Occasionally I check Craiglist for bands in my area looking for a bassist. I’m rusty on the instrument and my amp is buried somewhere deep within my parents’ garage, but I miss playing shows and figure if I found the right group of area would-be rock stars it might be fun to join on as a hired gun of sorts.

So I saw an ad recently for a band seeking a bassist in my age range with his own equipment. I have that, so I sent an email. The next day, I got a response.

The guy asked me for a picture, so he could run it by his band’s manager and producer and see if I fit with the group’s image before they extended me an audition.

No, sir, you can not have my picture. First of all, this is Craigslist, so I recognize there’s a halfway decent chance you aim to cut and paste my head on some ugly naked guy’s body and sell it elsewhere on the Internet as porn, or something to that effect. I don’t know the mechanics of it, but I’m certain it’s sketchy.

Second, you just exposed yourself as about the lamest would-be rock star imaginable. Your band’s image? Bite me.

I happen to be achingly beautiful in a totally pliable way and I’m certain I could be made to fit in with whatever it is you’re trying to package, but now you don’t get to see my pretty face or hear my pretty bass playing because you and I don’t see eye-to-eye on what’s most important about being in a band at all.

Also, what band with a manager and producer is looking for a bass player with his own equipment on Craigslist? Shouldn’t a competent manager at least have access to the bulletin board at the local guitar store?

Look: I recognize that, to some extent, rock and roll has always been about the image. But… I don’t know. I hold very things to some romantic ideal, and music is one of them. I always thought the Internet would eventually emerge as this amazing instrument by which musicians would meet and collaborate and paradigms would be entirely shifted, and it just hasn’t happened yet.

And then I go out and try to find some guys to jam with, and I begin to figure out why. Image. What am I, joining Limp Bizkit?

I told the guy it didn’t sound like my scene and left it at that. I should’ve given him a good scolding though. Or better yet, I should have asked him for his picture, so I could see if the band fit with my image.

Anyway, here’s an image of me playing the bass, with a fake mustache. Fake mustaches are a big part of my image. Dig my white leather guitar strap. White leather is also a big part of my image.

I have no interest in starting a band, mind you. Organizing a band is a huge pain and not something I have anything like the time or energy to do.

I led a band in college that met with some minor amount of success for a college band, and so whenever I brag about that, people comment about how college kids playing shows for college kids must have been great for our collective love lives.

Not the case, at all. Until you get to the level of having managers and roadies, the only action you get after shows is the joy of loading hundreds of pounds of equipment into a Nissan Sentra. Plus a lot of that equipment is borrowed, so you’ve got to go about returning it to the people who lent it to you. Plus a lot more of it is “borrowed,” so you’ve got to go about returning it to your college’s music room before anyone notices it went missing.

And while all that happens, all the people who were in the bar you were rocking leave with other people from that bar, none of whom are busy playing Tetris with amps and the trunk of a Nissan Sentra. A huge percentage of them leave with my friend Dan, who, to this day, has never met better matchmakers than the members of the Moo Shoo Porkestra.