Creativity Quote by Aynsley Dunbar

Aynsley Dunbar lands the punchline with a drummer's sense of timing: the "long drum solo" isn't just a musical choice, it's crowd management. The joke flips the modern complaint (self-indulgent virtuosity) into a memory of an older, more transactional live-music economy, where a solo was basically an intermission that kept the machine running. People wanted him to "keep on going" not because they were awestruck, but because it bought them permission to disengage. The bar needed traffic; the band needed the bar; the drummer became the glue.

The subtext is a quiet demystification of rock's mythology. We romanticize the era of extended solos as pure artistic freedom, but Dunbar hints that some of that freedom was subsidized by boredom, logistics, and alcohol sales. It's also a sly comment on changing audience habits. In the classic club circuit, attention was looser and the room's purpose was split between listening and socializing. Now the expectation is more curated: shorter sets, tighter arrangements, fewer "dead zones" where the show admits it's also a job.

Dunbar's line carries a veteran's mild bitterness without turning sour. He isn't whining about kids today; he's pointing out that taste is shaped by venue culture. The drummer gets blamed for excess because his spotlight is the easiest to frame as indulgence, when it used to be functional infrastructure: a rhythmic holding pattern while everyone refueled.