Jobs

I visited Rolling Stones: Exhibitionism last week. Highlights for me included Keef's war stories about various guitars—his memoir is a treat for the same reason; he's a delightful storyteller—and a collection of Ronnie Wood's colorful, handwritten set lists. In the accompanying text, Wood notes that the band often plays around with a song's arrangement, including its key, and that after a few hours of that it's easy to forget things, even though you knew in the moment that this was it, the bridge structure that had been eluding you for months. So his tendency to take notes comes in handy.

I think every band has a few unspoken jobs like that. Ideally—most easily—they're done out of habit by someone who would be doing them anyway:

• Stenographer: the person who, like Ronnie Wood, documents what you're doing in a way that lets you duplicate it. This tends to be me in the Baguettes, though it's often Thomas when we play as The Loudness War. I don't know if it's coincidence that the two of us are also the most sheet-music-oriented of the band. Charlie and Zach both have highly efficient ears, and Zach in particular has been known to improvise a song so quickly that he forgets it while the rest of us are still trying to capture it. (We've been saved more than once because Charlie tends to run a Zoom recorder for the length of our rehearsals. Which might make him also a stenographer, in his way.)
• Super-fan: I mean, you're not in a band if you don't really love music, but a lot of bands have at least one person who's flat-out obsessive, who devotes whole weekends to flipping through bins of vinyl and has passionate opinions about minutiae of production. (I've heard that Ad-Rock is that person for the Beasties; the Stones came together over a shared love of then-obscure blues artists; there are too many other examples to list.) These shared obsessions are often the reason you play together, but they're also a big part of the way you connect with listeners and the reason you keep working to make your songs better. It's safe to say that the Baguettes wouldn't exist if Thomas and Charlie hadn't met each other on a TMBG fan site. If you've heard Charlie's podcast Stereo Hysteria, you know exactly how deep he likes to dig.
• Cheerleader: the person who tells other people about what you're doing in a way that gets them excited about it. (Slash's memoir mentions that Steven Adler was especially good at this in the early days of GNR, handing out flyers for hours and chatting up anyone who showed interest.) Thomas tends to be this person for the Baguettes. 
• Stage manager: the person who knows where everyone's supposed to be, and when, and with what gear, and why. I am not good at this. I know very few artists who are. You really need a Brian Epstein type. If we ever start playing more than, say, a dozen shows a year, this will be the first person I hire.

It's not that you can't function without these designations, it's just that not having someone on top of them means a bit more work for everyone when certain questions come up.