I used to have this dream of being on stage behind my set of drums and all of a sudden I notice that the stage is at an angle tilting downward. Everything is sliding forward, my chair, the cymbals and all my drums. I'm trying to hold on and play at the same time, the rest of the band has an expression like `What's the deal?' and then I wake up.
I got my first drum set in `65, the Christmas I turned 11. My younger brother and I came down the stairs and saw this big yellow Tonka toy dump truck with my brother's name on it, along with some other cool things, but nothing for me. And then I looked in the next room and saw it all set up. A whole set of drums, a black marble color just like Ringo's! I was overwhelmed to say the least. They had cost a total of $150.00 and were not a brand name but they looked great and that was a lot for my parents, who were both teachers who had put each other through school. I was into music big time and the Beatles having just come on the scene were the biggest. I was a very nervous kid and had been pounding on the walls and everything else in sight for years so I think my parents felt I could put that to good use. I got the hang of it fairly quick. I played down in the basement every day to "Keep on Dancing" by the Gentrys and "Boys" by the Beatles. Then my parents divorced and we moved and I used those drums to take out loads of pain and aggression, every day.
Mark Howell was a kid in my neighborhood who played guitar-he was the first person I ever played with. He was the kind of guy that got along with everyone, the jocks who ignored me and the freaks of which I was definitely one. We played all of Led Zeppelin 1, the Who's Live at Leeds, Hendrix's "Fire", stuff like that. When I think back I don't know how well we played it but we had fun. I drank their orange juice, ate his mom's cookies and whoever had the money to buy a bass was our bass player. Through Mark I met the other musicians who joined me on my semi-career as drummer through the next fifteen years.
The first band I played gigs with was called the Wet Basement Band. There I met Dennis Landeen, the sax player, who I would play with for many years and is still out there rockin' on with the best in the Cities. This group with some minor changes eventually became Fatt City. Fatt City had a cult popularity and played, mostly out of the City in college towns, throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties.
In between these two Dennis and I did a stint with a local country wannabe named Johnny Bee who had a loyal keyboard player named Little Leroy (a small town DJ who dug Floyd Kramer). I believe Dennis saw an ad in which good steady money was promised. Johnny Bee was throwing together a group to play concerts. On the first (and only) of these we backed up Marilyn Sellers who had a hit song with "One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus". It was at a school auditorium in some hick town. Some of my relatives came. We were also her back-up band, without any rehearsal. That was how these cheap wannabe country stars did it, and the music was all the same anyway. I remember the guitar player that Johnny had recruited owned a music store in Shakopee where he had a bottomless pint of schnapps in a bottom drawer in his office. He used to be half in the bag when we played and would go off rhythm and blame it on me `cause I was the drummer. I honestly had a great natural sense of timing so it upset me that I had to try and slow down or speed up to keep everything together. I played a little fast at first when I was nervous and people I knew were in the audience. In beat but fast. People don't realize how important the drummer is. He keeps everything going, gets the people to dance and therefore drink and therefore that's the whole purpose of a band getting hired.
Anyway on this gig with Marilyn Sellers, she started this one song off too slow; the guitar player was drunk and veering off and I was playing fast. It was one of those stomach-turning, my-life-is-over, get-this-over-with moments. Then our checks from Johnny bounced. If we had any real sense we would have gotten out right then. I mean, this wasn't even the music we really liked let alone loved, but those usually don't make a dime. With Wet Basement we played what we liked, learned a lot and made no money playing keggers and wet basements. Anyway, Johnny promised us our money and much more, said he was getting rid of everyone but Little Leroy and the two of us and we would play the small clubs in the redneck towns that knew him and loved country like Sauk Center and Willmar. We became Johnny Bee and the Honeycombs.
Johnny (who had a Glen Campbell type look) wore a blue leisure suit and we (the three bees) all wore matching blue vests with blue paisley type shirts. All the songs were pretty basic and we played them every night without much of a change. Johnny only knew so many chords and was not much for jamming. Dennis and I kept our long hair tied back so the rednecks wouldn't notice, and we stayed in cabins on lakes and made some good regular money. We got high a lot. Johnny had a wife and kids who were Hawaiian and could all sing and we did these family shows in the daytime at the same bars. Corny Donny & Marie, Elvis "rolling in his grave" medleys (done by Johnny's 8 year old son) and the Don Ho hit "Tiny Bubbles". At night we did "Help me make it through the night," "Make the world go away," "Four Walls," "Don't let your babies grow up to be Cowboys" and some really great songs by outlaw hippie drunk writers like Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Many others were just plain sappy, sad / bad. Dennis played sax, harmonica and flute parts all strictly by ear and sang some backups. We took it all as a joke and would laugh to ourselves onstage. We took some pictures one time in back of one of the cabins of Little Leroy dressed up as Cop holding this bag of pot and arresting us. Then we got busted for real one night after a gig in Willmar, which was quite recently a dry county. These two police officers saw a couple of longhairs in an old red Volkswagen (with no heat but that's another story) at 2 am and thought they'd died and gone to heaven. They tore the car and our luggage all apart and found a couple seeds, I think. We might have gone to jail if not for someone recognizing us as two of the Honeycombs.
The whole thing fell apart shortly after that. Johnny was drinking a lot and fooling around with this young girl at the bar when his family was back home. Dennis got a gig with a real band (the aforementioned Fatt City). I was going to stay with Johnny and Leroy and was promised really good money at Holiday Inns. I had a few weeks off to wait for the gigs to start and ran out of drinking money about one week in. I was suspicious when the Holiday Inn gig we were supposed to do was advertised with some other band playing and then Little Leroy called on his boss's behalf and told me Johnny had skipped to Colorado to avoid the Taxman, his girlfriends, lawyers and such. I actually played some really sad gigs with the drunken guitarist and his wife (with a name I've blocked out) doing sappy Seventies stuff. You can only play `Muskrat Love' so many times, so I quit. I stopped playing for a while until I got the call from Bruce and Dennis to join them in Fat City.
There was a girl I went out with right around this time who used the expression "nothing but a dumb drum"-I took it personally and to heart. Being a Honeycomb was sweet for a while but it left a bad taste in my mouth for years to come. After Fatt City I traded my drum set for a trip out west that was chronicled in Whistling Shade's travel issue last summer. Eventually got a keyboard as I was doing a lot of writing and wanted to work on my own songs.
Now I have these dreams of a keyboard with broken keys, keys made out of paper or glued together so they won't press down or make a sound and I'm on this stage that's tilted forward at an angle ...
© 2005 by Mark A. Garcia.