“I left New York to get away from one girlfriend,” Bosco said. “I don’t need three more.”
With that, Bosco quit the band.
The boys still needed to practice. I’m not a drummer, but I can keep a beat, so I banged along on a snare one night. They asked me to join the band.
There’ve been times in my life when I knew exactly what I wanted and set about making it happen. Other times, things just presented themselves and I went along with it.
This was one of those times.
I wasn’t as into The Replacements and early Rolling Stones as these guys, but they were my friends. And they were actually doing something. I hadn’t managed to start my own next band yet.
Our first show together was a party, the house of a gal who bass-player Steve was trying to impress. She and all her friends were psych grad students. There was a lot of analyzing going on.
Do you actually like performing? It must be very validating on some level.
Did you get enough attention as a child?
Why aren’t there any women in your band, is that intentional?
If you don’t know what behavioralism is, there’s no sense explaining…
Finally, Steve’s love interest said something I could understand:
“Would you boys like us to order you some pizza?”
I can endure almost anything for pizza.
A week later, Steve made up for the psych party by booking time to record a demo.
The studio was in a guy’s basement on the south side of Seattle. He went by the name Jimmy Free. There were photos of his little-known rock band from the 70s on the wood-paneled walls.
It wasn’t as professional as the studio I’d stumbled into in Manhattan a few months back, but this time I was a participant, not an observer.
Jimmy Free had a sixteen-channel Mackie board, up to half of which would usually be taken up by drums. I was making life seriously easy for him by having just a snare, floor tom, and single cymbal.
I had the songs in my head and knocked out the drum tracks with just a click track in my headphones. The takes were good except for one flub. Rerecording and piecing in that missed beat was more of a pain-in-the-ass than if I’d just done another take.
Everything was recorded directly to half-inch tape. No computer program let you copy-cut-paste. No automatic level adjustment. Every little tweak threatened an audible difference in tape hiss. Every substitution a noticeable pop.
Playing the drum part, my job was over quickly. The pressure was off. The downside was that then I had to wait. And wait. And wait.
Steve’s bass and Dog’s guitar didn’t take too long. Maybe Joe’s vocals took a little more finesse, he wasn’t exactly a natural singer.
It was the mixing that took forever. I went out to get beer. When I got back, there was a freaky white dude standing in the yard. He had dirty dreadlocks, and was pointing a stick at me.
“Hey man…what’s with the stick?” I asked cautiously.
He had crazy eyes. I hoped I could disarm him without confrontation.
“This is my gris-gris stick,” he said.
He explained it was some kind of West African thing. I figured he probably wasn’t going to hit me with it, but the voodoo angle was not entirely reassuring.
“You mind pointing that in another direction?”
By and by, he put down the stick and passed me a joint from a little leather pouch strung around his neck. Strong shit. By the time I went back into the studio I couldn’t remember why I was there.
Voodoo Guy followed me inside. The guys looked dubiously at what I’d just dragged in, but Jimmy Free nodded like he was a studio regular. We popped the beers and continued listening to the mixes.
One song in particular called Land of the Free caught Voodoo Guy’s attention.
“This is the one!” he said.
“Now Curtis, even Jimmy Free doesn’t make commentary,” Jimmy Free corrected him, referring to himself in the third person.
Curtis, saying nothing further, smiled maniacally. He danced in place, pointing his gris-gris stick intently at the JBL speakers as Land of the Free continued to play.
Watching the scene, I was high as a kite. But I do remember thinking with utter clarity:
Either this guy just put a West African curse on us, or we have a mother fucking hit on our hands…
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I need a Curtis in my life badly.
❤️❤️❤️