continued…

But sometimes things go right.
I was amazed when I stopped to think that my band Fish Patrol was actually able to gig regularly and make money doing so.  We played mostly originals in the funky-jazzy-rock style of Frank Zappa.  The few covers weren’t hits by any standard:  Zappa, Primus, early Chili Peppers, obscure funk tunes.  Nevertheless, there we were week after week up and down the coast of Florida in one strangely lit rave bar or “alternative club” after another. 

Fish Patrol was a wonderful opportunity to do musically (and conceptually) things I had wanted to try for a long time.  I finally had trustworthy, competent musicians to work with:  drummer, Paul Bollenbach and bassist John LeBlanc.  I had known Paul for years at this point as he was my drummer for several different blues-bar bands.  John was actually (and is to this day) a fine guitarist but was shrewd enough to realize the potential of playing bass for the Odd Little Brain Child of mine that was Fish Patrol.  We debuted at a little upstairs “artsy” club by the name of Monique’s in downtown equally “artsy” Sarasota.  We shared the bill with “Crazy” Dave Talkovic (or something like that…Talkowitz…Talkowicz?) and his trio of insane Motorhead-cum-Mentors-type covers and originals.  They specialized not so much in music as spectacle.  The stage was decorated with rubber, plastic and blow-up skeletons, skulls and anatomy replicas.  There were Halloween streamers and party favors hanging from everything and taped/staples to everything else.  As one final gruesome touch the entire disaster area was awash in sticky fake blood.  Dave wrestled his bass and howled incomprehensible lyrics during his sets.  In between sets he hung out near the stage with his arm around his brain-damaged, tragically hip girlfriend.  Any other females that walked by to say hello (or even just walked by within reach) got a crude, quasi-sexual invitation along with an attempted groping from Dave’s free hand.

We took the stage after Dave’s band was finished for the evening.  We blasted our way through about ten originals; all the tunes we had worked up to that point.  You could hear jaws hitting the floor and we were greeted with what became a very familiar response to Fish Patrol:  complete, stunned silence and uncomprehending wide eyes.  No one knew what to make of us.  Some of it was too heavy, fast and hyperkinetic for the pop/funky/dance crowd.  Some of it was too funky and groovalicious, for the metal crowd.  All of it was too zany and madcap for anyone.  One particular Fish Patrol tune that could serve as a representative example is “The Lottery Song”.  It’s only 3 minutes and 49 seconds long but how we packed those fleeting moments with entertainment and chutzpah.  It starts with a quasi funk/metal groove, quickly shifts into a lounge lizard jazz verse then moves on to a heavy, intricate chorus of riffing.  When the bridge (of sorts) comes along it’s kind of a rumbling, loping circus sounding thing with a sung speech of goofy metaphors.  The guitar solo comes in roaring and racing over the bass and drums like one of those sleek boats that screams across the churning surface of a choppy water surface.  The return of various sections occurs and finally the whole thing winds down with a sort of bouncy, quasi-polka-swing section as the vocals parody their way around several analogies.  The lyrics are in some ways about people playing the state lottery (I should know, I wrote them and the original idea was inspired by having to wait in line behind all those sniveling, incompetent, waste-heads trying to fill out their lottery tickets and spend every last dollar they had trying to “hit the big one”).  But that is, of course, only on the superficial level.  There are also several deeper layers involved and I am only using the “lottery” as an analogy to get toward those other layers.  In a live setting I would sometimes extend the song.  As the bridge mostly had the bass and drums doing their low, loping-circus, rolling, rumbling thing going on, before the guitar solo I could (and did) take the opportunity to sermonize about various things that I wanted to get off my chest.  Or issues I wanted to address.  Occasionally I would read selected sections of Ayn Rand novels aloud to the audience.  Ah, the good old days.

Does that accurately describe the quirky, glorious sound we made?  There are only eight tunes of the fifty or so we wrote that were properly recorded.  So you could listen to those for a clue as to what was up.  I have some poor quality video and four-track cassettes of demos and rehearsals.  Any given live performance or song was an exercise in balancing highly structured, intricate material with funky, industrial jazz, off-the-wall improvisation.  Oddly (or maybe not), ten years later I am told there are people only just now discovering or going back to hear some of that Fish Patrol stuff and really digging it.

By far the best gigs I ever had were the Musical Theatre Playhouses.  They usually ran a show for a week or two and the prep usually went something like this:



1. Get a call from a musical director of a playhouse.

2. Take your equipment to the playhouse and leave it there.

3. Next week do 2 rehearsal run-throughs.

4. Get your tux cleaned.

5. Play the show (2-3 hours) every night for a week or two.

6. Get a check for $600 to $1200 (depending on the show’s budget and income).

7. Take your equipment home and put your tux back in the closet.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

I have a couple of standard lines about playing music.  Sometimes when people learn I play music they ask something along the lines of, “So what kind of music do you play?”  I say, “Whatever kind I’m getting paid to play.”  My other favorite is, “If I had a dollar for every time I had to play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’…oh, wait…that’s right I was paid about a dollar every time I played it.”