They hate me, part 1…

They hate me…

So it’s the first rehearsal for the first SD tour since the 70s. I was playing with my favorite rock band of all time, the genius duo, and with some of the best studio cats on the planet! (What’s a lunatic like me to do…) needless to say I wanted to make a good impression.

Soooo, we start rehearsing the first tune, “Green Earings”. Donald had already rehearsed the rhythm section and the singers, so he gave a tutorial on keys to the groove a la Dildos. Especially cool was how he wanted us in essence to accent the spaces with crisp note length cutoffs (my interpretation). In Green Earings, he emphasized, nothing on 1, then 2 e an uh 3 an (crisp cut) space on 4.   Okkkk…

Peter Erskine starts clicking his sticks to set the tempo, counts us in and I start right on the 1…

I was hearing this James Brown type counter part so I went with. We got about a minute in when Donald stopped. Silence…Donald turns to me and says…ummm…nothing on 1 Bill… 

Now I’m thinking that shit was crazy groovin’. Peter Erskine and Tom Barney, Drew Zingg… I said ok. And my head was like, dude, they hate you! So Peter kicked it in gear again, I behaved, and all appeared happy in SD orchestra land.

I’ll never forget the look on Walter’s face when he’s grooving…

Donald stops…again. Ooh shit…now what did I do. He made another tweak I think with singers (can’t remember ) then calmly said to me…Bill you can go back to that other part…

Ahh bliss…I was back on the one! Donald never gave me another instruction after that…