Chasing the Beat

In which our drummer pursues his rock star dreams to California and finds more than he ever dreamed of.

Hi. Two things. First, we’re playing this Saturday at Black Iris Gallery in Richmond. Doors at 7:00. We’ll play at 8:00 followed by the magnificent Paint On It. Tickets and details HERE.

Secondly, I had to share this story with you. You may know Humans’ drummer Greg Weatherford from any number of Richmond bands throughout the years, as a former editor of Style Weekly, or as a teacher and mentor at VCU. He posted a version of this story a while back on social media. I had a hunch this newsletter’s readers would enjoy it as much as I did. 

Here’s Greg:

Camper Van Beethoven was a college-radio-supported band with a little national recognition and two main bases of fan support: California and Virginia. 

I lived in Richmond. I and my friends and bandmates enjoyed CVB's gonzo mix of oompah band + psychedelia + skate punk + deadpan humor.

Their album “Key Lime Pie” hit me for real, though. When it came out in 1989 I played the heck out of it. There were real feelings in it, not just jokes. The melodies stuck with you. I loved the song "Sweethearts," a surreal Reagan/Enola Gay nightmare played as smooth and limpid country rock.

So now it’s late 1990 and I get a call on the phone I share — I am renting a room in a shared apartment on Hanover Avenue. A stranger’s voice. “Hey, we want you to come audition for our band. I play with David Lowery.”

“Who?” I say.

David Lowery is the songwriter and singer for Camper Van Beethoven, who unbeknownst to me had moved to Richmond’s Oregon Hill neighborhood the year before, after Camper broke up. The caller is guitarist Johnny Hickman. They’re starting a band. They have a record contract.

They send me their demos. To be honest, I’m a little disappointed; the style comes off like Black Crowes or some other faux blues band. I had hoped to play Camper-style songs. Not this. But — major label!

Long story short, I get the gig. Lowery and I drive to L.A. and move into his manager's little Hollywood apartment — one of those “Melrose Place” places, but without the charm and glamor. Mann's Chinese is three blocks away. A neighbor is an aspiring hand percussionist who practices congas all day, every day. Johnny and I share a pullout futon in the front room. Lowery, as the bandleader, gets a bedroom to himself.

I meet the bass player, Davey Faragher. He is a music lifer, a studio pro; he was on “Soul Train” when he was barely a teenager. But he wants to be in a band, not just be a session guy. Holy cow. This is amazing.

And it was. For a while.

Lowery grew up in a little town in California called Redlands. Johnny did too, and went on to play in a group called the Unforgiven whose main notoriety was their spaghetti-western band attire (dusters, bandanas, the whole thing!). He and Lowery had stayed in touch. Now they were starting this new band.

Turns out that bass player Davey also grew up in Redlands. This news is greeted with great excitement by David and Johnny.

So here we are in L.A. Three California guys from the same town, all with extensive professional band experience. David, Davey and Johnny. And me.

Keeping up

The full band started practicing in a rented rehearsal space in the Valley. And ... we did not sound great.

My lack of experience was starting to show. I tried and tried, but I couldn't adjust my playing to the needs of the other players. This particularly rankled Davey, who'd been in rhythm sections with drummers who were world-class. Now he was in one with me.

Things started feeling really awkward. We rehearsed and rehearsed. Davey and David woodshedded with me for a whole week, trying to get me up to speed. They told me to listen to certain drummers I should try to be more like.

I became so, so, so homesick. I had never had a home to miss. For the first time I did. I was on my own and far away.

Over the next six months, various other things happened — some record company weasels came by practice to check out the band, and David won them over by running to a nearby liquor store and grabbing bags of pork rinds and six-packs of PBR that he piled on a little table, which they cited as a genius example of “the band concept”; late some nights we wandered down Hollywood Boulevard making fun of the wannabe hair bands and their fans. I got to meet Mike Mills and Peter Buck and Robyn Hitchcock, who rolled up to our warmup gig at The Palomino Club, drunk as lords. 

That night at the Palomino Club we sound rough. The songs feel sluggish. Afterward, notes are shared. I am not cutting it. I need to figure things out fast. But no time. The tour is starting.

All four of us — the Redlands pals and me, our band gear and whatever clothes and personal effects we can — squeeze into a rented Ford Aerostar minivan and hit the road.

Our first stop is San Diego. It's a little dive called the Casbah. Within minutes of our arrival, we are accosted by a brash young blond woman. She hurls herself at us and calls herself “Krishna, the Goddess of Love,” which is memorable enough that I write it in my tour diary.

This detail is very important, as you will learn.

The show goes OK — better than the L.A. show. I think, hopefully, maybe things will work out.

Onward. We kept moving, map spread open on the dash, blaring CDs and the radio, smoking endless Marlboros, ticking off cities and clubs on our printed-out tour itinerary. Tucson, Austin, Dallas ...

We played small bars and clubs. We were not a big draw. At most shows we played for fewer than 40 people, sometimes in clubs that would have fit five times that many.

David's manager had wrangled show contracts with cash guarantees for every show — I believe they were $1,000 or so — and David often had to push hard to get the money from irate club owners who claimed they'd lost money on the night. (I have no doubt that many had; others probably hadn’t, and pocketed the difference. Rock-club owners, as a rule, are not to be trusted.) I learned a week into the trip that David kept a pistol in the van in case anyone got too aggressive or became handsy with the band's cash. It stayed under the driver's seat, thank goodness.

Our routine: Pull into town, find the club, unload our gear, set it up, wait endlessly for the club's sound man, sound check, waste time for two or four or six hours with no money in a town we didn't know, play, pack up the gear, wait for David to fight for our money, find the night's motel, fall into bed, sleep, wake up, get back in van, repeat.

A few lessons about life on the road

1. Laundry is everything.

I had packed a tiny backpack containing one pair of black Levis, 10 pairs of black acrylic socks (purchased at a Santa Monica beachfront stall), and four T-shirts.

Why so little, for a trip that would last many weeks? Simple: I thought we would be doing laundry along the way. This, I now know, was a profound error, another sign of my inexperience.

I learned fast that we had no time to find a laundromat, much less spend hours to wash and dry clothes. We had one van and a lot of ground to cover in the daytime, with tour dates a day apart and hundreds of miles away. We worked nights and went to sleep at 2 a.m. In the morning we had to get back on the road.

My black acrylic socks got so dirty and damp — remember, I'm not just sitting in a van all day, I'm playing a rock show every night, under stage lights — I shudder to recall them. My black Converse high tops got even worse. I managed to scrounge free tour shirts at a lot of our shows; that helped. But my black Levis slowly devolved until their damp turned to mildew. I still wore them. I had no choice.

2. Bands on the road.

More than once, we'd pull into a motel somewhere and find some other band van in the parking lot. Or we'd spot them crowded into a table at Denny's. Sometimes they were punk bands, sometimes gospel bands. Didn't matter. We shared a common bond. We swapped stories, cracked open beers while sitting in the well of the van, wished each other luck and good shows and club owners who paid well and honored their contracts.

Sometimes they asked if we knew of a nearby laundromat. We had to say no, with a pang of sympathy.

3. Take happinesses where you find them.

In Baton Rouge we played a small club whose owner took us to dinner at his father's house. His father was so Cajun I could not understand a word he said; he cooked us a jambalaya meal so extravagant and so amazing I dream of it.

In Carrboro, North Carolina, a band we'd heard good things about finally showed up to open for us after missing an earlier scheduled gig on the tour. I hung out with the drummer and bass player for a few hours after the gig; they were excited to be touring behind their first album and full of praise and encouragement for me and what we were doing and clearly loved touring life. I wished them luck. 

The band was Uncle Tupelo; the drummer was Mike Heidorn; the bass player was Jeff Tweedy. I am sure neither remember me, but even before I remembered meeting them I always remembered their encouragement. Thanks, Jeff Tweedy. You were a mensch.

Playing behind

Throughout all this I was struggling to find my footing in the band. The biggest problem was that my style of playing just didn't sit well in the rhythm section. This was a big, big problem.

Essentially, David was used to a drumming style that put the beat on the very forefront of every measure. But it turns out that all my life I had played on or slightly behind the beat. Until this experience I had no idea that this was true, but it was.

Every drummer has a way to feel rhythm that is natural to them, like a heartbeat, and on/behind was mine. It may have developed because of my childhood love of soul music and folk-rock; if I'd listened to more hardcore and punk music I might have internalized a different rhythm.

So how could I change my own heartbeat?

I understood this concept intellectually — I had read a lot of interviews in Modern Drummer. But I had no idea how to actually do it. This became my challenge.

I listened to the advice of my more-experienced bandmates. None of them were drummers, so their suggestions were shots in the dark. Still, I tried all sorts of things.

First, I tried playing faster and hitting harder. That just made the songs too fast and didn't help the feel.

At one point, at the bass player's suggestion I turned down the other instruments in my stage monitors, on the theory that if I just played without hearing the bass or guitars they could adjust around me as if they were playing to a drum machine. This went even worse.

Since I couldn't hear the difference between what the music should sound like and what it did sound like, I realized at some point that I would have to feel the difference.

I started focusing on one limb at a time. I began with my right hand, ordering it to play a little earlier on every sixteenth and eighth note. I trained that hand for a few days. Then I trained my left hand, the one that hit the snare drum, to keep pace. Next, left foot with hi-hat.  Then: right foot, bass drum.

The shows started improving, if only minutely. I could rehearse these details only during sound checks and during the shows themselves, so I was limited in what I could do. But day by day I got better at it.

Then it happened. I believe it was at the Georgia State Theater in Athens. It was a big show for us, the biggest theater of the tour. Athens was a hot spot and had sold a lot of tickets. The crowd whooped, the lights flared on, I started playing and I willed my hands to push ahead of the beat.

Suddenly I was ... flying. It was as if all my life as a drummer I had been sitting in the middle seat of a speedboat and then found myself perched on the very front, leaning over the water as it flew past. It was startling and more than a little scary.

I faltered. What was happening? Then I understood. I had done it. I had found the feeling I had been looking for. I couldn't hear it in the moment, I never would, but I could feel it. It was glorious. I've never surfed but I know exactly what it feels like to catch a giant wave. It felt like this.

That show went well. The rest of the tour did too, more or less.

By then I had given up on trying to convince the rest of the band I was up to the job. I just wanted to find out if I could do it. After Athens, I knew I could. Sometimes I found myself on the prow of that speedboat without much trouble. Other times I had to struggle to get there. But I knew what it felt like now, and with practice I could find it.

The tour ended. I returned to Richmond and my little rented room on Hanover Avenue. David wrote me a check for my share of the tour profit — the rewards from all his fights with club owners to get cash. I went to my bank, only to find out they had blackballed me and closed my account. So I went to David's bank and cashed the check. It came to almost $6,000. I'd never held so much cash. It felt good for a moment.

A few weeks later David called me. He said he and the other California guys had talked it over at length but had decided to cut me from the band.

That did not surprise me. What did was how he wrapped up the conversation.

He said, "I want you to know that you improved so much on the tour that in the end the decision was really close. Really, really close."

Sweethearts

The band continued — still does. Lowery named it Cracker, in tune with his pork rinds-and-PBR concept that had wowed the record company weasels. In time one of their songs — not yet written in my period with the band — was an actual hit. 

Before they announced the name, Lowery called and told me.

"Like the insult for poor Southern whites?" I may have actually sputtered. I am the grandson of an impoverished Arkansas farm boy. "That's a terrible name!"

David laughed. "I knew you'd hate it."

Cultural differences.

Davey, the bass player, left the band a few years later to join John Hiatt's band. Eventually he joined Elvis Costello as the replacement for the fired bassist in the Attractions — my favorite rock band of all time. He still plays in Elvis Costello’s band, now called the Imposters. It's an endless joy to think I was in a band with him for a while.

As for me ... I had a lot of hard thinking to do. I'd wanted to be in a professional touring band like this ever since I had started playing drums. Before that, even.

Now I'd had my shot and I'd blown it. I had not been good enough. It's hard to call what I went through PTSD. But it was a sharp blow to my self image. I kept playing, and for a while I kept hoping for another shot at the big show.

Now for the most important part of this story:

I am having lunch with a friend sometime in the mid-2000s. She is a writing and literature professor from California; we had met through my new, journalism-related career. In the middle of our shared meal of Lee's Famous Fried Chicken, my new favorite friend is telling me about her life.

She mentions her sister — she's mentioned her before; she's a favorite subject since her sister is uninhibited and at times unhinged. That's when she says it.

"My sister actually calls herself Krishna, the Goddess of Love. And yes, I know Krishna is male; she knows—"

"Wait," I interrupt. " Krishna? The Goddess of Love?"

"Yes, yes," my friend says. "That's not the point of the story."

"I met her!"

Indeed, this mysterious uninhibited sister is the same Krishna from the first night of our tour in San Diego so many years before. My friend and her sister lived there at the time. It turns out that Krishna had invited her sister, now my friend, to come to the club and see my band. 

And this woman, back then in her mid-20s like me, not being interested in spending time at seedy bars, had said no.

Instead she stayed home and read books and wrote. Because she loved to read and write stories. She is brilliant at it, actually.

I realize that moment at Lee’s Famous that had I met her that night, in the middle of my worst loneliness, I would have kept her phone number and eventually fought my way back to San Diego on the tiny chance that she would be interested in me. And I would have shown up on her doorstep. And being the kind person she is, I think she would have let me in.

That, obviously, did not happen. Life took us both on other paths. I never met her at the Casbah in 1991. But I met her in Richmond in 2004. Second chances.

It took time, but we did marry. She is my sweetheart.

Postscript

One last look back:

Here's me and the band playing "Sweethearts,” by Camper Van Beethoven, captured on a fairly muddy crowd recording from the Georgia State Theater in Athens, Georgia. I believe this is the night I discovered how to make the songs work. 

If I listen closely I can hear me finding my way. I can feel myself on the prow of that speedboat, delighted and amazed, trying to hold on to the sense that I am riding just ahead of some incredible force that is propelling me forward toward somewhere I don't know but want to. After all these years, it sounds good to me.