Father's Day Edition
Happy Father’s Day to all who celebrate, whether you have a dad, had a dad, are a dad, or, like me, are a serial stepdad.
On Drummers…
I saw the above meme and had to laugh. Not because I don’t like Lars Ulrich. He’s a great drummer. Just not the greatest. I responded with the comment, “Bill Bruford (Yes and King Crimson) stands next to Neil Peart’s ghost and says, ‘Is that your seat or mine?’ to which Neil said, ‘Might be Mike Portnoy’s. (Dream Theater)’”
But Lars never played for Rush, Yes, or King Crimson. Lars listened to heavy metal and proto-heavy metal as a kid. But the greats still cited today—Bruford, Peart, Ginger Baker, John Bonham, Keith Moon—cut their teeth on swing. Why? There was no rock and roll until Elvis showed up. And even then, early rock and roll drumming consisted of a four-count of whack-bang-whack-bang. By the time the Beatles hired Pete Best (never mind Ringo, who clearly listened to swing from his own stepdad playing in a band), they’d gone through four drummers before finding this kid with a penchant for the bass drum. When it came time to kick things up a notch, they switched out for Ringo Starr, who brought in drum fills, an oddball right-handed style played by a leftie, and could also toss in piano and the odd vocal. He could also tweak a Lennon-McCartney tune and call bullshit on his more creative bandmates when needed.
So when I cite drummers, I usually cite Bruford and Peart, pretty much anyone who ever drummed for Crimson, Bruford’s understudy in Yes, Alan White, and future Who stalwarts Simon Phillips and Zack Starkey (son of Ringo, godson of Moon, better than the best of both worlds.) They all hearken back to jazz.
What’s that say about Lars? Well, the above meme is more about Lars’s fans than Lars Ulrich himself. But Lars has a limited drum vocabulary, something Pete Best struggled with as a Beatle. (Nowadays, he’s discovered his snares and cymbals and sounds magnificent, but he had 30 years of obscurity to practice in his basement.) Mind you, Lars’s limited style would get the notice of any bar band looking to break out of cover band status into doing originals. Lars is a player, a serious player, and a sharp businessman. But he shines more like punk drummers. The two that come to mind are Dave Grohl in his Nirvana days and Gina Schock of the Go Gos, two players steeped in punk. Punk drummers are timekeepers, but the best ones (young Grohl and Schock) go beyond mere four-counts. Often, they’re the ones keeping the band from going off the rails during a given song, something Schock still excels at. Grohl, of course, has expanded beyond his punk roots, influenced by his bromance with the late Taylor Hawkins (more a Peart man than Phil Rudd of AC/DC.) By the time of Metallica’s Black Album, Lars had already established a standard for drummers to reach. So it’s not that Lars is mediocre. Hardly. But while he could up the game of AC/DC (who are really all about Angus and Brian/Bonn) or Van Halen (not that Alex or Wolfie would permit that, nor would Eddie), you have to acknowledge some drummers simply are sorcerers.
Like Bill Bruford, Simon Phillips, and the late Neil Peart. Nothing wrong with that. Lars is a fan. And it shows.
Mark Twain and the Art of Literary Cannibalism
Mark Twain has replaced Stephen King as the author whose canon I want to finish. I’ll probably miss a few spots with short stories and essays scattered about. But by the time I finished Holly (and yes, I’ve read You Like It Darker, which I liked very much), I was already into Twain’s later work. And Mr. Clemens was hard up for cash.
Twain moved into King’s spot in the rotation with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, possibly the first ever steampunk novel. (Verne doesn’t count because he was projecting forward in time. Twain was going backward.) That, The Prince and the Pauper, and Recollections of Joan of Arc are some of his best fiction, coming as they do during the same period he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
And there lies the problem. I recently read Tom Sawyer Abroad, which was, to put it mildly, awful. Then I read Tom Sawyer Detective. Granted, Tom and Huck were great for Twain’s bank account, but Twain’s fortes are humor, essays, and the travelogue. As their own characters, Tom and Huck are fantastic. As part of a parody of another writer…? Twain is not Weird Al Yankovick. In Abroad, where Jim goes from a finely drawn, if uneducated, man hoping for freedom to a racist parody that hasn’t aged well at all. Detective spares the reader that, but Twain can’t decide if Tom Sawyer is a preening attention whore (He is.) or a prodigy detective and lawyer. He is parodying the recent spate of detective novels, both precursors to the private eye of Hammett and Chandler and of this recently discovered author, A. Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame.
Now every writer has a few clunkers, especially if they have Twain’s longevity. I’m sure anyone reading this can point to a King novel they thought was subpar. For me, that’s Cell, though he seemed to be getting complacent in the 1990s before his accident. Shakespeare wrote a few duds, and one recent addition to his canon, Edward III, is obviously Wil trying to salvage someone else’s dud. No wonder it took almost 400 years to add it to his list. Pretty sure there came the sound of spinning from his grave in Stratford the day the RSC made that happen.
For Twain, it’s when he skips being Mr. Clemens and tries to be a caraicature of his Mark Twain persona. The two latter Tom Sawyer novels are hardly worth mentioning. Having read his sprawling autobiography, I can honestly say his strength is in the essay and the travelogue, when he’s the guy smoking a pipe and making ascerbic comments to his attentive audience.
Fortunately, the next time I return to Twain, it’s for a more worthy attempt to cash in on his Twain-ness, Following the Equator. Were he alive today, he’d be on one of the various incarnations of Top Gear or maybe popping upon Ricky Gervais’s An Idiot Abroad (mainly to remind the hapless traveler he’s an idiot.) That’s where Mr. Samuel Clemens of Hartford, CT excels. And I can’t wait to read it.
A Beast Without a Name
One day in early 2019, before my trip to San Francisco and driving back to Cincinnati, I got a call from Brian Thornton. I’d known Brian for years and had even contributed a story to his first anthology, West Coast Crimewave. He had a problem. He was doing a double anthology for Down & Out Books (now my most frequent editing client) based on the music of Steely Dan. However, for book 2, an author had dropped out while another one turned in a story that wasn’t up to this guy’s usual work. (Been there, done that. It happens.) Would I be interested?
Well, hellz yes. I was looking for a way to get Holland Bay into print, which is a lot easier when your most recent short story credit is less than seven years old. We went through possible song names that had not been taken. Finally, I said, “What about a lyric instead of a song? Is ‘FM’ taken?”
It was not. I went with the lyric “No static at all,” a staple on my cousin’s one-time employer, WONE in Akron. (WMMS, the rock behemoth in Cleveland also abused the song that came from, the aforementioned ‘FM.’) I came up with a techie who worked from home and took a job as the overnight DJ on a low-power station with barely any format. She does it because she can play anything she wants from Metallica to Willie Nelson, and she doesn’t mind splitting a joint with her boss-with-benefits, a famous DJ from that city’s rock heyday. I set the story in the Celloverse as it gave me a chance to connect with that setting again, but without the baggage of the Special Investigations sqaud. Our lady gets herself a stalker and, as it turns out, it has to do with her boss/boyfriend/maybe fiance’s family secrets. The standoff leaves her walking away from a promised idyllic life in Florida.
I read the resulting anthology, A Beast Without a Name, and its predecessor Die Behind the Wheel in short order. The nice thing about an anthology you’re in is you get to read a book you’ve never seen before, but also get the surprise of reading your own work in print. My favorite story, however, was Kat Richardson’s “Kid Charlemagne,” which comes closest to following any of the songs in the entire anthology. That’s because there’s a story behind that song, and Donald Fagan only tells it one way. Kat managed to insert or paraphrase quite a few of the lyrics at the appropriate moments. (Spoiler alert: There was gas in the car) while adding an entire fictional backstory to Fagan’s real-life tale of a drug chef in late 70s California.
Most of my short story submissions now go to anthologies these days. They’re great fun to write for as they usually have a built-in prompt. And while Murder, Neat and Games People Play—Opening Gambit have some great work, it’s the Steely Dan angle that makes this one something special.