Chapter Excerpt (Available For 48 Hours)

 

For the years I played in Brooklyn, my drumming was never truly valued by my teenaged hard rock and metal head friends because everyone expected me to play like Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward or Neil Peart of Rush.  Anthony idolized Neil Peart and so he did his best to play exactly like him, even when the music didn’t call for it. During one rehearsal of that unnamed cover band in Sheepshead Bay, Anthony was on drums and I was singing lead on a piss take of “Rockaway Beach” by The Ramones. Right before the last chorus, the Ramones stop and there are four drum hits to bring the band back. That’s it. “Boom, boom, boom, boom.” Anthony refused, and incorporated one of Neil Peart’s complicated drum fills from Rush’s song “By-Tor & The Snowdog.” It sounded like a hilariously bad cut and paste job. He nailed the fill, but it had no business being in a Ramones song, and that was something most of the guys in Brooklyn couldn’t comprehend. Flash and precision, while both excellent traits, don’t always mean “better.” 

  

John Foxx, the lead singer and co-founder of Ultravox said, “Proficiency blocks you off from real adventure,” and I tend to agree. Beatles’ records have audible mistakes, for Pete’s sake. I loved Neil Peart’s drumming, and of course, I wished I had his chops. But I didn’t, and that somehow meant I wasn’t as good as Anthony, because he could copy Neil Peart and I could not. I was judged by how elaborate my fills were, not by my timing or the groove I was creating. I had my own chops.

  

On those days when we were playing Led Zeppelin and Rush songs, and I would attempt one of those difficult or tricky rolls that John Bonham or Neil Peart played on record, like the one on the last chorus of Rush’s “Bastille Day,” for example, rather than play through my mistakes, my band members would stop cold and laugh because I had flubbed my way through it, and then they would onomatopoetically mimic the flub, sounding like a chorus of Spike Joneses in “Cocktails For Two,” teasing me for days on end. Not the best confidence booster.
 

As recently as a few months ago, I came across a Hard Copies rehearsal video that had been sitting on my hard drive for years. This video included our one and only stab at the Boz Scaggs’ hit “Lowdown.” The second I saw the video, that whole morning came back to me in detail. 

 

Peter’s college buddy Scott was in town. He came to the rehearsal and began filming us with his iPhone. After a few of our better numbers, I randomly played the opening drum pattern to “Lowdown,” and of course, Peter plucked that David Hungate bass line exactly like the record. Zeray fell in almost immediately with the chords, and suddenly we had that badass, disco-meets-funk groove happening. Now, I start singing, doing my best nasal, faux-Boz on lead vocals. There was so much reverb on my vocal mic, if you closed your eyes, you would have thought Boz was in the room with us, at least for the first verse. For two and a half minutes, this impromptu first take was hot shit. But then once we got to the instrumental break, there was only so much we could do as a trio without keyboards or a string section and a real singer, and it fell apart. It was abandoned, never to be resurrected. 

 

I showed that video to an ex-bandmate, thinking, “He’s gonna dig this.” He immediately replied, “Yeah it really did fall apart.” My first thought was a typical playground retort.

 

“Oh yeah? You play it!” 

 

But I just let it go. Still, I was dumbfounded. This is something most of my past band members never seem to get. It doesn’t need to be perfect when you’re rehearsing. “Lowdown” wasn’t planned. We hadn’t been working on it for weeks only to fuck it up on stage out of incompetence. I played the familiar drum intro, the others caught it and within seconds we were playing a song we had never played before. I know guitarists who can’t even play an impromptu solo on a song they’ve rehearsed for weeks. They must play the solo they had already memorized. When you’re rehearsing or jamming, listen for the good stuff as well as where it went wrong. Remember the right stuff, take that and build upon that. Soon enough, all the stuff that “fell apart” will be gone. As my friend, a talented musician and multi-instrumentalist Alan once said, “When creating, nobody, with a few notable exceptions, lets you down like family and friends.”

Why do guitarists put drumsticks on their dashboard?
So they can park in the handicapped spot.

I once got into a screaming match with an old musician friend after I posted a live video of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band opening up a show in Australia with “Highway To Hell” on my Facebook page. For that run of shows down under, The E Street Band opened with a different cover of an Australian artist every night, tackling versions of songs by the Bee Gees, The Easybeats, INXS, AC/DC and Lorde among others, all probably worked out minutes before showtime. All were fantastic. “Highway To Hell” kicked ass and the Australian crowd went berserk. Mission accomplished. 

My friend:
“What’s wrong with him? Why is Bruce using a capo?” 

“Uh, what?”
“It’s the wrong key.”
“You’re kidding, right? I mean, Bruce called an audible in the men’s room and they just banged it out. It’s for the crowd. For Bon Scott and Australia.”
“Well, it’s not a very hard song to play. Anyone could bang it out.”
  

Now, his bandmates, a cheering section of sycophants, coincidentally all Bruce haters, began fueling the unnecessary fire with more comments about the fucking capo. Then my phone rang. It was him. This conversation got progressively worse until the veins in my neck decided they needed to escape. I don’t recall anyone whiffing on a point as badly as this and I don’t recall either of us ever screaming at each other in our 45 year friendship prior to this. It’s rock and roll. It’s supposed to be loose and occasionally messy. And this wasn’t even messy. It just wasn’t the original key. 

 

Is this really the nit you want to pick? More importantly, as a musician, shouldn’t you be able to recognize when something is a rock and roll labor of love and not criticize the imperfections?
 

Led Zeppelin’s live performances are legendary and there was no one sloppier than Jimmy Page on guitar. But this isn’t because he’s a bad guitar player. It’s because he constantly took chances. Even his most iconic guitar solo in “Stairway To Heaven” took new routes to its final destination in every live performance. Page was always rolling the dice in concert. The rest of the band knew this and allowed it to unfold, rolling their own dice, following Page off the cliff which often resulted in some of the most incredible jams in live music history. It didn’t always work, but no one stopped playing to laugh at the clams. I’ll take the ramshackle but heartfelt slop of The Replacements over the cold, soulless precision of Toto and Styx every single time. Playing something note for note is impressive but so is making a bed with hospital corners, and we all know that bed is more comfortable once you loosen the sheets and stick one foot out so you can breathe.

 

There was nothing flashy about Al Jackson Jr. who played drums for Booker T. & The MGs and could be heard on countless hits for the Stax/Volt label. But put a different drummer in his place, and those Otis Redding hits won’t sound the same. Have you heard the revamped 90’s version of Booker T. & The MGs with Anton Fig on drums? Fig is a monster on the kit, but The MGs did not sound like the MGs without Al Jackson Jr.. That is how I wanted to play. I worked on being solid and subtly creative, which in its own way, is flash. In The Hard Copies, Peter got it and once we locked in, we could anticipate where we'd each be headed musically, which created some real magic. The Hard Copies lasted for almost six years, until Peter moved to Savannah.