I’ve been playing music in bands since I was 15. All through
high school, I was in punk and blues bands and I got a varsity letter for being
the drummer of the school’s jazz ensemble my senior year. By no means was I the
most talented member of any of these groups. Some of the people I played with
would go on to be professional musicians, including my friend Michael who
played guitar in jazz band and whose band was in Rolling Stone when I decided
to apply to USC and move to LA. In all these groups, I experienced the unique,
intimate connection which comes when one plays music with other people. The
players connect in a manner which is difficult to articulate in words and
virtually impossible for someone who doesn’t engage in collaborative art to
understand. To quote The Loving Spoonful, “it’s like trying to tell a stranger
‘bout rock and roll.” Maybe if you’ve
done improv you get it, or maybe if you were part of a choreographed dance team.
Maybe. A profound metaphysical connection happens among the players of a band
as they jam, write music and perform. With no one have I ever felt a stronger
metaphysical musical connection than with my friend Gary.
I bought the drum set I brought
to LA on Criagslist. It was a random Saturday morning and I was browsing the
instruments for sale section when I saw a post from an angry mother. She had
bought a high-end Tama Starclassic kit for her son on the assumption his grades
would improve. Well, when report cards came out, they had not improved, so she
was interested in selling it ASAP as a means of punishment. I paid $600 for a
kit which retailed for $1,800. It sounded even better than the deal I got.
When I arrived in LA, I set the
kit up in my bedroom with muted pads. I could practice at any time of day and
Katie wouldn’t hear a note. While the bedroom was great for me to practice in
alone, Gary and I obviously couldn’t jam there. As luck would have it, he was
in another band at the time and they had a rehearsal space downtown. Gary
picked me up and we went to play. I had to be very careful with the kit at the
rehearsal space because we were using it without the drummer’s permission. It
was in this downtown rehearsal studio Gary and I birthed our LA band, which
would be known by several different names, but in those early days was called
Gun Show.
After a few jam sessions
downtown, Gary and I had written two songs. Well, Gary had written two songs
which I improved with drum parts and suggested changes to the arrangement, as
was our writing process. This was in the days of MySpace and the feeling was
that if we could get our music recorded and posted up there, we might be able
to find the bass player and second guitarist we wanted to round out our sound,
then we could start to play gigs, build a following and eventually end up
opening for Michael’s band and/or with our pictures in Rolling Stone. At the
time, neither of us knew how to record digitally so we had to find a studio
where we could lay some tracks. As luck would have it, our buddy Dexter,
another friend from high school working to make music his career, had gotten
into digital recording and could put the tracks down for us. The only problem
was Dexter was back in Virginia.
Over the
holidays, I went home and Gary flew back East. Looking back, I like that we
flew back to where we first started playing together to record for the first
time. Gary and I laid down the two tracks at Dexter’s house and it was awesome.
It was especially meaningful to record with Dexter for two reasons. One, we
recorded at Dexter’s parents’ house, where I had sat in on rehearsals when I
was younger, watching Dexter and the rest of my friends play music in bands I
wasn’t in. Two, Dexter had been playing drums since he was a little kid and he was the
person who kept me practicing. It didn’t matter how many hours I spent improving,
Dexter was always better. Watching him drum taught me how to drum and made me
work harder. It was so cool to lay those first two tracks with him. He
even said he was impressed with my playing and I felt like maybe Gary and I had
a shot at being successful.
I pity
anyone who rode in my car the January after we recorded our two songs because
they are all I listened to, all month long. Gary had played both guitars and
bass, and he sang on the tracks. I played drums and helped with arrangement.
The music was good and the songwriting was stellar. A lack of talent was never
our problem. We knew we had to add more members to round out our sound and we
knew we needed our own rehearsal space. We found a spot on Hollywood Boulevard
where we could split a lockout room for $500 a month. I moved my gear in and we
set up shop there. The acoustics were terrible, there was no elevator for
loading and unloading gear and the parking situation was a nightmare, the
sounds of other bands playing bled into the halls and even into our room, but
we had our own space in Hollywood. We stopped having band practice and started
rehearsing.
For a while,
it was just me and Gary. He’d pick me up and we’d go rehearse. We made half-ass
attempts to find other musicians, but I was in grad school, Gary had a day job
and we were both pretty lazy when it came to our music. Through grad school, I
met a guy named John who also played music and seemed like he’d be a good fit
for the band. Though he was a guitarist, we convinced him to play bass for us.
With John, we now had a trio and, after months of rehearsals and songwriting,
we had a full enough sound to take to the stage.
Our first
show was, appropriately enough, at a venue called The Cocaine. Well, to call it
a ‘venue’ is generous since it was a Chinese restaurant that became a place
bands played at night. “The Cocaine”
wasn’t even on a real sign, it was hand-written on a piece of paper taped to the
door. By this time, we were calling ourselves Bellevue Arms after an apartment
building in LA where Gary had lived when he first moved to town. We had a
pretty good turnout of people John and I knew from grad school and friends of
Gary’s. The band played okay. I remember one of my cymbal stands fell over
during our last song; but, aside from that, the show went well. As a band, we
decided we needed to record more songs and get our MySpace page in order.
Our
‘studio’ consisted of GarageBand run on a MacBook and two Shure 57 mics. We had
to record all the instruments separately because of sound bleeding and a lack
of mics, which meant I had to lay drum tracks by myself, completely by memory.
We pointed the two mics at the drum kit to capture sound and I played the songs
alone, with Gary and John listening in, playing along silently on their
instruments to make sure I made no mistakes. I cannot express to you how hard
it is to play the drum parts of a song at perfect tempo without hearing that
song at all. But I did it.
Gary being
the most spiritually awake member of the band at the time, and the member most responsible
for our creative output, he didn’t want to record his guitar parts or vocal
tracks in our stifling, cramped, dark lockout in Hollywood. As luck would have
it, his friend Melinda was house sitting for her boss in Silverlake. Gary
recorded the guitars and vocals in this inspiring, tree-lined hillside abode. It was at
this same house where we took some band photos. The only thing I remember about
the photoshoot was that both John and I were violently ill. I cannot for the
life of me remember why the shoot was so urgent we had to do it while we were
sick, but that’s just how things felt at the time. It felt urgent for us to get
more music on MySpace. It felt urgent for us to play more shows. Foolish as it
may appear in hindsight, I had a genuine feeling this band, which was now
called The Gravelights, could be something and that Big Things were going to happen
for us. (This feeling was probably just anxiety, Los Angeles runs on the stuff).
The first
‘real’ show The Gravelights played was also our last. It was at a venue called
Safari Sam’s on Sunset, which is now closed. They had a real sign but it was a bringer show, which meant
we had to bring at least 30 people or we wouldn’t get paid. Gary was anxious
and high-strung, John was drunk and a bit aloof and I still feel like we played
great. From my perspective, I’d never played a venue where the drums sounded so
good and I made absolutely no mistakes in playing my parts. People were
genuinely impressed with the songwriting, musicianship and lyrics. Numerous
people remarked we were the best ‘my friend’s band’ they’d ever seen. A couple
sexual escapades aside, this show was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like
a rock star. 28 people came to see us so we didn’t get paid.
After that,
it all fell apart. Tensions had been rising between John and Gary and I ended
up feeling like I was five years old again going through my parents’ divorce.
John complained to me about Gary; Gary complained to me about John; I got drunk
and high and told them each what I thought they wanted to hear, the same way
I’d been handling my divorced parents for the last few years. Eventually, John
quit but Gary and I had been working up the nerve to fire him. (Fire him from a
band where none of us ever got paid). When Gary lost his job, I talked him into
working hard for the band. I bought some mics and a USB interface that would
allow us to record 8 channels at once. This meant we could elaborately mic the
drums and should have meant I could play to a backing track, but we could never
quite figure it out. I ended up having to play the parts alone again, but this
time I at least had a click track in my ear to help me keep tempo. We recorded
everything we had written, planning to release an album called “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.”
I had never
recorded music in this manner before and it changed the way I heard music
forever. Hearing the instruments individually layered on top of one another
altered my perception. I cannot listen to guitar based songs today without
remembering these recording sessions and thinking about Gary and how our
collaboration literally changed the way I hear one of the most important art
forms in my life. I choose not to remember how hard things got making those
recordings. I choose not to think about how Gary and I got angry with each
other and how our friendship almost fell apart. I choose not to think about my
pettiness and the day I deleted him as a friend on MySpace. I choose not to think
about how frustrated I am we never finished recording those songs. At the time,
Gary said he was ‘just not in the right headspace to focus on the band,’ which
bothered me until the day I left LA. That day, literally my last night in town,
I sat with Gary on the porch of the place he shared with Melinda, who was now
his girlfriend, and listened as he expressed frustrations about the singer in a new band, a band that is better than The Gravelights and should have made
it, whatever that means. The singer, Gary said, was feeling ‘like he wasn’t in
the right headspace to focus on the band,’ and I laughed and laughed, knowing
Gary was feeling the same helpless frustrations I had felt two years prior. The
upside of collaborative art is it involves working with other people; this is
also its downside.
After Gary
and my recording sessions fizzled, I looked to play with other people in LA. I
auditioned for a couple of bands and was told I didn’t have the right look. To
my credit, I never punched anyone who said that to me, but man did I want to.
My albinism was thrown in my face again and again and again as a reason not to
include me in an art form, the quality of which is based solely on the sound
produced by its players. But because I didn’t have the look of some skinny,
dark-haired dude in Interpol I wasn’t cool enough in the eyes of these
superficial ingrates and there was nothing I could do about it. To the surprise of no one, nothing ever became of any of the bands who turned me away because of my albinism.
I played with this punk chick
who loved X (the band) and wasn’t that talented but wrote songs so good I still
catch myself humming them even though I don’t remember her name. Through her, I met this awesome bass player who was also from
Virginia. He had some of the same musical tastes as us. He loved both Idlewild
(Gary’s favorite band at the time) and The Makers (my favorite band at the
time), which is statistically impossible, so I arranged a jam session for the three
of us, hoping to reignite The Gravelights. I played poorly and Gary seemed
disinterested. There was no connection. After that,
Gary and I got rid of the lockout. We had other things going on. He was still
looking for work and my tire fire of a writing career was about to get burning.
I sold the mics and recording gear and eventually I sold my drums for the same
$600 I paid for them. Gary and I played one other time together, but it was as
the hired gun rhythm section for one of our friend Michael’s new projects. We
played one show two weeks before I left LA.
Maybe 20 people showed up. We
played fine. Hired guns who didn’t get paid. To quote Fiona Apple, “Nothing
wrong when a song ends in a minor key.”
Gary and I are still friends, which is what actually matters.
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