ROY EDROSO

Part Two: From Hank Williams to Horrible Noise

John and I were fortunate to know a couple that was rehabilitating a one-story annex to their Avenue B apartment building into a music studio. With some other local musicians, we helped them gut and insulate the structure, earning us a cheap share in the rehearsal rotation. The excavation was rough and local thugs threatened at intervals to burn the place down, but in the end we had a small, dank warren in which to engineer our destinies.

We were joined by Dave, an accounts receivable manager and poet, on second guitar. Dave was nearly bald, sported outsized glasses and a drooping blond mustache, and spoke with the patient drawl of a tenured English professor, but played guitar with frightening enthusiasm. My wife played drums with us until I alienated her so completely that she withdrew even this level of support. (Drunk with power and Budweiser, I thought little even then of addressing my fellow musicians harshly when rehearsals failed to meet my Olympian standards. Dave and John deflected these jabs manfully, but my soon-to-be-ex-life-partner was understandably less phlegmatic.)

At this stage we were the Deadbeats, a competent bar rock ensemble, exhibiting little of the maximal thrash and crash in which our East Village neighbors specialized. Despite our leather jackets, shitty attitudes, and prodigious beer consumption, musically we were nerds. But we didn't say to hell with it and start playing like Black Flag. John, Dave, and I were by nature non-joiners, and I think we found some perverse nobility in our contrarian strategy.

Not wishing to lose too many steps, we quickly scheduled drummer auditions. These were unpropitious. Our stated musical influences drew mainly suburban types. Several nervous applicants asked, hopefully, if rehearsals would be held somewhere other than this tiny, clammy space. One teenager, who arrived at our studio accompanied by his mother, weighed close to 200 pounds, and it took 15 minutes to squeeze him into the tiny drummer's area.

We settled finally on Dave (Dave II, for our purposes here), or, rather, he settled on us. A tightly wound, bearded fellow from Queens, Dave II exhibited that borough's traditional resistance to fashionable existentialism. He wore checked shirts, an English taxi-driver's cap, and flared jeans. He was either ten years behind or fifteen years ahead of the fashion. He thought we were a little weird, and he didn't know what we liked about Husker Du, but he came aboard anyway and even kicked in a share of the rent on the space.

It became obvious over time that Dave II had joined us because of, not in spite of, our studio. What he liked was that it had a PA system, and that we let him sing backup through it. He had a nice, light tenor, romantic and expressive. Dave II loved his voice to an unfortunate degree, and exercised no restraint in using it. Within weeks he had composed meticulous vocal fills and obbligati for nearly ever beat of our music. When we tried to remove some of them, he argued strenuously. "I don't know what you're talking about," he'd moan, "that's classic rock 'n' roll."

Given our status, he might as well have told us we were playing classic Doobie Brothers. No nerd likes to be told he's a nerd, even inadvertently.

The struggle continued for some time. Eventually Dave II was marching into each rehearsal spoiling for a fight. He spoke to us only when he was checking his mike, as we twiddled the dials trying to give him the vocal effects that he had come to crave, in a loud, unfriendly voice:

"More treble! Check! Check! Now more reverb! Check! Fucking check! More reverb! Check! Check! Fucking check! MORE REVERB, MOTHERFUCKERS!"

Not for the last time, we were bringing out the worst in somebody.

When not playing, Dave II glowered and moped in corners or on the sidewalk out front, sucking down cigarettes and privately rehearsing his vocal parts. His romantic tenor became ominous to me; I thought he sounded like he wanted to make sweet love to a woman, then cut out her heart with a penknife.

We fired him and tried a few more drummers. There was Montreal Phil, a Canuck whose bibulousness seemed a nice match for ours, till Dave, John and I arrived slightly late for a sound check one night and found that Phil had already drunk our paycheck. "Sorry, guys," he burped. "I was a little nervous." (It was our third gig at that venue.) After Phil was ejected we engaged a man named Howard. "What's your last name?" we asked. "Djellikakik," he said. "Howard Djel-like-a-kik." It took me a while to get the joke. Howard never gave us his phone number, and came and went like the wind.

Meanwhile we had established ourselves at a local bar called Nightingale's. This place is sort of a regular club now, but in 1986 it was a dive, and not the kind that is celebrated by adventuresome lifestyle magazines as a "dive," but a real dive, frequented by prostitutes, pimps, welfare check liquidators, and assorted scum.

Its owner, a surly Korean, engaged us to play from 10 p.m. till 4 a.m., and by god, we played it, adding new songs as fast as I could write them, and padding our meager repertoire with 15-minute versions of Hank Williams songs and "Fight the Power."

One Wednesday night, the bar was deserted at 3:15, and as we sat dazed at the bar the bartender thrust a telephone at me. The owner was on the line.

"Why you no play?" he asked.

"There's nobody here."

"I pay you to play till four," he said.

We limped back to the bandstand and played "Jambalaya," this time for 40 minutes.

He paid us, though, and with all that stage time, we were well practiced. But there were problems, and not just the kind to be expected with thirsty musicians trapped in a bar for six hours a night. John was having trouble keeping up with the high volume of material we kept adding to propitiate the surly Korean. Actually, we all had trouble keeping up, but it sounded worse on the bass, which anchored the chord changes. Dreaming of glory and drinking heavily, I was sometimes less than circumspect in addressing the issue. In fact, sometimes I addressed it on stage, into a live mike.

"This is a real simple song," I announced to the crowd one night as John egregiously fumbled "Roadrunner." "A to E, A to E... that's all it is... petty fucking simple..."

"Hey, man," some guy yelled to John, "I know that song. Let me play it."

John quit the band the next day.

Howard Djellikakik phoned his regrets the day after that.

We retained the rehearsal space. Dave and I sat around in it, drank, cursed our lot, and played music. John, still a contributor to the rent, eventually showed up and drank and cursed and played with us. But we weren't playing Deadbeats songs anymore. We were playing whatever came into our sodden heads. We took turns incompetently bashing at the drum kit. We increased all volume levels excruciatingly, till the amps howled and the vocals could only be heard when screamed. If we had trouble playing a change, we abandoned it. Soon we played nothing that required more than three chords, or a bridge, or a dynamic shift. All we wanted was a gale from the speakers blowing in our faces, a steady ringing in our ears, and the occasional physio-acoustic phenomenon brought on by endless crescendo that John called "full body feedback."

We emerged from these marathon sessions matted with sweat, stinking of beer, functionally deaf, and elated beyond reason or measure.

We decided we had a new band, drummer or not.

"And the name of the band," said John, "should be the Reverb Motherfuckers."

The deal was sealed in coarse laughter and vomit.

To be continued.