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Or maybe the lost George Berz interview…
Or the lost Pat Murphy interview!!
Heck! Pat deseves a real Modern Drummer interview! He’s almost a ALT ROck institution.
He is a very different drummer then J. Sounds like he is also a different kind of drummer from George. He is all out front and spontanious ( at least in the way he keeps time as J has said the drum parts are all figured out.) J is reserved. I have not heard George play but I bet he is also more reserved.
Does anyone know if Pat has played on anything besides the Lemonheads and Dinousaur Jr. (All White Jury does not really count…)
The picture you are thinking of was here
http://www.cityslang.com/bandseiten/mascis/mascis_frame.htmlat Js section of city slang record’s site in the "Downloads" section.
I don’t know why they took it off their site. I think I saved a copy but I don’t have any web space to keep it on. And it’s not really my picture anyway.
For some reason I don’t think that was J’s kit. I think those photos were taken in Englend so unless he was travelling with his own kit, it must have been a set of drums in some studio over there. It was not George Berz’s kit as he has a Ludwig clear plastic "Vistalite" kit (I think…)
Hey anyone know about George Berz and his drums??
Thanks for posting a response Allison.
Uhh….
Nobody seems to be interested in this topic!
Well…. I have some things to add to this. I suppose I am just one of those longwinded types…
I have seen J play drums a number of times. I never went to any of the Deep Wound gigs or the GobbleHoof gigs. But J was in the jazz band in high school. I remember they played a couple of times in the cafeteria at lunch time. J seemed to go out of his way to look especially strange. Some people would sit there saying "What a freak!" Others thought he was totally cool.
He really did not seem to be into jazz too much but he did the silly ding ding da ding jazz rhythm pretty good. But then he would get to his drum solo. This is J with his head nearly shaved. He sort of held his breath or something and made the veins pop out on his forehead. He had a set of four large roto-toms in front of him. He somehow made it sound like he was doing a one stroke roll on all four drums at the same time. And roto-toms are these whimpy tunable drums so they looked like they were all about to fall all over the place and break. So there he was with he head beet red, with an intense grimace on his face, drum sticks flailing away in a blur… I don’t think words do him justice.
Then he would go back to normal and let someone do a mellow saxophone solo or something….
Everyone I knew was really impressed with J’s drumming anyway.
I also saw J play drums at a Dino Jr. concert in the late 80s. They basically switched instruments and did a hard-core song at the end of the gig. I think it was an "All White Jury" song. Pat sang (yelled really.) Lou switched to guitar and J played drums. This switching of instruments was something that Deep Wound was known for. I don’t think J has done anything like that since Lou got kicked out of Dino Jr. Maybe someone can tell us other wise.
Any way I remember J sitting there with this silly look he would get on his face sometimes. He did not play anything spectacular but he sort of looked strangely fascinated. He just sat there hitting the very edge of the ride cymbal as he played, with a look on his face like he was thinking "THIS IS COOL!" He looks like he gets totally lost in his playing when he plays guitar. But when drumming J looks like he is sitting there drinking a soda or something, thinking about what he is going to do tomorrow.
Or maybe he was just enjoying hitting the cymbal…
Hey!
You can get a non fender jazzmaster type wammy bar though Stewart Macdonald’s guitar supply http://stewmac.com Melody makers are kind of dippy looking but I think it might look a little better with that nice chrome wammy bar hardware on there. Some tell me that a Jazzmaster type wammy does not work well. But they do look cool.
Maybe this idea would work better with a les paul jr or a Les Paul copy… I never really liked the way a Les Paul looked. But the genuine article is too expensive to mess with.
