As seen in the December 2011 issue of DRUM!.

In late September, the monsoon rains are unyielding. At this time of year, some 10″ can fall in a month, the height of the wet season in Cambodia. The rains make the surrounding countryside lush and verdant, but are so unwieldy for the Mekong River that, bulging at its banks, it expels the water into the nearby Tonlé Sap River. The incredible torrent of water from the Mekong — enough to increase its flow by a factor of 50 — forces the 125-mile-long Tonlé Sap to completely reverse its flow and empty into a lake of the same name, flooding the surrounding forest and expanding the body of water to ten times its usual size.

After the Mekong’s waters crest, usually in late October, the Tonlé Sap’s flow reverts to its proper direction, and water flushes out of the enlarged lake. When the river’s flow reverses, fish flow with it, toward the millions of people who live in the capital city of Phnom Penh. It is said that the annual process is a pressure-release valve for the river system.

Just north of the lake, Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor is wandering about, exploring the sandstone galleries of the temple of Angkor Wat. For two weeks, Dailor will be here, as far as humanly possible from his day job and lost in the lens of his camera. He’s quick to insist that he likes the beach just like any other guy, but the truth is that Dailor seeks adventure — and his search for man-made wonder has brought him to the world’s largest religious building, a sprawling series of stone towers from the 12th century.

Unsurprisingly, the complex is almost completely surrounded by water. Legend has it that the ancient city of Angkor Wat collapsed six centuries ago after a relentless barrage of droughts and floods. Experts say the stress was too much to bear.

Dailor can identify. For the next two weeks, he will do everything — anything — but play drums. After a 22-hour flight back to his home in Atlanta, he will fly north to New York City to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman, promoting his band’s new album, The Hunter.

For a heavy-metal band like Mastodon, describing an album as “heavy” is almost too simple. And yet that’s precisely what it is. Sonically, it’s of great weight to the ears, with crackling drums, sludgy guitar riffs, and plenty of attitude. But more importantly, it is what flowed forth from the band’s minds after considerable duress — a pressure-release valve for the pent-up stress of a death in the family. It was too much to bear.

TRAGEDY

Bradley Ray Hinds died in December 2010. An avid outdoorsman, he had been out on a hunting trip in Alabama when he suffered a heart attack.

At the time, Brad’s brother Brent — the scraggly, bearded fellow better known as Mastodon’s frontman — had just kicked off the first official studio sessions for the band’s next album. Dailor, Hinds, bassist Troy Sanders, and guitarist Bill Kelliher were excited to begin recording again.

“We had a bunch of things loosely together but we decided to put the wheels in motion and record. When we start, we have to finish — our music is like milk; it has a short shelf life. If we come back to it, it might not have the same [vigor].”

The men of Mastodon had spent more than a year touring the world behind their previous album, Crack The Skye, including a string of dates with Deftones and a reformed Alice In Chains. That album was an homage to Dailor’s sister, who committed suicide at age 14. The band, wearied in more ways than one after the better part of nine years on the road, was looking forward to a fresh start. Reinvigorated after a month-and-a-half sabbatical, they moved into a new practice space, split into three separate rooms: jam room, studio, live room. Then they pored through the sketches of ideas they had scribbled down during those many months on the road.

“During the Alice In Chains tour, it was an arena tour. It’s hard to leave the arena. It’s very contained. There’s always this fear you’ll get locked outside before the show. You’re staying close, in some hockey locker room. We had amps backstage and Bill and Troy would jam. If we heard anything good, I’d grab my phone and record it. When we got home, we had almost the entire record there on my phone, just the riffs. It was a good jumping-off point.”

They began writing. Then the phone rang. Brad had died.

“I wasn’t sure how Brent was going to react. He stayed with his family in Birmingham. Around February, we picked things up again. It felt like he needed to be down there [in the studio] and be busy. I’d call him every day — a couple of weeks it was just me and him down there, and we wrote a ton of stuff. We were having a lot of fun with each other, writing. The songs on the record all sounded triumphant. They sounded like the distraction that they were.”

At first listen, you’d have a hard time discerning that The Hunter is anything but a mindlessly fun rock record to blast out the windows of a highway-bound car. The opener’s title, “Black Tongue,” references that part of a parrot. The lead single, “Curl Of The Burl,” is an absurd narrative about a cast of characters on methamphetamines who use chainsaws to fell trees to sell their knotty growths for more drugs. “Blasteroid” is a child-like attempt to lash out in violence. “Stargasm” is about sex in outer space.

“In the past, we’d retool stuff to death. Play it over and over and try it this way and that way. This one was different. We just didn’t really meditate on things for too long. It was very scatterbrainish.”

But dig deeper into the middle of the album and a more sincere sentiment emerges. “Octopus Has No Friends” is really about returning home after months on tour. “All The Heavy Lifting” prompts you to “just close your eyes and pretend that everything’s fine.” And the title track is a pensive, pained ode to Brent’s brother.

“Mastodon is what we know. Mastodon is that normalcy that you want when something crazy happens. I wanted that to be there for him. An engineer friend came down [to the studio] with us every day and we’d write lyrics and songs. A lot of the stuff ended up being really instinctual — whatever parts followed after a riff. We wouldn’t revisit it.”

The band’s recording sessions became their own pressure-release valve. By February, the band met with producer Mike Elizondo, better known for producing major hip-hop acts such as Eminem but also Avenged Sevenfold’s 2010 album, Nightmare. From countless demos, they extracted 15 solid song ideas.

“We just went down to the practice space every day. It felt like it was the only thing we ever had any control over. If we go down there, we’re being active and productive.”

BEGINNINGS

Brann Dailor was probably three or four years old when he first picked up drum sticks, but it took him many years to perfect what he did with them.

“I’m self-taught and took the long way,” he said, grinning.

Dailor’s uncle played drums in his grandfather’s band, Cinnamon Road, which practiced in the attic of his grandparent’s house in Rochester, New York.

“I’d hear them constantly. I had really young parents and my grandparents helped out a lot. We were over there a lot. They had a jam room upstairs and a small practice kit, Rogers with an 18″ kick drum. An old ’70s kit. If I was over at my grandmother’s house, I was upstairs playing the drums. Any three- or four-year-old kid, given the choice, is going to want to bang on something. Then it took a turn where I could do it and keep a beat naturally and was pretty good at it. I had a lot of positive reinforcement from everyone: ‘Let’s go upstairs and watch Brann play the drums.’ I enjoyed the attention I got from it. I really felt comfortable back there.”

Dailor’s stepfather moved in when Dailor was five. He played drums in Dailor’s mother’s band, and the kit he installed in the living room was far larger than the small Rogers kit Dailor played at his grandparent’s place.

“A huge Neil Peart–looking drum set in the living room. I couldn’t play that kit because it was just too big. There are pictures of me sitting behind it, but I just couldn’t reach around it. A giant tower of cymbals going all the way up.”

It was the late 1970s. His mother’s band reveled in progressive rock and heavy metal, playing covers of Rush, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath.

“Mom loved Judas Priest and we jammed it all the time. I naturally gravitated toward that heavier stuff. The imagery attracted me: Iron Maiden had monsters on their album covers. It was cool.”

By age nine, Dailor’s uncle gave him the Rogers kit, but it was dilapidated and lacked parts. At age 13, Dailor’s Mom sprung for a new 5-piece Pearl kit. Dailor couldn’t contain his excitement.

“I never took lessons, I was really self-taught. Kids would get dropped off and I started jamming with everybody. We’d eke out versions of Metallica songs.”

All that jamming led to a proper band. Through the late 1980s, Dailor would spend hours in the basement, honing technique while playing with friends.

“My drumming started advancing somehow. I would hit new plateaus. I’d challenge myself a lot. Eric Burke, our guitar player — we’d jam together. I never knew you were supposed to jam with a bass, so I’d follow what guitarists were doing. I’d follow along on my toms. That’s sort of why my style got so busy, I guess.”

When he turned 15, Dailor acquired a “big, ugly rocker kit” with double bass pedals and a rack of toms. His prog-rock band channeled early Genesis and King Crimson, called itself Lethargy, and began playing around Rochester.

By 1994, Lethargy was drawing crowds. The band started booking regional gigs in Syracuse and Cleveland.

“At that point I was like, Okay, I need to figure out how I’m going to do this for a living. I’m 21 — I’m going to give it a shot. But some of the guys in the band weren’t exactly on the same page, and didn’t want to tour.”

Dailor didn’t know where to turn. Then the phone rang. Dailor’s good friend Dave Witte, then of punk outfit Human Remains, needed a drummer for a tour. He took the offer and moved everything he owned to rural Clinton, Massachusetts.

“We wrote a record in a month. We needed a bass player, and I called Bill [Kelliher]. We lived in the recording studio, on couches. We toured with Napalm Death. It was awesome. Exactly what I was looking for.”

But Clinton was hardly the place for an aspiring young rocker — “There were no girls in Clinton,” Dailor admits with a smile — so he soon skipped town with Kelliher and resettled in Atlanta. His girlfriend — now wife — had a job down here at the CDC.

“I had never been there before,” he says. “We met the other guys at Mastodon within two weeks at some basement show; High On Fire was playing. It came together really fast. We started booking tours, and over the next five years just pounded the pavement — basements, VFW halls, any tour that would take us.”

Things moved quickly. After recording a demo in 2000, the band produced its first full-length album, Remission, for Relapse Records, in 2002. Met with positive reception, the album’s two singles — “March Of The Fire Ants” and “Crusher/Destroyer” — took off, the latter appearing in the video game Tony Hawk’s Underground. The band’s second full-length album, Leviathan, appeared in 2004 and garnered the band critical acclaim, exposure, and a major-label record deal with Warner Bros. Blood Mountain came in 2006, with tours with metal giants Tool, Slayer, and Metallica in tow; Crack The Skye followed in 2009.

In just ten years, Dailor went from playing Metallica and Iron Maiden covers in the basement to opening for them on stage in Europe. He still can’t quite believe his trajectory.

“I’ve had my moments with Lars [Ulrich] and Nicko [McBrain]. I’ve dorked out on those guys pretty hardcore. They know. They’re aware.”

HUNTING FOR SOUND

If there’s a musical difference in Dailor’s playing on The Hunter, it’s that he sits in the groove far more often than usual. It’s the result of not overthinking his playing and rejecting perfectionist impulses to rework recorded pieces.

“One part of me was excited because it was different. I like that feeling — the pressure of having to get it done. I dig being scared of something new. The things we decided to do this time were not big, lofty concepts. The songs were a lot more straightforward and stripped down. A lot more groove. I really liked that aspect of it. As we moved through the process, I’d second-guess it a little bit but then listen through it and wonder what else we could do to that song. I really enjoy that we turned down some streets and didn’t turn around.”

At 36, it’s also an approach that’s becoming easier with age.

“It was way more fun to play a sick groove and find it and sit in it and work it. It’s a great place to sit. It’s something I do when I go and jam by myself. I like to sink in — I love that feeling.”

The need to release energy in a time of crisis was one reason for Dailor’s groove-focused playing on the new album, but another was producer Elizondo, who worked with Dailor to find the right sounds.

“He let it be known early on that he wanted to work with us. I guess he’d been wanting to do a record with us for a few years. So I talked to him on the phone and he came down to Atlanta and we ate some tacos. He did an Avenged Sevenfold record — we heard that and he obviously doesn’t want to change us. He’s a very musical guy. He’s an amazing bass player. He’s a prog nerd. And he’s got a great personality. Being a producer, you have to be good with people.”

The result of Elizondo’s touch is an album that’s much more groove-oriented than anything Mastodon has done in the past, with a drum sound that’s more expressive than is conventionally found on albums produced by heavy metal producers.

“He paid a lot of attention to the drums. We worked together to get the baddest sound. Coming in, one of his stipulations was that if I wanted to go down the road of getting the Phil Collins tom sounds, he’d come with me — but I had to rip off the bottoms of those toms to get those ‘barking toms.’ He was totally down with that. Not into sound replacement at all. The drums have to have character.”

Elizondo didn’t fully indulge Dailor, however, and occasionally pushed him to the brink to extract moments of brilliance from spontaneity.

“We did 15 drum tracks in, like, five days. I just worked. I went into machine mode. I did Remission in, like, a day and a half; a lot of those are first takes. Some [others] could have been first takes, but we did ten takes just to see by accident if something would happen. Tried different fills. It was fun, but toward the end it got a little stressful for me. It was a lot. At one point I was just done playing drums.”

NEXT STEPS

At Mastodon headquarters in Atlanta, the excitement for The Hunter is at a fever pitch.

“I think we’re in a really awesome position,” says Dailor. “Everyone who’s heard the record thinks it’s great. We’ve surprised ourselves. Everybody’s buzzing. Can’t wait to get out there and tour it. I love this little spot in time right before a record comes out and no one’s heard it and you’ve heard it and a select group have heard it. We sort of have this little secret. We love the music so much that we’re dying to share it with everybody.”

As the band’s U.S. headlining tour in October nears, Dailor is unsure how the band will approach playing such a sensitive record — and song — that represents both the excitement of a new direction and the tragedy of the environment in which it was written. The promotional push behind the album is also top of mind. As the band retells the story behind the album at every new stop along the tour, it could prevent Hinds’ emotional wound from healing properly.

As someone who also lost a sibling, Dailor can relate.

“Grief is weird. You go into a corner and lick your wounds. You’d think it’d bring people together, but it doesn’t. It has this opposite effect. You can’t look at each other.”

On the other hand, the gradual exorcising of the band’s demons may help it grow stronger in the long term.

“I would hope that [Hinds] could look at me in the room with him and think, ‘Yeah, this dude knows.’ Now he knows what I knew for a long time. Now he understands what I’ve felt, that initial blow. He understands me more. It made it easier to be in the room together and make this record. It’s something that we can share.”

[Read it on DRUM magazine's website here.]

As seen in the October 2011 issue of DRUM! magazine.

Prince, that golden, glittering sultan of synth-funk, steps onstage to a tremendous roar from the crowd. He’s mere measures into his opening single, “Laydown,” but the audience is absolutely electrified. The six members of The New Power Generation are rocking their heads back and forth, their silhouettes gyrating in front of a massive LED display. The bass drum is pounding, the snare drum is cracking, and the synthesizers are buzzing as Prince plants one sparkling gold shoe in front of him, grabs the gleaming steel strings on his blonde Fender Telecaster, and pulls. Hard.

A wail from just off stage pierces the cacophony. It’s guttural, visceral, and entirely natural, given the thick funk groove permeating the air.

It’s Jay Lane, rocking out.

It was only hours ago that Lane, drummer of avant-garde folk-prog-rock outfit Primus, finished a furious 14-song set with an extended version of the band’s 1989 scat-funk classic “Tommy The Cat.” That was before, when the sky over this small city in Poland was still gray and not dark, when 30’-tall inflatable astronauts flanked Lane on stage, when several kids were crowd surfing with arms held high as frontman Les Claypool spit distorted prose through a Shure Green Bullet Harmonica mike.

It was funky, no doubt about it. Heads were bobbing, guitars were squealing, and the syncopation was in full swing. It’s the kind of tightly wound aural chaos that elicits a jerky, frenetic series of motions that society has in years past dubbed simply “the white boy dance.” It’s the kind of music that’s best suited for accompaniment by time-lapse cartoon animals drinking at a bar named O’Malley’s Alley.

But now, on this enormous festival stage in the small city of Gdynia, Jay Lane is grooving to an entirely different kind of funk. This one cuts deep. It’s loose, and eminently sexy. It’s the molasses to Primus’ Pixy Stix; a two-tone ’71 Cadillac Eldorado to an ’87 Toyota Tercel. And Lane’s brown curls are bouncing in unison as rock royalty shreds before his eyes.

“I was a big Prince fan back in the ’80s,” Lane says. “I heard we would be in a festival with him. I thought we would be on a separate stage, but we were on right before him, same stage. I was really honored to play right before him. We actually got to watch him from side stage. He’s 53 years old, jumping around like he’s 20. I was such a big fan that, standing there that close to him, it didn’t feel like it was real.”

But just as Prince returned to the stage for his first of four encores, Lane was told exactly what he didn’t want to hear: time to go.

“We had to leave to get to the next town. I walked back to get into the car and they came back and started the song ‘Cool’ and I was like, ‘Aw, man, we’re missing more fun.’”

Such is the life of a touring professional. Now that Lane has rejoined the band he played for more than two decades ago — he jokingly called himself “the Pete Best of Primus,” referencing the original Beatles drummer’s untimely early exit — he’s been spending more time on the stage than in front of it.

There’s a silver lining, however. A friend of the band’s Polish monitor technician makes kick drum pedals for a living, and he gave Lane one to take on the road. Lane is simply stoked.

“It’s unbelievable. Like an Axis pedal, but machine-shopped like nothing I’ve ever seen. [Made by a company called] Czarcie Kopyto. These things are sick. They have pentagrams on their design and s__t — the devil’s hoof kick drum pedal. Unbelievably made. I’d like to help them try to promote it in the States. It’s like a tank.”

But it’s not just Lane’s gear-head tendencies that have him excited about the new equipment. For the past year, he’s been working feverishly to catch up on a revered band that spent its most acclaimed years without him, generating somewhat of a cult following for its two mononymous drummers: Tim “Herb” Alexander and Brian “Brain” Mantia. Lane has been poring over the studio recordings, trying to learn every twist and turn. The new pedal, he thinks, might give him a leg up — literally.

“The footboards are totally married to the pedal, as opposed to using a bicycle chain or strap. You can pick up the footboard without moving the beater. Some of these Herb beats, I’m playing on the hi-hat and switching my foot to the left kick drum pedal. Picking your foot up mid-air, if that thing’s swinging [when your foot comes down on it] …

“Herb’s like the double kick drum master. When I heard about this gig and started to practice a lot for it, there was a point when I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this.’ I wanted to be able to do it justice. Primus is a certain level of technical proficiency. I was trying to live up to that, and still am.”

HISTORY

It’s a warm, rain-free day in Manchester, but Jay Lane is inside and feeling a little groggy. He’s been strategically taking naps during the day in anticipation of returning to the U.S., and the fogginess hasn’t yet left him when the maid knocks on the door to warn him that it’s nearly time to check out.

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks. Lane, Claypool, and guitarist Larry LaLonde have seen Finland, Norway, and most of western Europe in a rapid build-up to the group’s first official tour since reforming in March 2010. For six years, Claypool and LaLonde had been resting on their laurels and touring on the merits of the band’s deep catalog. Now, with Lane in place, they are striving to bring new music to the stage, in a preview of their eighth proper studio album, Green Naugahyde.

Tomorrow, London; in three days, Washington, D.C. Lane can’t wait to get started.

“We’ve been out here for a month. It’s going really good out here. The crowds have been great. Really receptive. We’ve been trying out a lot of new material. I’m so happy to be back on this gig. I used to be in this band 22 years ago.”

Primus began in 1984 as a San Francisco Bay Area duo named Primate, sans a drummer. The band, bassist Les Claypool’s grand experiment in combining the rhythm and blues influences of his post–high school group The Tommy Crank Band with the progressive rock of King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew, recorded its first demo on the profits from the sale of Claypool’s Mercury Cougar. In short order, the tape fell into the hands of local radio DJ “Big” Rick Stuart and the band — by this time named Primus — began attracting audiences in Berkeley.

By 1988, Claypool and guitarist Todd Huth had exhausted four different drummers. Despite the instability behind the kit, the band continued to generate buzz.

While Primus got its sea legs across town, Jay Lane was pursuing his own eclectic brand of music as the drummer for The Freaky Executives, an immensely popular Latin-inspired funk outfit whose members couldn’t be caught without a white button-down, black skinny tie, and shiny fedora.

“It was an eight-piece not unlike Prince And The Time. Very Jellybean Johnson–influenced.”

As the Executives struggled with internal turmoil stemming from overtures from a major record label, Lane volunteered to join acquaintance Claypool’s band.

“When I was in Primus back in 1988, we did a demo tape called Sausage, not to be confused by the album in 1994 by the same name. We did it on a Tascam 488 quarter-inch [recorder] and sold the cassette tape — a six-song EP — at gigs. It was some of the classic Primus tunes they rerecorded for Frizzle Fry and Suck On This.”

But soon The Freaky Executives’ record label issues smoothed over. Seeing opportunity elsewhere, Lane gave Claypool his two weeks’ notice.

“Les was going to take the show on the road and I was already in The Freaky Executives for four years. I said ‘Sorry, man, I gotta stay true to this gig.’”

Claypool would replace his departing bandmates with LaLonde and Alexander, eventually signing a deal in 1990 with Interscope Records. The band would go on to headline Lollapalooza in 1993 and share the stage with prog heroes Rush while producing several classic albums of odd, irreverent, experimental rock.

“I never sat down and listened to Sailing The Seas Of Cheese and all the albums they did after I was in the band. In the back of my mind, I [now] think sometimes, well, yeah, I like the way I played this. I like my take, and that’s his take.”

While Primus gained attention, The Freaky Executives experienced further disagreement and called it quits. Lane soldiered on, exploring the wilds of where one musical style starts and another ends with a series of stints in bands of various styles: hip-hop group Alphabet Soup, jazz combo the Charlie Hunter Trio, and a side project-turned-full-time-gig with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir named RatDog.

Lane would go on to play with Weir for 17 years.

“The Grateful Dead stuff is really interesting because it’s a completely different style of playing. I really had to relax. I didn’t listen to The Dead when I was a kid and it took a long time to get used to that slower pace. There wasn’t so much parts, but grooving and improvising. It could be different day-to-day. This [Primus] stuff is very parts-oriented.”

Over the years, Lane kept in touch with Claypool and occasionally joined him in the studio and on the road under several monikers: Sausage, which toured with The Rollins Band; Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, which ventured into jam band territory; and Claypool’s Fancy Band, for a tour in 2005.

“After 17 years, I’m going back to the way I played before that. I’ve been trying to just get back to more on top of the beat. Getting the chops back, man. I’ve been getting new calluses on my hands. Some of the double bass drum stuff that Herb did, I didn’t really play that stuff before. Herb is a tremendous drummer. The big help has been that Les Claypool himself is a drummer and he’s an excellent coach. He knows how to point me in the right direction. How to get the drums sounding and the feel and getting on top of the beat.”

Now, with almost a year of gigging with Primus under his belt, Lane says he’s rekindling his desire for the band’s more idiosyncratic elements.

“I’m still developing it, man. We recorded this album; we were done in January. I’m already listening to it and going, ‘Aw, man, I wouldn’t do that again.’ It is what it is. It’s a work in progress. I’m continuously developing my style. I’m checking out a lot of badass drummers. Also listening to a lot of music I was listening to when I was back in Primus.”

He glances back at the door. The hotel maid is knocking again.

“I’m so happy to be on this gig,” he adds. “I hope it continues. It’s really helping me develop as a player and see myself as more of a drummer’s drummer.”

PREPARATION

Jay Lane is surrounded.

He’s sitting in a tiny rehearsal room, barely big enough for three musicians to set up shop, in San Rafael, California, not far from the business loop downtown, and down the stairs on the bottom floor of a building thought to be a former Industrial Light & Magic model shop.

On all four walls: carpet. The sound: a dull silence.

It’s not unlike the Emeryville, California rehearsal room Claypool used when Lane was in the band in ’88, the one just around the corner from the room in which Lane used to run through songs with The Freaky Executives.

Deep within the building complex, next to offices for a digital arts company, Lane is preparing for a year’s worth of gigs comprised of songs he never learned. In front of him sits a massive glittery gold Ludwig kit the company had on display during the 2010 NAMM show in Anaheim, California. It’s so large it wraps around him like a military field fortification.

“The first thing I did was look online for a picture of Herb’s kit. He’s got the Octobans. He’s got a fixed closed hi-hat. A China cymbal. I had to get these things.”

In this room, Lane will spend close to three months wailing along to vintage Primus tracks on the shiny kit before him. Around his ears: massive headphones. Down his face: streams of sweat droplets. His mission: Replicate those drummers before him, down to every flourish.

“I was amazed at how amazing Herb and Brain are as drummers. I thought, ‘I don’t even know if I could do this.’ I had my head up my ass a little bit about how good I was compared to them. Honestly, I was dumbfounded. I can’t believe I didn’t listen to the stuff all these years and thought it was stuff I could have done.

“I’m trying to get the muscle memory going. Learn the tunes. Learn the fills. I couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to do my take on this song.’ I had to become a fan of it, because the fans expect the songs to be played a certain way.”

“Of course, I could add something to it. But I had to get it down first. I wasn’t worried about not having my own style — whatever I did, it would come through — but I needed to know how it exactly goes. And I’m thinking about all the drummers who practice to Primus and probably know it better than I do.”

It’s still a work in progress. Lane says he’s still fine-tuning parts with every passing gig.

“I’m not sure there was ever a moment where I thought I had it down. Maybe I did, but I didn’t want to be cocky. You could tell by the audience reaction when you get the song right.”

The stakes are much higher now. With RatDog, Lane would play gigs to upwards of 3,500 people. At the Heineken Open’er Festival in July, Primus played to a crowd of 50,000. And the men in Primus aren’t in their twenties like they were when they first played together in the ’80s.

“It wasn’t as easy as before. I have two daughters. Les and Larry have kids, too. Thankfully, they don’t like to go out for longer [stints on tour]. With RatDog, we played on average 60 shows a year. We never really left for longer than two or three weeks. Sometimes a month, but that was rare. This time’s the same, but I’ve brought my family to Europe. We’re all coming up on [age] 50.

“It’s nothing like what you’d hear about bands going out for six months of the year — bands that break up because of the personal stuff. Some of these bands are home for five days, and then they’re gone again. It’s really rough.”

Lane shakes his head in disbelief as he thinks about his younger days on the road.

“A big part of it, and the big part of the reason I’m here, is that I’m easy to get along with. Vibe — that’s 60 or 70 percent of it. We only play for an hour-and-a-half a night. It’s the other 22 hours a day — the ‘constant hang.’ In RatDog, we had a few people who just couldn’t handle it. I’ve seen more than two guys just flip out.

“Touring isn’t for everybody. Being a musician and playing music is one thing, but touring is a whole different animal. You have to be able to put a lot aside for the greater good of the group. You don’t get a lot of time to yourself. You can’t do stuff when you want to do it. You’ve got to show up with a good attitude.”

RECORDING

“Play something.”

Claypool and Lane are in Claypool’s home recording studio, Rancho Relaxo, and the two are preparing to lay down basic tracks for what will eventually become Green Naugahyde.

Lane is sitting behind a drum kit and Claypool is perched behind the mixing board. For the next five minutes, Lane will play anything that comes to mind, hoping that within the dense pastiche of half-formed ideas he will uncover a “signature beat” — a “We Will Rock You”–strength drum riff — that will serve as a strong foundation for the band to drape its funk-influenced complications over.

Once a few baseline grooves emerge, Claypool lays vocals on top of the tracks, giving them more structure. It’s a drastic shift in process from Lane’s first go-around with Primus, when the young band played together first, recorded second.

“Those were the days when high-quality home recording didn’t exist. Primus existed in a rehearsal studio. When we did a demo tape, it was tunes we had played a bunch of times. Now, Les has a studio and we get in there and lay down something and we turn it into a song. There’s a complete song before we even play it [together]. That’s the way it is now, although I wouldn’t mind doing it the other way again. Secretly, I want to rerecord everything.”

This time, however, Lane brings a wealth of musical experience to the table. After a quarter-century of creative musical experiments — from the aforementioned RatDog to a short-lived rap collective called Band Of Brotherz — Lane’s myriad musical endeavors promise that Primus in its current form will be anything but stale.

“I have many friends who are musicians and I’m always talking about jamming and doing gigs. My childhood friend Dave Shul, from Spearhead, we share a rehearsal space and hope to get something going. It’s really important [to play with other people and keep creative] because it gives you a little perspective. If I didn’t have something else to bring to the table, it would be boring.”

Lane says he’s continually looking to peers — especially in other musical genres — for inspiration.

“I could sit here and say, ‘This isn’t my kind of music,’ or I could say, ‘Let’s check it out.’ I like all different kinds of music. There’s country music I like. The hip-hop thing — I actually like it a lot. I can see the influence everywhere.”

“I’ve gone through phases. Touring with RatDog, there was a time I bought a Conway Twitty cassette. I thought, ‘These vocals are clean.’ Bob Weir said I needed to listen to George Jones. So I did that for a month or two.”

Lane’s latest kick? Gospel music.

“I like chords and melodies as much as badass chops. Some of the singing and the ballads — I don’t care that they’re singing about the Lord and Jesus; it’s the spirituality of it, that good feeling.”

It’s also, Lane will admit, a way to keep stoking the creative fire as the band prepares to play 20 straight solo shows across the U.S.

“Let me taste it. Let me check it out. As I got older, got married, and had kids, it became, ‘I need this gig to feed my family.’ I can’t go out there and fake the funk. I gotta like it.”

[Read it on DRUM's website here.]

As seen in the August 2011 issue of DRUM magazine.

Jason McGerr is sitting on an elevated platform high above a massive Los Angeles soundstage, peering over his drum kit into complete darkness. McGerr has been coming to this room every day since he flew into town, along with the rest of his Death Cab For Cutie bandmates, to run through choreography for the music video of the first single of their new album, Codes And Keys. McGerr can’t see them, of course, but all three of his bandmates are standing, instruments ready, within a stone’s throw of him. But they are hidden in the shadows. Beyond them, members of a video crew peer over their camera equipment. Several costumed actors stand motionless in single-serving dioramas. A dozen sequined dancers, clad in tulle with plumed feather headpieces erect, take their marks.

“Here we go, guys. Picture, picture! First position!”

McGerr and his bandmates didn’t come to Hollywood just for the sunny weather, although at 70 degrees with a light westward breeze, it might be preferable to the tension hanging over this room (or to the perpetual gray of their native Seattle, for that matter). For this final take, there is no stopping, no adjustments, no do-overs. That’s because the indie rock quartet is here to try something the world has not yet seen: a fully scripted music video that will air live, worldwide, as it’s being filmed.

Despite all the apparent spectacle, the room is entirely quiet, except for the pulsing hum of the fog machine as it belches a billow of white smoke slowly across the floor.

“Here we go. Roll playback!”

On the back wall, a beam of green light draws nine jumbled triangles on the wall. Red and yellow and white lights from the video equipment twinkle, piercing the deep, heavy shadows like moonlight reflecting off the backs of crickets as they chirp through a humid summer’s night. McGerr’s forearms tense and his drum sticks waver as he prepares, patiently, for one last cue.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Waves of guitar feedback cascade across the room. Multicolored lights snake along the walls. McGerr lifts his wrists, preparing to snap them down on taut drum heads newly aglow thanks to blue LED bulbs surrounding them, triggered a moment ago by a woman sitting in front of a computer on the floor below.

A soft red glow emits from the left side of his chest, a green sparkle quickly strafes across his shoulders, turning into blue as the ray of light runs down his legs.

There’s no going back.

PART TWO: RECORD

Earlier on the set, frontman Ben Gibbard described the song “You Are A Tourist” as representative of the album as a whole. He called it balanced, with “equal parts light and dark.” It’s the kind of clash that comes with tremendous change. Between this album and the last, 2008’s Narrow Stairs, all four members of Death Cab For Cutie have experienced major life events: Gibbard and bassist Nick Harmer each got married; guitarist Chris Walla went through a major breakup and relocation; and McGerr became a father.

Suddenly, the band grew up.

“Everybody was put through the ringer,” McGerr, 37, says. “It’s very much a big fat bookmark on our lives.”

Anxious to release this cathartic energy, the band entered the studio with three times as many demos as they usually prepare for a record, some 45 songs written over two-and-a-half-years’ time.

“When we finally sat down to record, it was all killer, no filler in terms of our favorites. We didn’t go into the studio to make 15 or 25 songs work.”

The result: 11 tracks of restless, atmospheric music in which McGerr’s drums flutter and stride with metronomic precision, without ever overtaking the mix. On opener “Home Is A Fire,” McGerr decorates reverb-soaked guitar notes with hummingbird-like cymbal flourishes; on the album’s title track, he adds rhythmic punch to a groove first plunked out on piano keys.

“This is the most complete, confident, thorough recording that we’ve ever done as a band. Because of that confidence, I think I played less — made more choices to fit in where I could fit in, like a puzzle piece. I abandoned chops and everything that I ever studied to work for because I felt like I had more faith in the record than anything I’ve done in the past. I kind of let go. Everybody let go. It’s a very liberating record for all of us, all of this stuff we’ve been carrying on our shoulders.”

The band entered the studio without knowing when they would be finished. The process allowed them to explore paths they wouldn’t normally under a deadline, but it challenged McGerr’s exacting approach to recording.

“It was frustrating at times. We’d go record for two weeks and never listen back to anything we did. Then we’d take three weeks off and start another batch of new songs. A lot of the stuff I played when we started recording the record in February 2010, I didn’t hear until December. I had no idea what kind of record we were making. It was like going down the trail and not throwing breadcrumbs. I’d call Nick [Harmer, bassist] and ask him, ‘Are we doing okay here? Are we doing this right?’”

Bandmate Chris Walla, who also produced the record, instructed the band to follow the mantra, “Slow preparation, fast execution.” McGerr obliged, but not without difficulty.

“We’d spend three days getting the right sounds and then we’d hit record and get it in three or four takes. Or it’d be me in the hot seat convincing everyone this was the right way to start a song. It was frustrating because of how long it was taking. When I was younger, I liked a little more structure. As we got to the end of the process, I discovered that, Wow, this is the way I like to work.”

For McGerr, the most difficult moment during the Codes And Keys sessions was solved with a heavy dose of patience. He and Walla had divergent views on how the record should be produced.

“The hardest thing was trusting someone else to captain the ship, in terms of production and vision. We’re all producers; we’re all bandmates. It’s not one guy behind the glass calling all the shots, like Rick Rubin. It’s difficult when your bandmate has the flashlight and is walking down the hall and you can’t see and you’re behind him trusting him on where to go with your career. I respect Chris’ way of traveling through the dark to feel his way around for the right part. Sometimes you want an answer. You want to arrive at the destination a little bit sooner. I’m far more of a journey guy than a destination guy, but you can tell sometimes the person isn’t entirely sure what to do.”

Taking the record’s mature stance to heart, McGerr let Walla find his way without giving in to the urge to interject.

“You have to have those moments to chill and relax and think and take a day off. It’s important to know when to let a song be and simmer. We would track something but couldn’t decide the next part. So we’d leave it as is, then come back to it four days later in a different studio.”

Part of the band’s new sound comes with a new face behind the mixing board: Alan Moulder, famous for his work with Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins. Previous to Codes And Keys, Walla mixed all of Death Cab’s albums; on the new album, Moulder lends his seasoned touch on all but the first two tracks, as a sort of compromise between old guard and new.

“Chris mixed [the song] ‘Codes And Keys’ because Alan didn’t quite get it right, and admitted that. I love that.”

Moulder’s touch, which could be described simply as “soaked in reverb,” permeates the album. It has a spacious effect on McGerr’s drumming, the same way U2 records help Larry Mullen Jr.’s playing sound tailor-made for a stadium. Moulder’s work left the band hearing themselves with new ears.

“For the first time, to hear someone’s mixes — to hear them be a part of our band, in a way — and hear my drums, punchy and warm, I love it. Siamese Dream. The Downward Spiral. We’ve been fans [of Moulder’s] for a long time. When we picked him, everyone was ecstatic. It was like drafting the No. 1 player.

“Chris sat and watched Alan mix for a month. It was like he went to graduate school. I would do anything to sit and watch Steve Gadd and Matt Chamberlain and Vinnie Colaiuta sit in a tracking room and play for a month straight. It’s rent-to-own knowledge.”

PART THREE: HISTORY

Jason McGerr had a drum teacher years ago who hated being called a drummer. He always wanted to be called a musician instead, and that’s precisely the kind of intention McGerr had when he picked up his first pair of sticks.

“I didn’t set out to play drums. I just wanted to play music, and I was too much of a procrastinator to sign up for instruments I really wanted to play, like saxophone or trumpet. The bandleader needed a tuba player. I did it for one day and got a fat lip. Someone suggested drums because you could sit in the back and talk. So I began in sixth grade. When I was 14, I got my first set. When I was 15, I played an open-mike night at a bar with peach fuzz on my lip. I always played with people who were older and better than me.”

Born in Bellingham, Washington, McGerr didn’t immediately have a musical career laid out in front of him. When he graduated from high school at 17, he took a construction job, but soon found himself miserable. At 19, he relocated to Seattle to take a job in a music store.

“I was always a catalog kid. I could tell you the product code for any single company. A lot of older drummers would come into the shop and play. For a year, I went to the Seattle Drum School Of Music. I started teaching out of my house, and asked to bring some of my students into the school. In 1995, I started teaching at Seattle Drum School. That built my clientele, helped me get enough students. I was playing in jazz trios and country bands and played lots of bar gigs. I ended up teaching through 2002 pretty solidly.”

That year was important for another reason: in October, McGerr left his current band, Eureka Farm, to join Death Cab For Cutie. The band was preparing to record what would be its breakthrough album, Transatlanticism.

“The band had asked me in 2000 or 1999 on a couple different occasions if I would fill in for a show, and it was obviously a bit of an audition. I was playing in another band on the label and stuck it out with them. I was afraid to hurt people’s feelings and do something that was obviously going somewhere. I don’t think I’ve ever explained it like that. I was afraid to play in Death Cab when I was first asked. I said no. I had loyalty and what I thought was integrity with the people I was working with. In reality, that band was never going to do what Death Cab was going to do. Eventually I took a leap of faith.”

Despite being torn, McGerr was hardly shy about moving on to bigger, better things.

“It’s like needing to get something off your chest. It’s that thing you know you should do that you keep putting off. It’s like the place you lived in for years that you know you need to move out of but don’t want to go through the process of moving.”

As Death Cab met critical acclaim with a steady trickle of EPs and albums, McGerr saw his chance to sell the band on his talents.

“I knew I would eventually do it. I wouldn’t be so bold to tell them — maybe I did a few times — but you’re only a strong as your weakest link. But there was not the chemistry that there could have been. I’m not saying I brought in the torch that lit the place up. But we knew each other. We started playing music at the same time. We had shared bills together in other bands.”

Suddenly, McGerr found himself in an odd position: He had to convince Death Cab bassist Nick Harmer — whom he’d fired from Eureka Farm years before — that he was the right man for Harmer’s band.

“We fired Nick from our band, and I had to go to him for the gig. The guy I took a big long walk with, explaining that we were two different musicians in two different places, was the guy I wound up with at a [Death Cab] rehearsal. It was like when a guy has a crush on a girl and gets up the nerve to ask her out. He was dropping hints, saying they were going to record their next record. I said, ‘You should use me.’ I had to find the confidence to say that. He played it cool, but within a week, we had a rehearsal.”

Playing in an established, touring band was a major shift for McGerr the drum teacher, whose exacting temperament was unfit for the vagaries of a live show.

“Here I am, a guy in a music school who charted music and was trying to play everything as solid as possible, and I’m playing with dudes who have been piling in and out of a van in Europe and the U.S. for years. Their time and tempo was so loose, and it was driving me batty. I’m used to playing to a click. They were pushing and pulling. I was too academic — part of my greatest realization is that you can study music all you want, play out of books, but playing in a band is an entirely different education. The most important education. You can’t go to school to study how to be in a band. I don’t know if I could have continued to teach and evolve as a musician. I could have evolved as a technician. But not a musician. I needed to get into a band with guys who forced me to forget everything.”

Fast-forward to today, where McGerr — now almost a decade into his career with Death Cab For Cutie — has been trying to rekindle his lost impulses as that steadying student. The road makes you strong in certain areas and soft in others, McGerr acknowledges, so he tries to leave the stage for time in the classroom while he’s on tour.

“I’ve been doing more teaching. I’ll go and do just a day — book eight students in a row at the drum school. It’s really hard. I could talk until I’m blue in the face about being a musician in band, but so many of these students are expecting a curriculum. I feel unprepared and guilty. But they’re not expecting to see me with a book — they want a different story. I want to do more clinics and teaching. Having a wife and two kids under the age of three and being in a band that tours as many as 200 days a year — finding that time is difficult.”

PART FOUR: FUTURE

The Hollywood soundstage erupts in applause. The 12 dancers, now breathing heavily after several minutes of tightly choreographed moves, just froze in their final kaleidoscopic formation, a six-pointed star. Their necks crane back, feather headpieces blooming outward, as each member of cast and crew, moving as one, rise to their feet in elation.

Clapping, McGerr and company hop down from their platforms, joining the group at center stage. Gibbard and Harmer give director Tim Nackashi a hug; McGerr offers him a triumphant high-five. The band’s matching black suits with stitched-in multicolored lights glimmer in unison, like a pinball machine after a successful go at the board.

The afterglow won’t last too long. Six weeks from this moment of celebration, Death Cab For Cutie will embark on an extensive tour that has them crisscrossing the continent and the Atlantic Ocean for gigs from Edmonton to Amsterdam. McGerr is looking forward to the challenge.

“I become the best drummer I can possibly be when I’m on tour. We’re physically challenging ourselves. There’s no energy like live energy. There’s no better way to be on your toes and fast on your feet. It’s like training. I’m very much looking forward to it.”

It’s also a welcome change after several years of sessions in the recording studio. From now until the end of the year, McGerr will probably have no more than six weeks off — expected for a band that typically spends 18 months touring in support of an album.

“It’s time to build show muscles. I do work out and try to be in shape, but I’m always sucking wind out of the gate until I’m back in the show saddle. We call it tour metabolism. You need to get your music body working. It’s a balance of pushing real hard and knowing when not to go too far and using the dynamics of the stage and using the audience.”

You might say it’s a bit like rehearsing for a live-broadcast music video in Hollywood.

“We love doing it live. You never know what’s going to happen.”

[Read it on DRUM's website here.]

As seen in the September 2010 issue of DRUM! magazine.

Johnny Kelly stepped outside, took a deep breath, and thought about lighting a cigarette. He wouldn’t, of course. He couldn’t do that to himself. The day after the death of close friend and longtime bandmate Peter Steele, lead singer and larger-than-life frontman of Type O Negative, Kelly promised the doctor he would quit, and he couldn’t turn back now. Steele’s sudden death at age 48 made Kelly think of his own mortality. And besides, lighting up reminded him of his father’s emphysema.

But Kelly still needed a moment to think, and the only way he could do so was to leave the funeral parlor and get some air outside.

In a moment, he would change out of the suit he was wearing, which sagged around the shoulders from overuse. Then he would get in a car, head to the airport, and board a plane bound for Los Angeles, across the vast country and far away from this place.

Steele’s funeral was one of ten Kelly would attend in the span of a year and a half. He never thought he’d lose his father, grandfather, and bandmate in the same short span of time.

But he couldn’t think about that now. He had a job to do. He had to be the drummer in a rock band.

The gig: Arizona radio station KUPD 98 FM’s annual UFest. The band: heavy metal outfit Danzig, with which Kelly has played since 2002. The occasion: the premiere of Danzig’s newest album, Deth Red Sabaoth, the first studio material from Danzig in six years.

“It was kind of weird at first, going through the motions,” Kelly says. “Do I cancel it? Do I get into it? Take the blow, and I’ll process this thing that happened later on? I really wasn’t sure, and I really didn’t have much time to think about it. It was really one moment to the next – a rollercoaster.”

In two weeks, Kelly was supposed to have joined Steele in the studio to write Type O Negative’s follow-up to 2007’s Dead Again. Now Steele was gone forever.

“Peter was sober, eager, and anxious to get to work,” Kelly says. “I was really excited just to see what we could come up with, having him working at 100 percent. It could have been really impressive. We might not have sold a million records, but artistically, it could have been a really good record.”

Back at UFest in Phoenix, Paige Hamilton and the rest of Helmet take the stage. The crowd roars.

But Kelly is still thinking about Steele. Type O Negative had signed a new record deal just two days before he died.

“Peter was a smart guy, a smart songwriter,” he says. “At times, some of what Peter wrote was just impulsive, on half a bottle of Jägermeister. I was looking forward to having Peter really apply himself.”

Kelly stops. He realizes he’s thinking too much again.

Glenn Danzig had told him not to over think things. It was a constant reminder when Kelly was in the studio recording Deth Red Sabaoth earlier in the year.

“Glenn’s still a very punk rock guy,” Kelly says. “His whole approach to things really is punk rock, which I admire in a way.”

At the time, the ex-Misfits frontman’s shoot-from-the-hip approach to recording was slightly jarring to Kelly.

“I was kind of stressed out a little bit, because you have to come up with something right on the spot,” Kelly says. “But that’s the challenge. What can you really do? You’ve got to go with what you feel instinctually, and hope that what you feel works.”

But Kelly liked having that mindset. He liked having the opportunity to prove to himself what he was made of.

“Everything happens so quickly, you don’t get a chance to think about what you just did,” Kelly says. “When I heard some of the tracks back, I’d say, ’Who’s playing drums on that?’ And Glenn would say, ’It’s you!’ And I’d say, ’I don’t even remember playing that.’”

At UFest, the industrial pop punks in Powerman 5000 have begun tearing through their 1999 single “Supernova Goes Pop.” Frontman Spider One’s platinum spikes of hair gleam in the sun as he bounds around the stage.

Elsewhere, Kelly thinks about Type O Negative and what could have been. After years of substance abuse, Steele was eight months sober. He had been preparing to move closer to the rest of the band, from Scranton, Pennsylvania to Staten Island, New York. The place he picked was only a ten-minute drive from where Kelly and Type O Negative guitarist Kenny Hickey lived.

The band never got the chance to play Madison Square Garden. Still, it was a good run, Kelly thinks to himself. Not bad for a few guys from Brooklyn. “We took 15 minutes [of fame] and stretched it out to three hours,” he says.

Now, with Steele gone, Kelly can’t imagine playing as Type O Negative ever again. “We’ve been through a lot together, the four of us,” he says. “Now here I am, 17 years later … not only have you lost one of your friends, but you’ve lost your band. What are you going to do now? You try to take stock. What am I qualified to do? What do I want to do? What do I need to do? There’s the turbulence that comes with that. It was losing family, and also how you earned a living.

“It’s pretty safe to say that Type O is finished.”

It’s getting late, and it’s almost nightfall. The jocks from KUPD’s morning show, “Holmberg’s Morning Sickness,” just finished a brief, bizarre set spoofing Lady Gaga and Rage Against The Machine.

Danzig will go on any minute.

Kelly thinks about the gig he’s about to play, and Danzig’s cross-country Blackest Of The Black tour that’s scheduled to follow. If he can get through this, perhaps he can overcome his existential crisis and find his footing.

“Once I get in my office, everything is cool,” Kelly says. “If I play more, I’ll feel better. I’ll be able to bounce back from it easier, I think. The times when you’re sitting at home, and the TV is on, and you start thinking about it … those are the dark moments. But you take the blow, shake it off, lick the wounds, and get back to work. For me, getting back to work is playing rock and roll.”

The lights go up.

“And then it was show time,” he says. “I had my usual couple of Coronas, the intro tape went on, and I said, You know what? This is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I’m wired for it. Even though I lost something, I really shouldn’t lose everything. It really is what makes me happy.”

[Read the rest in PDF format here.]

[Read it on DRUM magazine's website here.]

Click the image to read the rest in PDF format.

As seen in the February 2009 issue of DRUM! magazine.

Paul Thomson is locked out of his house. He’s 45 minutes late to our scheduled interview, busily trying to figure out how to break into his Glasgow pad. This was not how Thomson had planned his evening. He may be a jack-of-all-trades — having mastered the roles of drummer, guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, singer, disc jockey, artist, tap dancer, choreographer, and dedicated father — but locksmith apparently doesn’t play a prominent role in his skill set.

[Read the rest in PDF format here.]

Click the image to read the rest in PDF format.

As seen in the December 2008 issue of DRUM! magazine.

Not long after ringing in the New Year, Chris Raines found himself almost a couple thousand miles away in Atlanta, sitting in the Venice Beach headquarters of Ross Robinson, producer to such critics faves as Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, At the Drive-In, and Glassjaw. The 29-year-old was about to begin penning songs with his four bandmates in metalcore band Norma Jean for what would become the group’s latest album, Norma Jean Vs. The Anti Mother. Raines had played his first show with the band only four weeks earlier.

[Read the rest in PDF format here.]

Click the image to read the rest in PDF format.

As seen in the November 2008 issue of DRUM! magazine.

Matt McGinley is miles away. It’s a hot, lazy day in June, the kind of 83-degree day in Pomona that makes the tar on Mission Boulevard slowly come to life. On any other day, thoroughbreds would be hurtling down the track at Fairplex Park, the thundering echo of their massive hooves rippling through the roaring grandstand – but not today. Today, lip piercings and eyeliner replace bits and bridles, and the collision of shiny patent-leather army boots meeting faded orange Boss Distortion pedals is responsible for most of the thunderclaps. It’s that time of year – the 2008 Warped Tour is in town.

At a time like this, most musicians among the 50-some bands on the roster would be backstage, gearing up to play, cooling off after a searing set or just plain goofing off – perhaps watching latest “it girl” Katy Perry’s set, hoping to confirm that she really kissed a girl and liked it. But not Matt McGinley. Unsatisfied with just going through the motions of the tunes of his increasingly popular indie hip-hop band, Gym Class Heroes, McGinley is in his dressing room, all alone, mental miles from the tour, and hunched over in the midst of mastering a new skill: double bass.

“I learned how to play [double bass] about a month before we went on the Warped Tour,” he says. “I have a Roland V-Drum electronic kit that I used to write most of the new album – bought it in the fall. I would set it up every day in the dressing room. I started playing steady triplets on the kick drum, then threw in my right playing quarters on the hi-hat, and my left on the snare. I started working through the variations in the songs. It definitely took me a few weeks. I was pretty diligent. I had my kit set up in my house between bedroom and bathroom, so I’d walk by and see it and feel guilty not playing it.”

Playing two kick drums is just one of McGinley’s latest challenges during the recording of the Heroes’ new full-length, The Quilt, and he’s not taking it sitting down – well, in a non-literal way, at least. The anticipated follow-up to the sleeper hit album As Cruel As School Children, The Quilt is new fodder for the 25-year-old drummer’s learning curve. The album’s summery hip-hop backbeats are laying the constrained groundwork – patchwork, perhaps – for McGinley to dare to try the untried. In this case, stealthily working two kick drums into a hip-hop set without a punk-pop audience calling him out on it.

“I’ve definitely tried to keep it fresh for my drum parts,” he says. “I do quite a bit of improvising. I just sort of go with my gut. I think as I’ve aged and matured as a drummer, I’ve become a little more disciplined in my playing, and I try to do what is necessary to support the music. When the time arises, I take advantage of it.”

A brave thing to do for a young drummer with so much to prove and so many ears listening. “It’s different playing to festival crowds – the festival audience messes with my psyche,” he says. “I’m less inclined to play around with the groove. It’s something about playing to these massive-sized crowds. When I’m in a club environment, I sort of get my jazz hands, and play around with the beat even more, and go over the bar line with my fills. I just try to be like John Bonham and make the stuff solid and groovy.”

That is, if John Bonham backed The Roots instead of Led Zeppelin. Either way, it’s working. “We started four years ago in a 12-passenger van with no trailer,” he says, chuckling a little at the mental image. “We’ve now moved up to two tour buses, which I think is a milestone in our career.”

BEGINNINGS

As “Lake Trout Capital Of The World,” Geneva, New York isn’t the easiest place to get your rock on. A serene town in the Finger Lakes region of the state, Geneva is known more for its Seneca heritage and wine production than its recording industry legacy. That didn’t stop Matt McGinley. At the urging of his pianist mother, eight-year-old McGinley took up the drums.

By high school, he was hooked enough to start a band with classmates Ryan Geise and Milo Bonacci (“All the way back to a performance of MC Hammer’s ’You Can’t Touch This’ in second grade,” he says of Bonacci). After hitting it off with now-frontman Travis McCoy in class, Gym Class Heroes was born.

“I was into all the alternative music, and Travis had the same musical mindset,” he says. “It excited me. Travis was a drummer at the time; he played for a band that sounded like a bad Nirvana. The first weekend of school, both bands played a birthday party. We played rock and funk, kind of like Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” but we had no musical identity. We played one original funk tune, and in the middle, Travis jumped on stage and grabbed a microphone and started rapping over it. It just clicked. We could feel the rest of the party being like, ’Damn.’”

In between months of playing gigs in popular college town Binghamton, marketing themselves on PureVolume and MySpace and attending the occasional college class, the bandmates went into the studio to record an album for friends. “We weren’t trying to make a hit record,” McGinley says. “We went in with a battle plan with all the songs listed on a big poster board. Did a lot of pre-production by ourselves, recording the songs off my alarm clock, actually, which served as a recorder.” By the third such session, what would become The Papercut Chronicles EP, the band was gaining traction in the area and significant experience in the studio. Then one day the phone rang.

“As soon as I got back to college [at SUNY Oneonta] a couple days later, I posted three songs on PureVolume, and we had already been hit back by interested people, one of which was a graphic design artist on tour with Fall Out Boy who offered his services,” he says. “I sent him a couple songs to get inspired by, and he wound up playing the CD for [Fall Out Boy bassist] Pete Wentz, who was starting to have an idea of putting together his own imprint.” The phone call came shortly thereafter, and, in an instant, the record label cyclone touched down directly on McGinley and Co. The fledgling band signed with Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen in 2004.

“We kept trying to do things to make us look like a band you’d want to sign – went out, took promo pics by ourselves, shot video, tried to show them that we were really hungry and eager to make this something full time. All we wanted was to sign to a label that was going to take care of us. We weren’t going into it trying to be millionaires. We didn’t want a big advance. We wanted a big van to tour in.”

BIG TIME

Opportunities beyond New York State borders stacked up quickly, and the band played its first Warped Tour in 2005, eventually opening for The All-American Rejects. It was a challenge to be the odd-band out, musically, on every show’s bill.

“First it was intimidating,” he says. “We’re this weird, black-sheep hip-hop rock band opening for Less Than Jake and Fall Out Boy. Kids didn’t really know what to expect. We played hip-hop music at a rock show. After the kids got through the initial shock, they were actually bobbing their heads to the song. You could tell they were appreciating it. That’s when we were like, ’This is going to be a pretty interesting ride.’”

The snowball kept rolling. In 2005, the band recorded its first major full-length, As Cruel As School Children. For such a do-it-yourself band, the process of recording under the wings of a record label was a learning experience. “It was our first time being able to spend more than a week on a record and work with a producer in a real studio,” McGinley says. “It was nerve wracking. We’re not used to working on songs or writing songs with other people. Once we started to realize that these people were looking after our best interests, we stopped being overly defensive and took their advice.”

It was particularly hard for McGinley, who had up to that point internalized his drum parts. “I had never tried to translate someone’s gibberish into a drum groove – translating someone’s mouth grooves into a crazy awesome beat,” he says. “It helped me play more critically and helped bring the best out of me.”

To boot, McGinley had never played alongside the drum programming that peppers the album’s tracks. “I’m used to playing raw, organic drums,” he says. “I didn’t know if I should approach it thinking that my parts would be compromised, so I played my ass off. I tried to be better than the drum machine.”

If Gym Class Heroes built the monster in 2006, they rode the beast to Valhalla in 2007. Buoyed by the hybrid hits “Cupid’s Chokehold” and “Clothes Off!,” the record catapulted the band into the consciousness of a rising generation of music fans – and familiarized them with the straightjacket nature of a hit single.

“All of a sudden ’Cupid’s Chokehold’ started taking off like crazy on the radio,” he says. “That song was from our previous record. We’d do a late show and they’d want us to play that song, and we wanted to play the new stuff. That song we arranged and recorded in our bedroom for like $80. You want that song? After a while, we just stopped fighting it. The public spoke.”

PATCHING THE QUILT

The concept behind the Heroes’ new album, The Quilt, is to expose the patchwork of musical influences that inspire the band’s hybrid style – an effort to return to the electric, instrument-driven hip-hop that the band used to get signed in the first place.

“Our biggest task over the years [has been] trying to match the energy and chemistry of a live show on a recorded album,” McGinley says. “We’ve always sort of struggled with that. It’s a good thing and a bad thing when someone comes to your show and says, ’You’re so much better live.’ That’s awesome, but … damn. So for most of the album, we tracked it live in a room in L.A. Me and Disashi [Lumumba-Kasongo, guitar] and Eric [Roberts, bass] would record together in entirety. We might nail a song on the second take or we might nail a song on the twenty-second take.”

For example, on the track “Like Father, Like Son,” a McGinley mistake ended up a fortunate drum fill. “Nine-tenths of the way through the song, I told the engineer I messed it up, and he played it back, and it came out sounding ridiculously awesome,” he says. “This weird linear groove that locks into the beat perfectly, accented off the bell. We ended up using that take as the winner. It’s stuff like that that makes me really happy to track live. It’s one of the most sincere ways of recording, as opposed to isolating yourself in a drum booth and running the song. It definitely made me a sharper player in terms of consistency. There are actually a couple mistakes that made it onto the record that I’m really fond of now. We finally found the right process for recording this band, but it only took about 11 years.”

As a result, the album is a diverse affair. The track “Live Forever (Fly With Me)” shows McGinley toning his playing down to a somber, almost tragic level to match McCoy’s lyrics about the loss of a cousin. But on the album opener, “Guilty As Charged,” the funk machine is on full blast, channeling Earth Wind & Fire at their brassiest, with McGinley sitting in the pocket, slapping a sassy big band swagger from his snare and hi-hat. “Each song has its own identity – that’s why we came up with the idea of the quilt,” he says. “Each song is separate, but together they form a patchwork of something different.”

McGinley applies a similar philosophy to his technique. “I try and think of the overall song,” he says. “Each hit I take, I try to make sure it’s the most appropriate and suitable. That’s the biggest change I’ve made in my playing over the years. I’ve been able to discipline myself to make the songs breathe more and not have the urge to fill every inch of space. It only took 11 years, 8 albums. Okay, that’s kind of an embellishment. It’s probably more like seven.”

CLASS HONORS

While on tour with Heroes, McGinley is diligently chipping away at completing his college degree by taking online classes from Boston University. “I feel like, as a professional musician and a full-time touring musician, it’s important to balance your life with something else,” he says. “It’s not for something to fall back on, as people say. It’s mainly to bring balance to your life. I’ve really enjoyed having something that’s so different from what I’ve been focused on right now.”

Far too busy to study his craft in the past, McGinley has trained his eye on getting back into the woodshed. “I’d really love to study with a drummer in R&B or gospel drums, and just get really sick at that. If nothing else, I’d really love to take lessons again, to incorporate something else into my playing. As a musician, there are always new tricks you can learn.”

And plenty of time to work that into Gym Class Heroes too. “Longevity is the name of the game for us,” he says. “We’re in this for a serious amount of time. I look up to bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers to guide my career. A band like that has been making and pioneering great music for years and years. We aspire to do that – to create music that pushes the envelope and sounds different.

“I really hope to grow old with my bandmates. I hope to be performing Gym Class Heroes songs when I have gray hair and I have a walker.”

[Read the rest in PDF format here.]

[Read it on DRUM magazine's website here.]

Click the image to read the rest in PDF format.