For bands out travelling the country playing music, one thing that I think is critically overlooked, and extremely ironic, considering the fact that playing music is always regarded as fun, is the inability to have fun, in constructive ways that is. Not all "fun" is the same.
For a bunch of guys playing music four or five nights a week, travelling thousands of miles in a van and spending hours and hours in motel rooms, being able to entertain yourselves in a reasonably sane and healthy way is paramount. So many bands actually don't know how to do that, and the result can be excess drinkin' and druggin'. Showing up for the gig already wasted, because you got bored, is very counterproductive. Even if just one guy is wasted, it makes the whole band look stupid. It's kid stuff.
We called it "HUWS,' or "Hurry-Up-and-Wait Syndrome." Say you're playing out of town. If you're smart, you'll get there early, in case something goes wrong, and most times that means you'll have some time to kill. You've gotten rooms, set up your gear, soundchecked, eaten dinner, smoked a bowl, and now you might have two or three hours to wait before showtime. The problem isn't really the time, it's that fact that you're prematurely jacked-up.
You know you have a gig coming up, so you get pumped, except that there's still a good way to go before you play. Your body's full of Adrenaline that has nowhere to go, without mitigation. You can get jittery or anxious, when you should be fairly calm. You need to blow-off some steam. What are you going to do...sit around the motel room looking at a bunch of other clowns? Maybe talk about the weather? I've seen far too many bands just hit the bottle in those situations. We felt that doing things like removing the Gideon's Bible from the top dresser drawer, tossing bottle rockets in and closing the drawer was way more fun, and smarter, than drinking, so we usually at least started the gig sober.
Since I never touched a drop of alcohol either before or during a gig, I had to work overtime coming up with fun shit to do. For most of the time of the band, I carried around an "anti-boredom" kit. It was a backpack or suitcase filled with things like magazines, cards, games, toys, glow-in-the-dark stuff, electronic toys and doodads, and fireworks...lots of fireworks. Fireworks were our #1 remedy for boredom, and we shot them everywhere we possibly could, including some places where you shouldn't shoot fireworks, like onstage, in motel rooms and wherever else that wasn't always appropriate.
During gigs, my buddy and keyboardist O' could drink epic amounts of alcohol and still function, but I stuck with spring water. A little reefer was okay though, and on any given break, taking a puffy-puff or two was a great way to have a bit of fun without drinking, but I always wanted to up the game, so I tried to find fun things to do, in 15 minutes or so, after I'd had a puffy-puff. Although we came up with stuff that we repeated at clubs and parties all over the country, this activity was limited to a single bar. We came up with a little game we called "Pennies from Heaven."
I can't recall the name of the place, even though we played there a million times, but it had been a movie theater. The bar was in front, in the former lobby, and the band played in back in the former theater. It had a high ceiling, maybe 20', with massive curtains on the wall, which made for some good acoustics. They'd removed the seats and put in a stage, I think maybe a dancefloor, and added some tables. A catwalk circled the room, about 5' below the ceiling. It was pretty dark, especially above the stage. Some of the stage lights were hung from below it, and if you looked up, you couldn't really see beyond the lights. It was perfect.
The crowd would migrate between the theater when we were playing, to the bar section when we took a break. They played really loud music in the bar area, but with all the curtains, the theater area was quiet, so anyone who wanted to have a nice, quiet conversation would grab a table in the theater. There were always a few couples, sharing their thoughts over a beverage. Poor things.
O' and I would carefully walk out onto the catwalk, position ourselves over the drum kit, try to stifle laughter, and get comfortable. Oh, and we'd have a pocketful of pennies. We'd take turns dropping pennies onto the drums. The sound of pennies hitting drums and cymbals from about 15' was surprisingly loud, clear and quite startling. It made an "almighty clatter," as Bill Bruford would say. The first hit was always the killer, since nobody was ready for it and it scared the shit out of all the loving couples, but of course we didn't stop at one. We'd wait a minute or two, and then drop another one.
The patrons' reactions were priceless, and honestly, I hope they all left with dry underwear, because to hear a loud drum hit or cymbal crash without warning is pretty harsh, not to mention looking up at the stage, expecting to see the drummer but there's nobody behind the kit. That had to be crazy for those people, bless their hearts.At the first hit, they'd snap their heads around and stare in confusion at an unoccupied drum kit.
It was more than just a couple of assholes making loud noises and scaring the shit out of people who'd done nothing to us, and in fact had paid good money to come see us...we made it into a game of skill. With the various angles of the drums and cymbals, and the downward slope going around the toms, down to the floor tom and finally the bass drum, it was possible to hit more than one drum with a single penny.
For instance, I remember that if you dropped a penny in just the right spot on the Ride cymbal, it would bounce from there to the first tom, and sometimes on to the snare or the other toms. I'm pretty sure the most hits from one penny that we ever got was five, and that was rare. Since the head of the bass drum was parallel to the line of flight of the penny and hard to hit, we'd get bonus points for nailing it. Sometimes we'd spin the pennies, and a couple of times they'd land on the snare drum, still spinning, and emulate a perfect buzz-roll. It was beautiful, and we'd usually give ourselves away by laughing when it happened.
After the loving couples got over the initial shock of the hit, and did an underwear check, they'd try to figure out what was going on. They'd looooook at the drums, and they'd looooooook around the stage and around the room, and finally they'd loooooook toward the ceiling, but with the lights shining down, all they saw was darkness. We could see them, but they couldn't see us. It was like being on the fun side of a two-way mirror. How could we possibly resist such an opportunity?
Yes, we were juvenile assholes, but for us it was much better than hitting the stage wasted, for lack of anything fun to do besides drinking. Obviously most people figured out what was going on, even though they never saw us, but from the looks on a few people's faces, and an overheard conversation or two, not everyone did. Once we heard one girl say to her date, "Umm...is this place supposed to be haunted?"
We had to put our hands over our mouths to keep from losing it laughing. I almost let out a big "BWOOOOHAAAHAA" but I didn't want to scare her off for good, because she was fine. Maybe we started a legend there..."I think that place is haunted, and the ghost plays drums." Several of our antics in that band became legend, and one such incident, the "gas-main affair," was even featured in a bestseller called "On Fire," by author Larry Brown, a former firefighter in Oxford, Mississippi, where the incident took place. Maybe the "drumming ghost" became another legend. I hope so.
Music is sacred, and I've been incredibly blessed to be able to not only play music all over the place, but to make a very good living at times. I always say that I'd do it all over again just for the women, and also for the little peripherals like this...the adventures. I couldn't have dreamed of a better time than playing music. "Pennies from Heaven" was a hell of a lot of fun, and it never got old. Good times.
No comments:
Post a Comment