There was a time when I was playing with the Vapor Rhinos at the Metro and Dan-o was in the front row, yelling for us to play “Chinese Rocks.” Both Tommy Rodriguez and Peter Headley turn around and give me a look, but I didn’t know the song, so I just shrugged! Dan-o had a look of total disbelief, dumbfounded, like “how can you not know ‘Chinese Rocks’”? But I hadn’t listened to The Ramones. I didn’t come from that background. That’s why Tommy called me "Dirty Hippie" for years.
With me, it’s never been about genre. I can find things I like about any genre. In those days, it was weed or women for me. My high school hadn’t caught up to punk rock yet. We were still at jocks and freaks. Everyone smoked pot, but you were a freak if you wore it on your sleeve. It was all Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ted Nugent, ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, The Grateful Dead.
I was playing jam band music when I met Tommy. Charlie Brown ran a little reggae bar at the corner of Harrison and Broad called New Horizons. He calls me and says a band called Brown Experience is playing with the Prevaricators and someone else, and the regular sound guy won’t do it because they are awful! So, for 25 bucks and beer, I was mixing me some awful. That’s where I first met or saw all of those guys, Tommy, George Reuther, Dave Brockie, Keith Clarke, Crazy Jimmy.
That night, I watched Crazy Jimmy flick a cigarette into one of those retro greasy car mechanic haircuts and chuck his white ‘70s boot into the mirror ball. The guy with the cigarette in his hair didn’t notice until it was smoking pretty good. I laughed my ass off the entire night. I had already seen and fallen in love with Root Boy Slim, so this was pretty much exactly where I was headed. Loud, often obnoxious, slightly offensive, fun as shit, rock and roll that didn’t take itself seriously!
I continued to play the jam band stuff for a stint, toured with a band from Georgia, even moved to Arizona for awhile. I played with Widespread Panic a number of times and even toured with them, but I was never in the band.
New Horizons caught fire. The Jade Elephant opened. Twisters opened, and Tommy and Peter let me join the Vapor Rhinos! George was the bass player! I think Peter liked me because I was good, but not as good as him! I loved all the crazy shit, the flying penis, the smoke machine, the gutted stuffed animals everywhere, poking fun at everything and everyone, especially the cool people. Packing peanuts, general all-over goofiness, but mostly I really loved the songs! Peter is one funny guy and that is totally reflected in his lyrics, beach me a whale, chocolate mousse, if you can’t cut the mustard, you can cut the cheese. That’s some All-American potty humor at its best! I was all about it!
We played New Year’s Eve at the Red Light Inn in 1994. Aside from George chasing wild, coked up strippers around with a yard rake and a bicycle horn down his pants, the funniest thing to me was the regulars were really upset I was wearing a red, white and blue bikini top. We really didn’t get too out of hand that night because as you can guess, some pretty big bitches work at strip clubs! Not to say we didn’t do any crazy shit, we just didn’t break anything that wasn’t ours to break.
I was actually a DJ at the Red Light. I "spun the hits that shook the tits." Peter loved that one! Lots of funny shit happens at a strip club. The reason they hired me to DJ was because the girls were sick of the idiots loading the juke box with “Girls Girls Girls,” 47 times in a row.
The Pee Patrol used to crack me up, as well. Every night they would stick their heads in and make sure everything was all right. Two officers dressed up in ridiculous disguises would walk through the alleys, trying to bust drunk college students peeing. They would mill around the entrance for 20-30 minutes every night, getting a freebie! That building is now the home of my fellow bandmate and best friend, Ric Withers’ print shop!
The Vapor Rhinos eventually gave me the boot, signed my walking papers, kicked me to the curb, told me to amscray. They shit in a bag, lit it on fire, and threw it on my porch. I’m kidding, kind of. Bands come and go. People come and go. I am still great friends with those guys, and I think the world of them. Peter got me to stop using so many notes on the hi-hat and introduced me to the girls of Ultra Bait, the next band I was in. Tommy taught me how to tongue kiss! George gave me one of his gonads. I love all of them and now they kick ass with just two and don’t need nobody else.
Ultra Bait was super fun, my first chick band. We rented a practice space downtown the first summer. It was a Salvation Army storage building. The Cashmere Jungle Lords had a space there. The place was originally a school and our space was the shower and locker room area. It was hot as hell, so there was a lot of almost naked rehearsals. I loved that part! Peter introduced me to them and one night a few weeks later, in Carytown, a girl dressed as a hot nurse comes bounding across the street in the pouring rain, carrying a guitar amp, slips and falls, smashing the amp right in front of me. I got out of the car, helped her up, and it’s Carmen. She is a lot upset. So I told her I would get my amp from home and she could use it. I watched them play with this drummer they called Jiffy Pop.
He was awful, truly awful. His beats were sporadic and irregular like the sound of Jiffy Pop on the stove. I told Tammie they should let me play, and they did! That lasted a couple of years. With me, it’s not really about genre or anything other than I like you and you like me. I can’t handle playing music with someone I don’t like. No matter how much money or anything else you get! I explode eventually and destroy it all!
Thelma Shook was one of those bands. We were all teenage friends way back, with the exception of the drummer, and now we were together again to give it another try. We had just recorded an EP with Mark Miley at Glass Hand that was getting attention. We had enough money and material to put out a CD, and then…I exploded. The band was practicing at my house. The bass player was living with me, behind on his rent and not giving a shit, eating my food, not cleaning up his cat shit, drying his stinky ass fish socks on the radiator and gassing everyone out of the house. We broke up. Ric and I carried on without them. Hell, we wrote all the songs anyway.
We recorded the CD with Mark again, this time at Montana studio. Everyone from Harry Gore to Tim Harriss played on it, Sherrie Blanks, Tommy Rod, Tom Illmensee, 27 people in all. That was a lot of fun! Then we put together a new band to play out. It was pretty much straight up pop-rock. We dug it. Ric let me do whatever I wanted, so I got to be all campy and goofy again with giant, inflatable dolls, space costumes, lots of fun! The Rt. 1 South show was super fun with Mark Miley on drums and Cheez playing bass. There’s a funny as hell video on YouTube of another show, opening for Beex at Moondance and Tommy is heckling us throughout the set. You can’t mistake us, we are the guys dressed like sailors! The rhythm section was Bobby Jorgenson and Chip Farnsworth. It’s great to see how uncomfortable those guys get when I start making with the gay sailor jokes.
Bands come and go. I have been in more than 50. Bay of Pigs is a stoner metal band I am singing for. They wrote all the songs and arrangements. I just do the screaming. I really like not being in charge. It’s nice to come back to. The other guys are half my age and full of piss and douche, so they aren’t afraid to tell me what sucks and what doesn’t. I love that shit.
Brown Sabbath sprung from Ultra Bait. Mr. E.T. Snyder, El Presidente, came up with it. He put it together with Ryan Lake on guitar, Denny Cable on vocals, and me on drums. He told me he heard Bill Ward in my drumming, but I think it was more that I had a good practice space. Truth is – and this harkens back to the Ramones thing – I had never listened to Black Sabbath until I was asked to be the drummer in a Black Sabbath cover band! I had the first record on vinyl and that’s it. Skillet actually set me straight on how to play that shit.
Other musicians will give you shit about playing in a cover band, but it doesn’t bother me. Bill Ward is a kickass drummer, so if someone says I play his music, great! I take it as a big compliment. I wouldn’t say Brown Sabbath is a tribute band, though, not in the sense of Zoso or Mister Crowley. We don’t dress up or duplicate a record or performance. There is a lot of us in it, sometimes whether we want it there or not. Ryan Lake was the original guitarist and he is friggin' amazing. He left to play with Alabama Thunder Pussy. Frank Jackson took over and promptly fell off a roof and compound-fractured his arm. Ryan came back one more time to play the Frank’s Hospital Stay Benefit at the Canal Club. It has been Frank ever since. We all really enjoy it, still, every time. I doubt we will ever completely stop.
It’s always great to play on a nice stage like The National, with a great PA and someone competent to run it. Always! When you play mostly low quality stages and basements with mediocre PA systems, a nice stage stands out. But in this town, music venues are held captive by outdated and idiotic ABC regulations. Everyone knows it. You have to sell 15 slices of shitty pizza so you can drink a beer and watch a band in Richmond. I don’t understand why outside investors don’t do a little scouting before opening a big-ass, never going to pay for itself club in this town. Why were there 12 security guys at a Brown Sabbath show? How much does that cost? This town can only float a smaller venue. Why do they make them so big? For half the money, you could equip and run a great, local music venue, even with the inane regulations. I believe you could stay afloat. It takes a good deal of work, and by more than one person, but I’ve seen it done. Dreams of the lottery….
I am not a good Iggy Pop. I look like Iggy, but as Danny and Chester can tell you, my voice is awful! But the band Iggy Plop is fun and funny. The other band members don’t like the name Iggy Plop! They don’t think it’s cool! That cracks me up. I like playing music that I like with musicians I like, whether it’s my music or someone else’s. I don’t care, as long as it’s fun. I am not what you call a looker, and you wouldn’t know it from watching me on stage, but I am shy, so I do this whole music thing just to meet girls! Oh, and maybe smoke a little weed! Hang out with my friends! I am such a douche!
