Rockin' Phyllis' Musical Inn

The Friday night show was a three-band night at Phyllis Musical Inn on Division. Our old friend Sam Saunders booked us to open for his band, the Sam Saunders Machine, and an Indiana band called Factor Four (http://www.myspace.com/factorfourf4).

Factor Four was a real welcome surprise for the Chicago scene. A blend of punk and post-punk, they are reminiscent of Wire, Joy Division, early Cure, and Black Flag. It was a mutual admiration night with the Short Punks diggin' the music of Factor Four. We were impressed by the tambourine player -- "reminds me of the Byrds," Brian said later. They play extensively in Indiana so if you're in the Midwest, definitely check them out.

In the meantime, here's some pics of SPiL, Factor 4, and The Sam Saunders Machine.


Chuck of Factor 4 leading the band with Chris on drums, James on guitar, and Shelly on a mean tambourine.





Sam Saunders tears it up with Dara on bass and Rich on drums.

At the end of the Short Punks set we were surprised by the entrance of 10-15 bar crawlers in 1980's workout regalia. Feel the burn, everyone.

For those of you who haven't seen SPiL live, here's shot of Brian's foot -- he plays barefoot.











Thanks to Sam Saunders for the great pics!

Montrose Saloon

We did a show on Friday at the Montrose Saloon, one of our favorite places to play. This time, we had guests: John Mead from Mystery Train and his friend, an Old Town School of Folk Music guitar instructor, named Cathy. John and Cathy did an opening set playing some of John's originals.










Then John sat in for four or five songs with Short Punks. Before this show, John and Brian had met for less than 5 minutes 3 years ago, but on Friday they rocked like old friends. As self-taught guitar players that shared a mutual vocabulary in classic rock. They jammed on impromptu versions of "Road Runner," "Sweet Jane," "Garden Party," and some Dylan classics.


We look forward to having John sit in with us at a future show.

Gear Alert: John Bull

Acquiring guitar gear is probably one of the few things Brian lives to do. And one might wonder what that has to do with Chick Drummer. Does she have input in pedal choices? Does she care? Gear acquisition discussions usually begin like this:

Brian is at the computer in the kitchen. I’m washing dishes.

Brian: Where’s Northbrook?

CD: Uh…above Evanston, why?

Brian: Just curious.

A minute passes and I figure it out.

CD: What gear do you want to buy now?

Brian: Well, there’s this…no, no, I won’t get it. I don’t need it.

CD: What is it?

Brian: Well…[he lifts his hands in the air, the fingers forming a box shape] what it is does is [insert gear head ramble here]…so you see I could get a whole new sound…

CD: Where is this pedal?

Brian: A new guitar store opened in Northbrook called Fat Tone Guitars and they’re the only ones who sell this pedal.

Then, here comes the look that would make juries weep…a round-eyed lost puppy dog look.

CD: Okay, I’ll do this. If we go to Evanston first so I can have lunch at Blind Faith and go to Dave’s Rock Shop, then I’ll go with you.

Brian: Okay!

And sure enough, in a day or two after a lunch of eggs and granola at Blind Faith and a quick trip to the rock store, we’re pulling up to Fat Tone in an industrial park in Northbook.

Brian: Um…you can stay in the car, if you want.

CD: I was planning on it.

Guitar stores are tough places for drummers. There’s an obscure tech lingo in these stores and nothing a drummer can hit. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: you better not hit anything in a guitar store, because it could cost you a fortune to replace. But for Brian guitar stores are like temples and he enters, his guitar slung over his shoulder like King Arthur wielding Excaliber.

I wait in the car. I’m the dusty, awkward groom who waits behind with the horse while the hero battles a dragon. For an hour and half, I read, sleep, and sweat. It’s 85 degrees and I start to feel like a survivor on a desert island. Thirsty. Impatient. Hot. Thoughts of abandoning him to drive to Target down the road and browse housewares invade my mind. No, I’ll wait. I can’t leave. Just as I think I’m going to go mad with dehydration, Brian emerges, little white box in hand. He’s grinning.

A pedal acquisition is no ordinary trip. It involves negotiation, travel, patience, and an epic journey to lands time forgot. But Brian emerges from the lair of the minotaur with his new conquest. A bright, gold covered box. Beowulf emerging from the depths would have looked no less triumphant.

And like all secret talismans, ordinary folks like me have no idea what it does. For more on that, e-mail the guitar wizard himself at shortpunksinlove@sbcglobal.net But make sure you have the secret password, the magic phrase that will open wonderous worlds: short punks rule.

God speed, brave warriors.

Chick Drummer Has Moved

Omigod did you leave the band?

No. I didn't leave the band. At the Blogher conference I received some good information about expanding the Chick Drummer to its own blog so that I can explore more issues about women and music. I also wanted to devote some time to writing about our shows in general. So this blog, Short Punks in Love, will be about our shows, rehearsals, recordings, podcasts, etc.

So, if you're looking for Chick Drummer, go to: http://chickdrummer.wordpress.com/

I'm new to wordpress so let me know if there are things that I should change on the new blog. And if you subscribe, don't forget to add the link.

Meanwhile, stay connected here for news on SPiL!

Thanks for reading!!

Walking a Cat

Brian took Rosie for a walk today. Well, sort of. Rosie is a cat. Cats don’t get walked. They get tethered. And once you tether them, you better be prepared for the cat to make the rules. Cats always make the rules, but it is only when you leash them and try to make them act like something that they are not that you begin to realize finally that they are not dogs or weasels or horses. They are cats. They live by their own rules.

Brian has been sick. And his daily perambulation consists of sitting on the porch with Rosie on his lap while he sniffles and coughs at the August sunshine. Brian hates summer. Having a cold during the summer just makes a bad situation worse. So while he sits on the porch and hates his cold and his summer and longs for the bite of a Chicago winter, Rosie sits with him

Today, however, she seemed more enchanted by the outdoors than usual and rather than sit contentedly on Brian’s lap while nature came to her, she decided to investigate nature. This meant an attempted leap off the porch. The only thing stopping her was my hand on her tail and Brian’s hand at her collar. That’s when I suggested he leash her. We tried using a harness once, but she bucked it like a wild horse bucks a saddle. She leapt up and down throughout the living room and kitchen, toppling guitars and chairs before I had the presence of mind to grab her by the back of her neck like a mother cat grabs a kitten while Brian unbuckled the harness.

Now, we just attach the leash to her collar. She gets the idea anyway. She knows she’s attached to something and instead of going to explore as we think she would, she sits down instead and bats at the leash or pulls at it with her head. This is perhaps the only time when she seems like a dog – rather, a puppy. Which, by the way, is one of the ironic nicknames we use for both cats – “puppy.”

So Rosie sat there on the porch peering at her green leash while Brian waited at the bottom of the stairs. It was there that I remembered a story I read – the only story I remember, really, and not even a story at that – about Shelley Manne, the drummer. Manne was a great drummer who began during the big band era. I still remember my first sight of him on a DVD of jazz drummers. He sat on a riser above the band behind a white drum kit with a bass drum the size of a coffee table. He had a solo. The bandleader signaled him, but instead of a flashy Buddy Rich solo, the kind I had been accustomed to seeing, Manne did something subtle instead. A quick roll. A swinging beat on the hi-hat, and then without hesitation he moved to the floor tom and changed to a slower tempo but it still swung. You could hear all the beats even when he wasn’t playing them. Wow. And he was cute, too.

What’s that guy’s name?” I asked Brian who was holding the remote.

“I don’t know. Let’s see…” He skipped back on the DVD. “Shelley Manne.”

Be still my heart. Shelley Manne. Where are you?

Turns out, he’s dead. Long since.

A quick Wikipedia search told me he had died. That was all I really learned aside from the usual listing of recordings and famous appearances and friendships with other musicians. But that’s not what I wanted to know. I wanted to know some story, see some picture of the musician that would help me see what kind of person he could have been. A few weeks later I ordered a book about him from the library. In the dim light of my library carrel I skimmed over the names of records and appearances and then I read an anecdote about where he grew up. His father was a music director in New York City and young Shelley, perhaps no more than 7 or 8, would walk his cat on a leash through Central Park.

Walk his cat on leash through Central Park. That’s what I needed. Every time I see him play or even think of him playing I see that picture of him in my head – a young boy in short pants, a boat under his arm, walking toward the pond in Central Park with a cat on a leash. A cat that undoubtedly would stop and sit and pluck at his leash rather than walk.

So this morning, while I watched Rosie chew on her green leash and while I watched Brian wait patiently for her to notice him and not the leash, I saw in my mind a young Shelley Manne, seven years from his first drum set, try to walk a cat through Central Park. It’s these odd pictures years apart in different cities and lifetimes, but which are remarkably similar that remind that we are all the same and that once Shelley Manne, just like me, had to learn to play triplets, or hold his sticks properly, or accentuate a beat, or come in from a break. That’s why stories about famous people are so comforting to us. We realize that’s once they were just like us – just like us trying to walk a cat on a leash.

The Magic of Elephants

About a month after I started playing the drums, we got a gig at the Red Line Tap and I suggested instead of practicing at home that we should rent a rehearsal space for a few hours to hear how we sound at a louder volume. We found a practice space just south of Wicker Park in the old industrial district that rented rooms with equipment for $10.00 an hour. Ten dollars got us a room full of amplifiers, a P.A., and a drum set. The usually smelled of sweat, bear, and stale smoke which filtered in from one end of the hallway where people were allowed to smoke since smoking wasn’t allowed in the rooms themselves. For me, the advantage of playing there was being able to hear myself play loud. At home, I covered my drum et with an assortment of kitchen towels and placements to dampen the sound, but no matter what I did to the drum set, it was loud, so loud that if Brian was playing it, which he often did when he was recording a new song, I could hear it halfway down the block. Despite my enthusiasm to learn to rock, at 38 years-old, I could imagine how annoying it would be for the next door neighbor who just moved into that million dollar single family home next door to hear me banging on drums at one o’clock in the afternoon. So I covered them with towels and did my best to play quietly. But that’s antithetical to the instrument and in order to hear how I really sounded, especially when I played with Brian, we had to rent a practice space by the hour in four-story factory building. The first time we went, Brian insisted on bringing his own tube amplifier, which is a heavy kind of thing be carrying up four factory flights of stairs. As time went on and the more we practiced there, the less we brought so that eventually I only brought drumsticks and a bottle of water and Brian brought his guitar and his pedals. It was on one of those evenings that I discovered the magic of playing music.

It was an awful rehearsal. I sucked that night. There was something going on in my head. I thought everything I played sounded terrible and at the same time I could play what I heard in my head. Brian would hit some chords and in my head, I would think: “Okay, double snare hits, right here.” Instead I would miss the space to play them entirely and I would play out of rhythm. I stopped several times, just gripped with a kind of panic, that all of sudden, after almost a year of practicing I couldn’t play even the simplest thing – something I could have played in the first month. Each mistake just made me more panicked until I became focused only on what I couldn’t do and not what I could do. After an hour, I felt paralyzed. I sat behind the drum set almost unable to move. It was made worse by the fact that we weren’t at home, where I could get up, take a break, maybe have a cup a tea and then come back in an hour. Here we were paying to play and I wanted to make the two hours worth the money we spent on it. My shoulders slumped over. I sighed. Brian smiled sympathetically.

“What’s wrong?”

“I feel like I can’t play.”

“But we’ve played this before. We’ve played it out.”

“I know. There’s just something going on my head. I think I can’t play.”

“You can play.”

I sighed. If I was a Peanuts cartoon, someone could have looked at me and seen the word balloon with SIGH written in it above me. I almost didn’t know what to do. I tried for a few minutes, continually looking at the clock, thinking “another hour.” Then after half an hour, “another half-hour.” And then later, “okay, it’s 15 minutes before the end of the reservation, I can pack up now.”

The two hours ended with me, unhappy and depressed – dejected. I wanted to give up. Who was a I kidding anyway? The thought was embedded in my brain as we walked down the four flights of stairs to the street. I barely spoke.

I was in front of Brian, opening the door, so I saw them first. It was 10 o’clock at night, dark in the street between the factory buildings, but even in the darkness I could see the huge forms of grey elephants, walking tail to trunk. I stopped. My mouth opened slightly and then as if I was twelve, I shouted “Elephants!”

There they were a line of four or six elephants lumbering gracefully with their giant padded feet down a street in a Chicago. Next to them were keepers, who smiled as I shouted. What it must be like to take elephants for a walk down a street in Chicago! I heard a footsteps racing down the staircase behind me and the door burst open. One of the managers of the practice space had raced down the four flights.

“I saw them from upstairs,” he said, breathing heavily. “And I wanted to see them up close.”

The three of us stood there, watching, mouths slightly agape as a short little parade of elephants and then zebras passed in front of us quietly and calmly. And it was in that moment of awe, of wonderment, that I forgot the very thoughts that had kept me paralyzed for the last two hours. For three endless minutes, it wasn’t about me being disappointed in myself and fearful of the future, but me with elephants and zebras standing in wonderment of the circumstances that brought all of us together.

“Where are they coming from?” I asked the manager.

“The circus is at United Center and there’s a loading ramp to the trains behind the building so they walk them to load them into the train.”

“Wow.” I said

“Yeah.”

The last zebra twitched its tail in good-bye to us as the parade receded into the dark, damp mist of a Chicago November night. From that night on, I tried, whenever the fear of my inadequacy loomed large in my head, to think of elephants, and their magic which helped me forget that the largest part of who I am is not the part that can’t do something, but the part that can.

The Green Elephant

Making your dreams come true is one thing. Practicing to make them come true is another.

I had the drum set – hunter green – set-up in the spare bedroom (now known as the “music room” after we removed Brian’s desk and the books). But owning a drum set isn’t the same as playing it. And because of the flu, for the first 2 weeks, I barely touched it. When I did, I sat on the drum stool (“throne” I eventually learned later), hitting things sort of aimlessly. I was timid with this new monstrosity that took up all the available space in the bedroom the way an elephant takes up the space around a small circus stool. Oddly though, I felt huge behind the drums rather than small. I thought I would feel small behind it overwhelmed by the drums that I didn’t know how to use and the bronze cymbals that seemed to loud in that too small space. Instead, I felt like an elephant trying to balance a huge foot on a small table. Everything seemed too small as I hit a drum head with a stick. And I seemed too big. Out of place behind the set. I feel I didn’t fit. This wasn’t me … yet.

Learning to make that drum set feel like a part of me rather than a set of false limbs was what practicing came to mean to me. The more I practiced, the more I realized I was learning how to live as me rather than just learning how to play the drums. This realization came one day during one of those tortuous practice sessions when I would bash at the heads and sound would come out, but nothing that sounded like music. Or, to put it more simply, I was not playing anything that even I wanted to hear.

On the rubber practice pad, I had begun to feel as if playing the drums was possible. Without the loud, real sound of a stick hitting a drum head on a huge birch shell, I could feel like I was playing really well. Yeah, I rock, I thought, as I heard the muffled fwack-fwack of the drum stick on the rubber. Fwack-fwack, fic-fic, fwack-fwack.. Oh yes, I definitely rock.

The day I took those sticking exercises to a real drum set for the first time was the moment I realized that I had only learned half of it. On those drumheads, that fwack-fwack sounded like bash-bash-rattle, bash-rattle-bash. When I tried to play softer, thinking if I lowered the volume of what I was playing, it would sound better all I heard was a whooshing rattle noise that buzzed in the air long after I played it. That’s when I felt as if learning how to play the drums was one of the most misguided ideas I have ever had and I had a few in my lifetime.

I sat there on that stool, dejected. My heart fell into my shoes. And the sticks, felt heavy and leaden in my hands. What happened to that magic daydream that I had in my head? How was I going to get there from here? I put the sticks down and walked away from the kit. I stayed away for a few weeks. Whenever I walked by the room and saw that green drum set, it looked like a huge face, opening its huge bass drum mouth and mocking me: You can’t play me. Ha-ha. You can’t play me.

I started to wonder if I should sell it. Post a picture of it Craig’s List and buy a futon for that room and some plants. Maybe make a library.

The drum set had arrived on the December 23^rd, but because of the holidays and my teacher’s departure to Texas to plan his wedding, our next lesson wasn’t for another 3 or 4 weeks. I continued practicing on the rubber practice pad, where I felt safe. At my next lesson, Ben asked if I had found a drum set. I triumphantly told him I had.

“Awesome!!”

I told him how much I paid and that it had been delivered to me by a filmmaker in Milwaukee who was on his way to Indiana to film a documentary.

“That’s a great deal,” he said. “And it was delivered to you! Well, we have to teach you something you can play on it.”

We do? I thought. You’re going to help me conquer that green elephant in my possibly-soon-to-be a library?

That’s when Ben had me move my stool up to the drum set that sat in the basement of Andy’s Music where he gave lessons.

I tensed. I was sitting behind another drum set and that feeling that said you will never do this in your whole life even if you tried returned.

“Okay,” Ben said. “You’re going to learn the basic rock beat.” While he talked I tried to breathe while he wrote the notes on tabulature. He showed me how to read the notes: the middle note was snare; the bottom note, bass; and the row of x’s on the top, hi-hat. All those violin lessons were finally paying off. At least I can read notes across a page, but the hard part was going to make my limbs recognize that the middle note wasn’t an “A” but a snare hit. Over the course of an hour, Ben helped me discover a new road into the mysterious land of that drum set. The hi-hat clicked out the time in eighth notes: one-and-two-three-and-four-and. Chik-chik-chik-chik-chik-chik-chik-chik. As I played it, I recognized it as that sound I hear in most songs that ticks out the beat, a high-sounding clicking that can be heard above the other sounds. Then, I learned the snare sound, a crack that came on the TWO and the FOUR. So, now I heard chik-chik-CRACK/chik-chik-chik-chik-CRACK/chik-chik. And finally, the bass drum, the boom underneath it all; that came on the ONE and the THREE. BOOM/chick-chick-CRACK/chik-chik-BOOM/chik-chik-CRACK/chik-chik.

OH MY GOD!! I thought. I’m playing the drums!!

And as soon as I heard it, it was gone. The booms fell on the cracks the chik disappeared altogether and I was playing the same noisy-bashing I played at home. I looked to Ben, expecting either disappointment or concern.

Instead Ben’s face flashed a huge smile: “Awesome!! That rocked!”

“It did?”

“Yeah, you got it. Now, you just have to practice it.”

Practice I did. I practiced and practiced it until I could play that plain old rock beat for 3 minutes. At first it came for only a few seconds, then a full minute, and then, one snowy, sub-zero afternoon, I heard that rock beat come steady and loud and I knew I had tamed that elephant. The mocking maw of that bass drum was vanquished, and instead of the drum set being a land too small or too large for me, it was a place that was beginning to be made just for me. It was on that day that I discovered how music could be a place to go to not only to escape, the most obvious reason, but also to discover – to discover who I was going to be now and what I was going to do now.