DRUMMER: Water Between Continents, Lonely Trailer, Skin Donkey
I started going to Record Service when I was 13, looking through the budget records, ya know, based on what they looked like, then I drifted into jazz as I got older. I finally did get a job there and that’s where I met Nick.
I worked with Nick limited hours. You’d pick up subs because somebody got drunk. It was that kind of lifestyle—music—you were surrounded by it. Nick and I purposely listened to stuff that opened up different parts of our brains. Lots of independent stuff, Minute Men, Sonic Youth. They weren’t on big labels then. And then we listened to Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy—and we listened LOUD, it turns out. Tom from upstairs would come down and have us turn it down. We were playing music that might not have been really appropriate, you know, to sell music. It was just for us and that open mindedness that we shared.
We started playing in like ‘87 or ‘88. We had talked about it for a long time and I think when we finally got together it was with Matt Allison. I’m not sure what we were doing was really his favorite kinda thing, not formless, not belligerent, but kinda forceful. We called it Skin Donkey at first. When we started, Lynn Canfield would play with us. One time she ducked out and we just kept playing. We played some shows at Chins as Skin Donkey.
You know I never want to close any kind of musical possibilities. I want to be open Nick was that way. He didn’t want to limit himself to one kind of musical thought.
I remember when Nick lived in Champaign and I lived in Urbana. He called me up and I was listening to Ornette Coleman, “This Is Our Music,” and it was an album that we had listened to together so he put it on his copy, and we were listening to this album together, over the phone. He synched it up and it was really neat, just slightly off, a faint echo, really cool, and we flipped the album and listened to the whole album that way. Yeah, we were kind of connected by things that we might not have understood at the time. Maybe he understood it, I don’t know. It just made me feel a certain way that I liked.
We had some things that were formed and some things, you know, we would go into an unknown, and that didn’t work as much for some of the folks who played with us, but we just liked the freedom. We felt that we could do whatever we wanted to, at any time. That’s what we really valued—freedom—cuz you’re kinda limited by everything else, why limit yourself with music?
Not sure how many songs Nick was on with Lonely Trailer, but you can hear his contribution, his voice. We tried to have a three-part harmony so it would sound bigger than a three piece, and Nick has a beautiful, very expressive voice, so we were very lucky to have him on those tracks.
Lonely Trailer, we were lucky to have Nick along with us. It lasted a year and a half, and I had written a lyric, that I don’t know if he ever caught on to it, but it was “It might last a day,” cause his involvement, Ha! We didn’t know how long he’d stay, ya know, cuz he didn’t really want to be limited by any single thought or form. I think that showed up in the last year or two when he was playing with the Krishna folks. He played so much and really influenced a lot of people’s playing when he joined bands.
When we played, that freedom involves a certain kind of trust. And it’s not limited by a form. When we started really concentrating on Water Between Continents, that’s what we wanted to do, we both wanted to do that, and it was really intense cuz were pretty naked out there, just two people, drums and guitar. It’s hard to be objective about what you’re capable of doing, and it took us a year, for Nick to feel comfortable enough cause he couldn’t be objective about his guitar playing. He’s sort of a perfectionist.
Basically, what we would do, is we would have a tape player up in my great grandmothers house. I was living there so I’ve got all these crazy like, I don’t know how many, maybe 75 or 100 cassette tapes. We both played separately on our own, practicing, then we would come together and just start playing, and out of that, if anything stuck, we’d go, hey wait, and then tape it. After a while, we would turn on the tape and just play and then flip the tape when we were done. We lost a lot of stuff that way, but what we would do is include what might be considered mistakes, rhythmic mistakes, an eye opener, something that would knock you back, and make you realize you’re listening to something that’s happening now.
Andy Baylor was the first person we recorded with. There’s like 20 plus studio songs and Michael Mapes tried to release that. He had asked us to be the musical entity for a show he was developing called Quick Spin, and it was kinda like a variety show, but quick, great concept. We spent a lot of time, and we were the musical entity for that. I have a lot of that, ridiculous number of these, and I don’t know the format but, I’ve got those tapes if anybody has the machine to see them!
I was living with my dad when I was going through this divorce, and it kept me from being self-destructive. The other thing that saved me was Nick. Nick saved me by coming there and checking on me. I was very isolated and Nick would come by in the morning and check on me before he caught the bus, and he would drop off a CD of what we had played the day before. He brought his 12 string over, cuz I had no place for my drums. I was so lucky to have him. And it still means so much to me that he was there for me. This was when he was living over on Oregon Street in Urbana. Anyway, I have those CD’s of us with Nick on 12 string and you can really hear his fingers, very elaborate. We would go in and out of, almost like ragas, cuz I was playing a Turkish drum, and other percussion instruments.
His acoustic music was really wonderful, the way it would resonate, and his dexterity, it was just really remarkable. I was really, really lucky to have been able to play with him so long.
I’m surrounded by Nick, is the way I see it, the way I feel it. I think about his smile and I’m surrounded by him.
Anyway, I had this crazy dream. I’m sure it was influenced by Nick. Cecil Taylor is in the studio with these other musicians and they just revere him, they’re like disciples. And in the dream, they had just gotten done recording. One of the musicians questioned the validity of what they had done. Then all of a sudden, we were in a classroom and Cecil Taylor is teaching a course on the importance of the trickster in improvisational music, and that was it! That was Nick! He influenced that.
He’s part of the eternal vibration, for real. And it’s not gonna stop…it’s just not gonna stop.