG's conversation with FV) and that opening up the space to unverified third parties was a risk that I was not prepared to take.
FV came out swinging, mentioning a phantom mic cable that had gone missing ("your other band prob took it") and saying that, when he left the band, he had prepared a "long list" of things I said or did that pissed him off. He also called the band a trainwreck and me a "nobody"—the former is false, the latter is true but irrelevant (why rejoin a trainwreck?). He said that we "had nothing to offer him as a vocalist"—kind of hard to do that when the vocalist shits on everything the band writes (we had exactly one song to which he did not object)! The entitlement just radiated off of him as well—he said he "scratched his head" as to why we didn't accept him back when we were already talking to another vocalist, like the spot was his by divine right and like his cargo van was some mystic boon from above. I told him that a) I would inquire as to the whereabouts of his mic cable, which he had never before mentioned, not even when he came by my place to retrieve his gear after his departure, and b) that it is best if we did not work together professionally as our personalities do not mix well. (His response to that was "I can mix with anyone. It's you, I might add, who cannot.")
Ultimately he creeped on my profile to find PV's. PV had taken a picture of us at practice with me, LG, and KB in it. "I see [LG] has brought [KB] into the fold", he said, accusing KB of racism and fascism. "Good luck keeping up with both their lies," he capped it off with.
LG is his best friend and he called him a fascism-enabling liar. I blocked him after that, and his fiancée too for good measure so he couldn't use her profile to get at us.
But somehow,
I am the asshole in this situation.