by Alice Cooper. We were awesome, I’m sure.
I was hooked. I had to have a drum set. My first was a Royal Star with a cool gold bamboo finish. I didn’t know how or what to play, so I listened to records with headphones on and tried to play along. The Rolling Stones and Beatles were good to try and imitate. My mother had to put up with all the horrible banging. She said at least it was “positive noise” that was probably keeping me out of trouble. I don’t think it worked that way.
I went through a phase for several years where I felt compelled to throw things at cars. It was usually from a ledge or cliff. Both houses I lived in during this time had landscaping features where a parkway was around forty or fifty feet below a ridgeline. I threw mud balls, snowballs, eggs, water balloons, dirt clods, hard pinecones, even a rock or two. I shot bottle rockets. I thought this was hilarious. I made dummies out of old clothes and pine straw, then set them in the road with a string tied to one of the arms. The string went under the guardrail and up the hill. When a car came around the curve, I would pull the string, and the dummy would appear to be waving to avoid being run over. This worked best at night, but I did it in the daytime too. Usually, I had to take off running when a car stopped and the driver got out and saw that it was only some clothes filled with straw. They were furious and usually cursed at me, even though they couldn’t see me. I really thought that was fun.
I got hit by lightning when I was twelve years old. I mean a direct hit. We had a golden retriever, and he stayed outside in a fenced-in area in the woods behind our house. During a thunderstorm at night, I had to go out and bring him some food. I had an umbrella in one hand and the metal dog bowl in the other. I had almost gotten to the dog when the whole sky lit up. It was brighter than day, just white light. The next thing I knew, I was scrambling around on the ground in panic and fear, not knowing who or where I was. Slowly, I came to my senses and realized I had been hit by lightning. I was thrown about twenty feet. I am lucky to be telling this story. Weird. True.
Around that time, I started hanging around with a friend named Leonard who turned me on to Queen (Queen, Queen II), Alice Cooper (Billion Dollar Babies), and Black Sabbath (Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath). That was the soundtrack to my life then. We would listen to those records, burn incense, and imagine what it was like to be in the bands. We went for walks along the railroad tracks behind Leonard’s house at night, coming up on hobo fires with nobody around them. Then we got to see Black Sabbath in 1974 at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta. Leonard’s mom drove us down and dropped us off. I think a band named Warm from Texas opened up, followed by Spooky Tooth, then Black Sabbath. After each band the lights would come up, and it was almost impossible to see through the smoke from all the weed. Joint after joint came down our row, a real community high. We didn’t yet partake of the great herb, so we passed it along. Soon enough, things would change.
By now, music was all that mattered. I would stay in my room, listening to as much music as I could, getting my mind blown by Grand Funk Railroad (like Live Album from 1970, still one of my favorites; Don Brewer on drums is unbelievable) or hearing “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin for the first time, trying to figure out how that guy could play drums like that.
In ninth grade, a guy named Chris came up and said, “I hear you play drums. Want to jam with me sometime?” He introduced me to a few guys, and we formed a band that rehearsed and played out once in a while, mostly parties and the occasional school assembly. We played some Robin Trower, Trapeze, Flash, Dave Mason, Kiss, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, and whatever we thought was cool. The band’s name was Acropolis. Our bass player grew mushrooms in his room; he was really good at that. We played a battle-of-the-bands contest at a local Jewish community center. We didn’t win, but we did all right. The whole experience of being in a band, playing songs, and trying to get better was a real thrill and, after a while, something I felt I needed. The next band I was in was called Island. Pretty original, I know. I was fifteen, and the guitar player had to pick me up for rehearsals because I couldn’t drive yet. We played some interesting songs: “Raging River of Fear” by Captain Beyond, some Jo Jo Gunne, Spirit, Hendrix. The other guys were a few years older than me. We played pool parties, things like that, mostly getting paid in beer. The drinking age was eighteen then. We played in another battle of the bands, this time at Six Flags. We were in a big tent, and it was raining hard with a lot of thunder. Right before we were supposed to play, the power went out. The guy emceeing the show came over to me and said, “Why don’t you play a drum solo?” I didn’t have time to think about it or be nervous, so I played a twenty-minute solo, and when I finished the crowd was pretty kind to me. We got something like fourth place, behind Mother’s Finest and a couple other bands—not bad for being the youngest of twenty acts. It was amazing being onstage with people enjoying themselves.
The beginning of my descent into the progressive rock wormhole included Gentle Giant, Amon Düül II, Curved Air, Spin, Family, Camel, Nektar, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis . . . the list goes on. I liked the way these bands could play in odd time-signatures and still put the music in a rock context. I still enjoyed my Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Neil Young, Traffic, and Grand Funk, and lots of other rock music. Some of my good friends went deep into jazz, and they would bring all those records to parties. We would listen to Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Don Cherry, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Terje Rypdal, Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Larry Coryell, Gary Burton, and lots of ECM records. It was kind of mind-blowing.
I went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for a couple of years, majoring in broadcast communication. The guy across the hall was a religion major, and he said he was going to become a preacher one day. He kept a cold keg of beer in his room at all times. My dorm was situated away from the rest of the campus and was considered the one with all the “weird” people in it. Maybe they knew something about me ahead of time. We threw big jars of mayonnaise out the third-floor windows, just to see what it was like when they shattered below. There was a cafeteria next to the dorm, so it was easy to take industrial jars of condiments. Whether it was ketchup or pickles or mustard, it was all good ammo for the window fling. We used to take Pepto-Bismol tablets before we started drinking so we wouldn’t get sick. Someone put acid in my chili once.
I made a record in 1980 with a project called the New Age. It was kind of prog, kind of rock, and part I-don’t-know-what. The recording and rehearsals were fun. The kid putting it together was a really good keyboard player. His name was Larry, and he had a Hammond B3 with a Leslie cabinet. If you have ever had the pleasure of standing next to one of these monsters and hearing it growl and churn really loud . . . well, it’s one of the coolest sounds on this planet. I have a copy of the record, but not many were made, so good luck trying to hold me accountable for that.
When I returned home from my great time at TCU, my grades were discussed, and I was informed I would be going to college locally. I started at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and got an apartment near campus. I joined a band, and we played power pop, for lack of a better description. We were called Formal Behavior. Even our name was kind of uptight. Our guitar player was listening to Elvis Costello and the Cars. We didn’t really sound like any of that, but we played around Atlanta, mostly at a club called the Bistro, a converted house in Midtown. We got some demos played on a college radio station. We had a singer who played violin, and that sort of put us in another shoe box. We liked prog, we liked pop, we liked rock, but we were still a little fresh to really have a go at anything. There was a band called the Producers, and we wanted to be like them. We weren’t.
Punk rock was, among other things, a reaction to the overinflated ambition of prog rock, and the attitude of do-it-yourself-and-see-what-happens was gathering steam. Suddenly, you didn’t need wigs and boots and shiny suits. That was now pretentious, unless you were Devo. It was a necessary move, at least for bands and fans, to make music that was more immediate and accessible. You wore your regular clothes, not “stage gear,” and you just played music, raw and in your face. When the Sex Pistols came to play Atlanta, most people thought they were just a joke, me included. I would have rather seen Brand X than the Sex Pistols.
My friends Max Koshewa and Ken Schenck were now playing in a band called Lobetan, and a bunch of us would go to see them at a bar called Hedgen’s. They were kind of slowing down as a band, so Max, Ken, and I started a band called