Grinding To A Halt

Last winter was pretty brutal. Lots of snow, wind, and temperatures that often times dipped into the single digits and below. I remember one morning my car doors wouldn't open and - frustrated from weeks and weeks of the frigid onslaught - I proceeded to kick my car, hoping that would get me in. And I succeeded! I manged to get my driver side door open, and my passenger side door came open while I was driving down the road on the way to work. In recent years Poughkeepsie has been notorious for having terribly treated roads (and terrible other things thanks to the guy in charge), and I had two road incidents last year: once where my car slide into a light pole while trying to make a turn, and another where it couldn't handle a slick off-ramp, which forced me stay straight and travel over the bridge. Neither incident occured while there was actual, you know, precipitation falling from the sky, but both had me telling myself that that winter was going to be my last in the northeast. In my mind I was planning a move to Los Angeles or Nashville - warmer climates, and warmer winters. Talk about some bullshit.

Last week I was able to be back in Poughkeepsie for my friend Brett's funeral, and subsequently my niece's birthday and Valentine's Day, as well. And surprise - it's another brutal winter in Poughkeepsie (and all of the northeast). The snow, the wind, the below zero temps? Yup, they were all there. While I was home Poughkeepsie set a record low of -14 degrees. I'll write that out for you: negative fourteen degrees. That's seriously cold, and it was seriously windy. So windy, in fact, that I changed my flight home from Sunday to Monday because of predicted 50mph winds in White Plains.

And then Winter Storm Octavia decided it was going to come right across Tennessee, hit Nashville with an ice storm, then proceeded through the upper south, hitting Charlotte, which was my connecting city. Apparently all that terrible winter weather that I chose to leave in the northeast decided to come visit me in Music City - only I wasn't there. So, I changed my flight from Monday to Wednesday, and hunkered down while the storm brought Nashville to a halt. Shows were cancelled. School was closed for the entire week. All while I cooked dinners, and hung out with my girlfriend and my family. And I did not have a guitar or a keyboard, but I was able to be at least a little productive in other ways.

When I did finally get back to Nashville on Wednesday, the interstates I rode home on were clear, but the side roads were not. In fact, even though I know the area isn't as experienced with this weather, and even though I know everyone here is working overtime as best they can, as a person from the northeast I still find the conditions of the roads to be...well, let's just say surprising. Imagine a road with two lanes in each direction and a turning lane in the middle, with the four main travel lanes relatively cleared and the middle turning lane not cleared at all. Imagine streets cleared only where the wheels of the cars actually hit the road. Imagine cars sitting at the bottom of driveways because they can't make it up the hills to the house. My street is on a small hill and I had the tires on my GMC Safari spinning the day I got home. One Friday on the way home from rehearsal I took a detour and found myself in two precarious positions: one where I had to back up very slowly to avoid the iced-over street ahead of me, and another where I was sliding, foot on the brake, down a slight hill toward an intersection, hoping I would stop in time. Luckily, I did. My housemate slide into the curb and had his hubcap knocked off.

The point is...winter sucks. All the way around. Except for maybe in Los Angeles? Well, I still think I made the right choice. Time to get the wheels moving again.

To My Friend, Brett

Mulligan's Irish House in Poughkeepsie became kind of like my unofficial home base. From my monthly solo/acoustic shows, to my bi-monthly solo/acoustic shows, to my Over The Edge Album Listening Party (and even to a bachelor party I threw there one time), my appearances at Mulligan's Irish House were epic - often epically under-attended, that is. But more often than not, you would find, sitting at the bar drinking a diet soda, my friend Brett. He would show up, hang out, make jokes with the rest of the regulars who would frequently come out to see me, and proceed to heckle me from the bar like Waldorf & Statler. And he could never get enough of constantly requesting that I play "MMMBop," by Hanson (which I never did), getting on the mic for background vocals in "Free Fallin'," by Tom Petty (which he did numerous times), and singing along to "Forever Young," by Rod Stewart (which I had learned just for him).

But my history with Brett extends back much further than shows at Mulligan's Irish House - more than 20 years, in fact. Brett and his brother, Dan, were my camp counselors when I attended YWCA Camp Cedarcliff - a small summer day camp that I always went to because my mom worked at the YWCA, and at which I ended up as a counselor myself for my first job. Every two weeks or so at camp there was an event called "Parent Sharing," where the families of campers would come and the different groups of kids would perform skits or songs, sometimes based on a theme. One time, under Brett's direction, my group performed an infamously bad rendition of Rod Stewart's "Forever Young," which has become the stuff of legend and inspired me learning the song for him. It was always performed tongue-in-cheek.

When I was younger, my family and Brett's family were both mutually close with my brother-in-law's family, so he would always be around. Summer parties, holiday meals, New Years celebrations, and late-night movie screenings thanks to my brother-in-law's movie theater connections (I still can't believe that he didn't like Galaxy Quest, by the way - I mean seriously), and even though he was a decade older than me and had been my camp counselor, as time went on and I got older he became much more of a peer and a friend than a "grown up." Maybe that was because I was growing up, or that he had such an irreverent sense-of-humor, or an affable personality, or his closeness to my brother-in-law, or a combination of all of it. Brett was a "brother from another mother" to my brother-in-law, so just like my brother-in-law's actual brother he because a part of my extended family. When my sister got married in Vermont in 2006, Brett and I shared a room at the inn. A couple years ago when he directed a sanitized, age-appropriate version of the play Election at the middle school where he worked, I was there to support him the way that he had always been there to support me at Mulligan's.

We got word yesterday that Brett suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and it's shocking for everyone who knew him - friends, family, and friends who were family. It's surreal, to be sure, and being so far away from home all I can really do is share a few memories of my friend. And maybe have a diet Pepsi in his name. As my brother-in-law writes, "A whole freakin candelabra has gone out and it's going to take a long time for our eyes to adjust to the darkness."

 

In an mmmbop...

2015 - Full Steam Ahead

For all the posts I've made about Nashville - what goes on here, what it's like, how it's different, etc. - I really haven't made any posts about what I'm actually up to in Nashville. You know, in terms of like...music. Well, I've been here four months so I guess it's about time I clue you in.

I'm the new drummer for Slipknot. I know, I know - most of the internet believes it's Jay Weinberg, son of E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, but that's just how good a job we did at hiding my real identity. Currently, we're on tour in Europe, and I'm having a blast!

But when I'm not thrashing about with them, for the past 2 months I've been working with a band who moved to town from Kansas City the same time that I did. We were lucky enough to connect and really click in terms of style, influences, and personality, and it's been an exciting time playing with them more days than not, firming up arrangements, and tightening the sound of the group in preparation for some serious studio time in the coming months. The plan is to live-track as much as possible in order to fully capture the energy of the band, and that's a different way of how I've usually worked in the past. My album Over The Edge, for example, was strictly multi-tracked piece by piece - first we did drums, then bass, then guitars, keys, horns, and so on until all the instruments were there. Live-tracking requires a lot of preparation and practice beforehand to do it right, but I'm excited for the challenge and the opportunity.

I'll post more about the band and what we're up to as things continue to progress, but the plan is to be doing my first Nashville studio sessions less than six months after moving here - not bad when you consider I knew only one person who lives here, he is not in the music industry, and I haven't even seen him because he had his first kid right after I arrived.

Onward and upward, baby. 2015 - full steam ahead.

P.S. No, I'm not really the new drummer for Slipknot. C'mon, people, get your heads in the game!