DRUMMER: b-lovers/Turning Curious, Mixed Company
I was playing in Mixed Company, and we were hanging out with the b-lovers a lot. We had a whole series of adventures and shows together. I remember playing at Mabel’s and seeing Nick at the side of the stage watching us, and I was like, “Holy Crap! He’s watching us play!” When they asked me to play in their band, I felt, you know, validated. And when we started rehearsing it was just amazing. Nick had very clear ideas of how everything should go. But he was also completely open about ideas and letting you go with it. I felt thrilled. Just thrilled that he liked my playing. It was a big deal for me, it really was. It had to have been fall of 83, around October. I know we had a rehearsal at the old Faithful Studio on Halloween of ‘83. Mike Bailey came by and gave everybody tabs of acid. That’s why I remember that one so clearly.
When we started rehearsing to do the e.p., he just came in, and he had a new song every time. I remember him coming in with the song, Three Sisters and he would have all the parts and he would say, “I want you to play this, and you to play this” but he was never a tyrant about it because everything made so much sense and it was all so clear it was all the right stuff to play anyway! We worked up those songs so quickly, so fast because they were so fully realized by Nick before he’d bring them to the band. Those songs were all complete in his head.
Nick would bring in new songs and we would rehearse them for three hours. We could play the SHIT out of them! He didn’t just write lyrics. He wrote poetry interwoven with music. And the fact that the rest of us worked together so seamlessly; I felt like I slid into it very easily.
What really mystified me was that we would play a song, like, ya know, Three Sisters, and people would go crazy. And then Nick would go…”Uhhhh unhhh, we gotta take that out of the setlist.” And I was like, “Wait?? What?? Why???” And that mystified me about him. I don’t think it was a fear of failure. No, no, no. It was something else. I couldn’t understand it though. I knew he didn’t want to be commercial. But there were times when I got the impression that he thought if it’s too accessible then it might not be good. I always thought that he figured if something he wrote was too popular he would question its merit.
Besides his obvious gifts as a songwriter, I was always so impressed by his simple approach to playing guitar. He had his sound, and that Strat and the little tweed Princeton. And he sounded fucking great. He had such a great tone. And he was a great player—so simple and so matter of fact about it. I always thought, this is how you do it, this is how you approach it. You have your instrument and you master it, whatever your instrument is. His dedication to his instrument impressed me. I mean he played A LOT and was very devoted to it, you could tell that. He sorta played the way he was personally. He didn’t play a lot of notes, just a few really good ones. He had a fluidity and enough technical ability to express himself freely without ever being mechanical.