Jay was kind enough to sit down with Dave & Allison Rosenberg in Stamford, Connecticut, on August 22, 2006 to discuss his music and career. A complete transcript follows. Photos by and copyright (in order of appearance) ??, Terry Rogers, Gregg Nixon, Terry Rogers, Gregg Nixon, ??, and Gregg Nixon.
Part 1: Getting Started
Let's start with where you grew up and how you started drumming.
Growing in the SF bay area I had a lot of exposure to different cultures. When I was 16, a friend of my mom... she played harpsichord. Old thing, Olden days music. She went up to this baroque music camp called Cazadero Music Camp. It was run by the city of Berkeley. She found out they were going to have some youth sessions and jazz sessions, and she recommended to my mom that she send me to this music camp, so she did and when I went up there I met all these kids from Berkeley.
Actually that's not actually how I started. Let's start over here.
When I was nine my mom—as you can see it's my mother who's really the proponent of me doing something creative, which is really cool. So when I was nine, she offered to get me some music lessons, and she took me around to a few different places. One was a Yamaha piano school; I didn't like it. Ya know, it was like another thing or like some group lesson thing or something. Then we went to this one guy's house, a private drum lesson guy and I liked him. Just liked his personality and I decided, "Okay, I'll play the drums." So I took drum lessons for about two years from this guy, and then I started taking drum lessons from another guy at this Blue Bear School of Music, this thing in San Francisco where they teach kids and stuff at Fort Mason. And so then it was like, "Okay, I know how to play the drums" or "I play the drums"—I was a kid who played the drums.
My mom bought me a practice kit, and then I ended up buying my first drum set from that first drum teacher I had, so I had a drum set so from the time I was ten years old or whatever til I was 15 or 16. I had my drums in my room, so I played my drums in my room, and I took lessons for the first few years of that, nine til twelve or whatever, but from the time I was 12 to 15, I just had my drums in my room. Oh, and I did take some other drum lessons with a woman who played percussion with the San Francisco Symphony, a woman named Peggy Lucchesi, who was a really nice lady, man, and she was a really good percussionist. And she has a son named Alan Lucchesi that was a rock drummer in the area.
Anyway fast forward to this music camp my mom sent me to. So I go up there and meet all the other kids who are like 15 or 16 who have been playing for like five years or whatever and I bonded with these few kids. I bonded with Dave Ellis right away. I bonded with Dave Shul, who's now the guitar player in Spearhead. I met all these kids. I met this guy Eric Dinwiddie, who was in The Uptones, and they'd been starting their band right about that time in high school, and so I met all these kids. Then after—I'm just kinda going through the whole thing here.
I went to that summer camp for like three summers, and the first summer I was a camper, then the second summer I went up there for the jazz session. The jazz session had people like Bobby McFerrin and Whoopi Goldberg up there, man—like before they made it and shit—Pete Escovedo, Eddie Marshall, who's a famous jazz drummer who played with Bobby Hutchinson. I ended up bonding really well with Eddie's three sons, Al, Andre, and Drew, and they're all really talented guys. So anyway these bonds that I made, I made these friendships that I still have to this day, most of them. So I went to Cazadero for like three years, so there I am like 18 or whatever.
What happened was I graduated from high school, and my mom decided that if I wanted to go to a music college that I could go to whatever one I choose or whatever, so I wanted to go to music college, so I chose Berklee College of Music in Boston. So there I am at the Berklee College of Music until the Christmas break. Came home for the Christmas break—I did not go back. I did not want to go back, man. It was just Boston wasn't my thing. I met some really good friends there. My roommate was Mark Whitfield, who's now like a jazz guitar player. He's in the jazz scene or whatever, kinda made it. My other roommate was this guy from South Africa named Gary. I always wonder what happened to that guy. But anyway so I come home from Berklee College of Music, and I really missed my friends at home. I'd taken acid with my friend Dave Shul one day and we were playing and we had a band called Ice Age where his dad wrote the lyrics and we had this lead singer named Dan Cassidy, who was an older guy. Ya know, we're kids and the lead singer was the age of Dave Shul's dad. Anyway, we were in this band, and we had this bass player named Johnny Atra, and the three of us took acid and we jammed out and recorded on my boombox, and I recorded like three full cassette tapes, both sides, of us jamming. So I took those cassette tapes with me to Berklee College of Music, and I always listened to them and ya know there were always these moments of genius music—and I wish I still had those tapes—that I really connected to and I missed that. So when I came back home and I saw my friends again, I was like I'm not going back there. I need to be here.
So coincidentally at the same time these guys had this band The Uptones, and their drummer, Tommy White, was just—ya know these kids were in high school and they were starting to graduate and folks were saying "enough with the music, time to go to college" or whatever. So their drummer was the first to go, so they needed an drummer. Dave Ellis actually was playing sax at the time in the band and played drums with them for a few months and he didn't sound bad, he sounded pretty good too, and then Kenny Brooks was playing saxophone in that band. Kenny Brooks went to college in New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and Dave Ellis took over the saxophone chair and called me up to see if I wanted to come play drums with that band, so I did. I played with The Uptones for about two years. We recorded an album, we had some radio play. We opened up for like Madness, ya know, "Our house in the middle of the street." And we opened up for The Go-Go's. Who else. The English Beat. Remember the English Beat? Remember General Public, skanking ska shit? Ranking Roger and Dave Wakeling? Anyway, so I played in that band for a couple years, then I was in the scene, the Bay area music scene or whatever. There was another band called the Freaky Executives. It was a band with guys that were older. The Uptones were like my age and younger and the Freaky Executives were all at least four or five years older than me. Anyway so I ended up kind of skipping over to that band you know. We played a lot of shows together and I ended up quitting The Uptones to play with the Freaky Executives pretty much like that. And Freaky Executives, it was a long strange trip in that band. It was about four or five years of gigging around the Bay area scene, getting a record deal with Warner Brothers, flying to LA numerous times to record this and that, demo tapes, meetings, it was like college education in music, ya know, the whole music business and everything. And we got dropped from Warner Brothers. It was really ugly. We recorded this album that cost like 350,000 dollars and it never came out. It was too bad because it was a band that kinda got creatively ripped in half by the powers that be. The creative spark in that band, the two guys, the two songwriters got divided and conquered basically. There's a MySpace page of the Freaky Executives, but it's pretty biased because it's by the guy that got kicked out of the band and he's pretty bitter, so he only put on that Web site up to where he got kicked out and then he says the rest of it is some watered down Prince shit, which he's got a point—kinda right about it. So anyway, I remained friends with all those guys for years. So I was in that band for a few years then that fizzled.
We used to rehearse at this place in Emeryville, California, a big warehouse where a lot of bands rehearsed. And there was this guy, Les, who used to rehearse around the corner from our practice space. I just knew him as "Les," ya know, this guy Les. I didn't know his last name for years, man. So Les asked me if I wanted to jam with him and his buddy Todd. They kinda reminded me of these two guys that I used to jam with at Berklee College of Music, these brilliant guys. There was a guitar and bass player, Stan and I can't remember the other guy's name. But Les and Todd just had this thing that they did. They had all these songs that they made up. It was guitar and bass but it was fully made up—all these songs went all these places. Full on epic songs; all I had to do was learn it and then I was jamming with it. So it was kinda like that when I met Todd and Les. And I would go in their room and I would jam with them and you know it reminded me a lot of King Crimson kind of stuff and I really dug it, you know, but I was in the Freaky Executives at the time, so I played with them when I could.
Les really liked my drumming and you know, I appreciated that man because I didn't really know about the style that they were playing. But he really liked the way I played with him or whatever so we did a few gigs, little clubs n stuff, and I played with them for about eight months, and the band was called Primus. And then Les wanted to take the show on the road, but Todd had a kid and I was in the Freaky Executives and we were doing our big record deal thing, so Todd and I both did our last show with Les and said "thank you" and he was like—actually you can find it on Youtube. Somebody sent me the link. There's a videotape of "Jay and Todd's last gig" on Youtube. If you search you can find it. Anyway so you see Les right there going "So this is Jay's last gig. This is Todd's last gig. I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do." It's a trip man cause I remember that day. But what he did was he got another guitar player, Larry, and another drummer, Herb, Tim, and you know they started touring around and paying their dues, man. They did it for like two years, going around the country in a van sleeping on people's floors and just doin' it. And they hit. And right about the time they hit was right about the time the Freaky Executives totally broke up and I started working construction. But it was cool though because you know, who knows what kinda stuff is gonna happen. If I stayed in Primus it might not have even made it. You squash a butterfly and years later the next guy's president. You never know.
So anyway I was going to college and working construction and stuff for about four years 'til about '92-'93 or whatever and then Dave Ellis called me up and Charlie Hunter, childhood friend of his who I'd met years before, was back from New York and wanted to get a band. So he was like "let's get a little band," so we started jamming at Dave's house, and we started doing gigs and we were like, "What should we call the band?" And I was like, "You got the gimmick, dude, why don't we call it the Charlie Hunter Trio." I actually said that. So we played a few gigs right about the same time we started Alphabet Soup.
Kenny called me up. His roommate Gary was friends with a lot of these club owners who were all of a sudden hot about getting a band in their club. I think the way the club scene goes—every few years they get tired of the DJs and they need live music just to have something in there but then you get the onslaught of live bands which you know 70-80% of them probably suck or don't make people dance, so you get a scene of live bands where people don't go out any more 'cause they want to dance, so clubs slowly get rid of that and get DJs back. You know I think it goes through waves. I've seen it go back and forth a couple times. So this was a time when they were getting live bands. "Oh it's really hip to get a little acid jazz trio in the corner." This is like when they were starting to have a lot of clubs with different levels. You know, the acid lounge, the techno, different levels of the clubs, early '90s kinda thing, whatever. So we started playing gigs, so I'm playing with Charlie Hunter and Alphabet Soup, then Les calls me up and wants to do this thing called Sausage with me and Todd, so now I have three gigs going all at once.
And then all of a sudden Les calls me up one day and says, "Hey there's this guy, Rob Wasserman, who's doing this radio ad for Levi's and he wants me to bring down somebody, so I want to bring you." I was like "alright" so I came down to Hyde Street Studios, met Rob Wasserman, recorded this thing for Levi's 501 Jeans, and we jammed for like 15 minutes. They said "that's cool," then they were like "Anybody want to do a voiceover on this thing?" And Les didn't want to do it 'cause he'd be recognized and Rob didn't want to do it so I ended up doing it, getting on the mic and talking about 501 jeans.
Is that on Youtube?
I don't know. It exists somewhere. It might be under "Three Guys Named Schmo" or something like that 'cause, then we did a gig at the Bammies and called ourselves that, me and Les and Rob. So anyway then Rob calls me up to go up to Bob Weir's house....
Intermission....
