How to Make a Jam Band Out of Stuff You Have Lying Around the House

Anthropomorphic sculpture, digital photographs, 500x400 and 400x600 pixels, 2009 

My friend Amy D was bored yesterday and decided to make a jam band out of stuff she had lying around the house. You're probably thinking that making your own jam band takes days or weeks, but it doesn't. You can do it in 30 minutes! Just follow the five easy steps:

1. Grab anything you have lying around the house that has a face on it and that you can easily lift (like a stuffed animal or a cookie jar). These will be the musicians. 
2. Collect all of your real instruments (like drumsticks or a harmonica). If you don't have real instruments, make your own out of boxes, toothpaste tubes, or old cans.
3. Take each of the instruments that you've collected and tape them onto the musicians.
4. Make up a back-story about a sleazy traveling jam band in the 1970s. 
5. Sit back, have a beer, and watch your band have a fantasy jam session.

Here is Amy's band and their captivating story:

"The band was Vegetable Basics. The year was 1977."

"Raul 'The Boss' Estramado had a bad temper and a problem with authority. He also had a problem with methamphetamines. The other band members dubbed him the leader, not because of his middle-school education or because he claimed to be related to Ulysses S. Grant, but because he frightened everyone."

 

"The Albertini brothers joined Vegetable Basics straight out of an Idaho penitentiary. If there was one thing the brothers were good at, it was electric guitar and bass. If there was one thing they were bad at, it was saying no to dope and loose women."

 

"The band's distinctively heavy sound came from the keyboards and there was no better keyboard player in those days than Tommy 'One Ear' Ghiradelli. He was also the shy one of the bunch, but the other guys liked having him around because he studied chemistry in college and knew how to make his own drugs."

 

"Vegetable Basics had a mighty good run. They performed on Japanese TV and played festivals all over the world, but, like all good bands, they were eventually ripped apart in a tornado of booze, embezzlement, and venereal disease."

"The End."