A demo tape is an audition for people who were not there. That is all it is. You play your best three songs into a microphone and you mail it to a man in an office and the man in the office listens to fourteen seconds and throws it in the garbage. I know this because I sent demo tapes to every record label in New York City and every record label in New York City threw them in the garbage.

Here is what they did not understand. My demo was not the tape. My demo was the corner of MacDougal and West Third on a Saturday afternoon in 1966. Three hundred people standing in the street. The cops trying to shut it down. The audience singing along to songs they had never heard before. That was my demo. But you cannot mail a street corner to a record label. You cannot put three hundred strangers in an envelope. The demo tape was a translation and every translation is a lie.

John Lennon did not hear my demo tape. John Lennon heard my demo. He was walking through the Village and he heard the noise and he walked toward it and he stood in the crowd and he listened. That is how you hear a demo. You walk toward the noise. The record labels sat in their offices and waited for the noise to come to them in an envelope and the noise does not fit in an envelope.

Every musician I knew in the sixties made a demo tape. Most of them were better than me in a studio. They could sing in tune. They could play in time. They could do a second take that sounded like the first take. I could not do any of those things. But my demo had something their demos did not have. My demo had the street. The traffic and the sirens and the guy selling pretzels and the dog barking and the woman yelling out the window to shut up. That was not noise. That was the arrangement.

The internet killed the demo tape and replaced it with something worse. Now your demo is a link. You send a link to a playlist and the playlist has four hundred thousand other links and nobody clicks any of them. The demo tape at least had weight. You could hold it. You could feel the tape inside the plastic. The link weighs nothing and that is exactly what it is worth.

I never made a good demo tape in my life. Every tape I made sounded like a man yelling in a room. But every show I played on the street sounded like a revolution. The demo was never the tape. The demo was the crowd. And the crowd does not fit on a cassette.

See also: The Tape — the tape was a translation and every translation is a lie. The Phone — the phone is the new guitar. The Venue — the best venue has no walls. The Rejection Letter — after the demo, comes the letter you never got. The Record — what happens when the demo becomes a groove.