Kids Wanna Rock Band

One day I woke up and found out my job had become a video game.

I've been on tour now for about four months across North America. Recently, on a night off, I went down to a club I'd played before. I figured I might hang out and hear some bands at the club's Rock Band night.

Instead, I found out this wasn't a night to see an up-and-coming indie group, but a night to "play" the Rock Band video game. The stage was empty except for a big screen TV and the game's microphone, guitar and drum game controllers. And there, the would-be rockers from the audience would come up to play the game in a live music club while their friends looked on at the screen and applauded, danced and laughed. Some of them were more entertaining than some real bands I'd seen.

YouTube is full of clips of people playing the game. And maybe the jump from rec room to nightclub is a natural progression. Open up any newspaper's weekly entertainment listings, and you'll find Rock Band video game nights in many small clubs -- if only on mid-week off nights.

So is this the future? Musicians are only just coming to terms with the public's penchant for illegal downloads. Do we now have to deal with clubs preferring video gamers to bands? When the flight simulator computer games came out, it wasn't as though they were letting people with the highest scores have a shot at piloting a 747.

That's not the only thing that's hard on musicians. Because of the response controls of the Guitar Hero video games, actual musicians are notoriously poor at the game -- an intriguing and somewhat enjoyable feature that starts everybody off at the same competence. Little Billy from Kerrisdale and Sir Paul McCartney are both at the same skill level the first time they play.

And all of this provides my guitar teacher friends with a new generation of kids too used to the game, without the patience to learn chords or scales, and too easily frustrated, generally, by the real instrument.

But now the commercial music industry is getting in on the act, and seeing gold in the video game hills. In a first, the same day that Metallica's new album Death Magnetic hit the streets this month, fans were able to purchase and, by paid download, have every song from the album put into the Guitar Hero video game to play.

What's next? This fall, World Tour debuts: the latest game in the virtual rocker video game series, Guitar Hero. In the new multi-player game, players can use their wireless controllers to compete in an online "Battle of the Bands," and use the Music Studio software to compose, record, edit and share their recordings with other gamers and, for all intents and purposes, become songwriters in their own right.

Can a Tour Bus video game be far behind? Or an early level of the game where players join their real counterparts as they spend most of their waking hours making phone calls and e-mails to hustle gigs? Will touring musicians now have to compete in clubs with gamer bar stars for groupies? Is "Guitar Hero: Rehab" ready for Christmas 2009?

Maybe I shouldn't feel so threatened, or worry that the party has been crashed. After all, that's what I loved about punk rock in the first place -- that everybody could get in on it and play.

And after all, it is just a game.

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