1. Grow your hair long – but not long enough to get you fired from your day job.
Tuck it behind your ears during the day to make it seem shorter. Joke about how you’ve been too busy working to go in for a haircut.
2. Hold a full band rehearsal in your apartment. Without getting evicted.
Second-Best Method: Call in sick at your job so you can have the band over during the day when nobody else in the apartment is home.
Best Method: Recruit everyone on the floor below you for your new band. Voila! No one left to complain about the noise. Soon, they’ll all be jobless and penniless, and won’t care, anyway.
3. Get carefully cultivated fake tattoos.
Real ones would get you in trouble with the boss. But fake ones have no Indie Credibility (see point #5). To convince everyone they’re real, get really ugly ones. That way, everyone will think: “There’s no way he would be sporting that if he could help it!”
4. Get a Rock Star image. From a magazine.
As a bona-fide productive working member of society, you’re going to have trouble pulling off the rock star image. So you’re going to have to steal someone else’s.
Just sign up for one of those “free magazine” offers your annoying co-worker keep pushing at you, and get a subscription to Rolling Stone or Paste or Spin. Then just rip out some photos of rock stars, and copy their clothing exactly.
Next month, repeat. This way you’ll always be “cutting edge”.
5. Get Indie Credibility.
No one is going to believe you’re a rock star until you start talking like one. So do two things: rail against the music establishment, and claim to hate anything released in the last decade. Talk about the glory days of rock, before Kurt Cobain “sold out” and joined Nirvana. That’s right, even Kurt Cobain isn’t cool enough for you.
6. Use company stationary to book the big shows.
Want to open for Motley Crue? It helps if your request to open for them comes on the letterhead of a Fortune 500 company. Better yet, sign your boss’s name. Agents will be more impressed to hear from Harvey Jefferson III than from Jimmy the Intern.
7. Use your company copy machine to create fliers for your next big gig.
Just be sure to print a nice Excel report too, so you can sandwich your fliers between spreadsheets, and convince any passerby that you just printed off 500 pages of financial data.
8. Borrow your neighbor’s minivan to carry all of your band equipment.
Tell him that it’s for a “soccer emergency”. He’ll understand.
9. Tell your co-workers to come to your gig, but don’t tell them you’re the one playing.
Just tell them there’s this awesome band that’s been really hitting it big overseas. Let them feel the peer pressure burn.
10. Play to a Huge Crowd.
Simply sneak in to a Hard Rock Cafe about an hour before another band’s scheduled show and start setting up. Tell the manager that there have been some personnel changes lately, but you’re still going to “rock the house”. When the real band shows up, accuse them of stalking you.
If you follow all these steps, you will be well on your way to success as a weekend rockstar.
-micah