Sex, Drums & Rock 'N Roll (eBook)

Life As A Backup Drummer

Gerry Benoit (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
136 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9063-0 (ISBN)

Infos

This memoir follows the author's experience as a kid getting to enjoy the band life, following his fun times onstage and to and from gigs.

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"e;Sex, Drums & Rock 'N Roll"e; will take you on the journey of a kid watching the band and wishing to play in it one day. Finally, as life has it, he gets to be part of the show. Follow decades of madness behind the scenes of band life. This book will take you on stage for performances to remember and through the most shocking parts of life on the road. Dangerous roads will make you glad you came to see the show but didn't ride with us. All I can say is, crazy things happen around musicians. After living it for decades, I can tell you, it is more than true. Come for the multi-decade, crazy ride with a band, as seen from the eyes behind the drums.

Textauszug

Chapter Two

PRE – ‘PAX’
SISTER IN THE ACT

My sister Pat was incredible. She was my savior with CW in mind. The after-school antics that would almost get me killed that my brother would do to me, she was my only defense. Yeah, she had a way of putting the fear of God into him. He would be trying out the latest Three Stooges act on me, be it with a hammer, wood saw, or who knows. Thank goodness Pat would be there in seconds in my defense. Oh yeah, CW knew he couldn’t mess with her. She always brought the best weapon to the fight. Sometimes it would be just breaking up the latest all-star wrestling move he had just seen on television. I didn’t care how she did it, if I was able to walk away unharmed. Her moves were awesome, and she had plenty of them.

The best times were had, when for whatever reason, my brother CW would pick up the guitar and head out to the living room. Pat and he would start singing in perfect harmony to just about any song, both were pitch perfect. Being the youngest and not quite ready to join in the act I would always try though. It would be a few years before the band started to play, and there were many exciting times to come. Excitement after school involved some crazy fun. One time, Pat broke up the bashing and crashing afternoon event using a screwdriver. When CW came out of the living room at top speed, the throw carpet in the kitchen slid and he went down flying across the floor. Jumping up with Pat in a heated chase behind him, his famous line we would not forget our whole life was “Who said non-skids work!” Then he ran down to the bedroom to disappear from the scene as Pat and I were laughing our foolish heads off at the whole situation. He’d run just as fast as when she had a strap or a knife from the kitchen drawer, it was all too funny.

One of the best afternoons after school involved another living room wrestling event. I was half my brother CW’s size, so pinning me and snapping me in two wasn’t much of a task for him. This one day the kitchen drawer opened and slammed shut. CW immediately knew Pat was on her way to my rescue. He then jumped off me and started to run through the kitchen. She was in hot pursuit and took the old red strap, used for the childhood threat of ‘you better conform or else’. When CW ran around the dining room table, Pat took a shot at him with the snap of that strap. The problem was though when the strap reached its end and whipped, it hit the globe on the wagon wheel light. “Uh oh”, we all said at once. There was a perfect one-and-a-half-inch round hole perfectly poked out on one of the five globes. Remembering that we had been sitting in the car the night they purchased the light fixture, we knew the right store to find one. Without hesitation my sister was on the phone with the store in Fall River that carried the light. CW and I went to the store out on East Main Street in Fall River, almost near the Tiverton town line to buy the globe. My parents smoked a lot, so my sister soaked and cleaned the other four existing globes, so as not to not give away the scheme. Upon arrival back at the house Pat had all the globes washed, and the broken globe hidden in the trash. The new one went in the back, the other existing four in front to hide the fact that a new one had been added. A half-hour later, my mother came home and without even looking up she asked, “Who broke the light?” We never knew to this day how she knew. Mothers are something, hey?

We started playing a club called the Ocean View out on Martha’s Vineyard. Pat had gotten married and was now living there. This would be fun. We would also play at the Dunes Hotel in Katama on the island as well. On a rare occasion we would be at the V.F.W. We had the island covered. Fun times with a ton of family and incredible friends would show up to have a great time. The band had taken the name PAX by then. It couldn’t have been a better name at the time with the Paris Peace talks happening. Yeah, PAX means peace. When band breaks would come, CW would make an announcement. It basically went like, we stood for peace, the ‘ea’ kind, the ‘ie’ kind you’d have to discuss amongst yourselves for later after the show. Yeah, it was always great to watch the newbies coming to see the show. Obscene lyrics to well-known songs and well-thought-out made-up songs of his own, CW entertained the crowd like no other. One of the people that came to see the band let us know proudly that he didn’t drink to get drunk, he drank to get obnoxious. He hit that nail on the head because it was true. Piling into someone’s house after the gig with all the instruments and playing until almost dawn was not unheard of, and always a great time.

Pat’s house is where we camped out every weekend when we played on the island. Learning about island life in the winter was interesting. It was nothing like the summer when there were hundreds of thousands of people there. In the winter, only eight thousand or so inhabited the place. It was fun to see the same crowd of people show at all the different venues we played. Pat and my brother-in-law Jack knew everyone it seemed, which made it fun.

One New Year’s Eve we played a gig at a hotel in Vineyard Haven. The place was packed, and CW and Pat were giving the crowd a great show. It was exciting backing them up on my drums, watching the whole scene. During one of the later sets played that evening, there were so many people dancing and going crazy my cymbals were rocking back and forth. The floor that we were playing on was located directly above a swimming pool. The floor was deflecting so much my boom cymbal stand was almost falling over. Of course, CW wasn’t going to let this go by without commenting on it over the microphone. He went right into the song Pretty Woman to end the set. I thought, as well as some of the crowd, that we’d finish the set crashing down into the pool on the ground floor. Thousands of gigs later we still talked about that night, it was a great memory.

There were times we got stranded on the island after playing due to the weather and the boats not running. It was always a crap shoot in the winter with things like that happening. A big thing about winter on the island also was the lack of restaurants open late. We’d try to get subs before the gig. One night was rather incredible because one of the subs disappeared. My sister’s French poodle Francine, that couldn’t have weighed any more than eleven pounds, grabbed it and swallowed it before we took them out of the bag. It was like someone had shot my brother CW. He stomped around like an idiot, and no, we didn’t want to share ours with him either, but we did. There was no more time to get another, between the place being closed and having to head over to the club for the gig. Francine was always a joke around the house the way she wolfed that sub so incredibly fast while hiding in the bedroom to do it.

Transportation to the Vineyard to gig on the weekends always included a ferry to get you there. One time after I had my license, we took my van with all the equipment in it over to the island. It was a snowy weekend with an intense windstorm. We went to a friend’s home that evening, it just seemed like that was the stormy thing to do. I got drunk and got trashed. Galiano with beers too made me so screwed up, the trip home would be very interesting. On the boat ride home, I just stayed in the driver’s seat of my van. I know I was cranked and not really feeling well. As the boat was pitching and rolling badly because of the high winds for several days. I opened the door and puked my guts out several times while my brother just laughed at me and made drunk jokes. I looked down to see the mess I had made from my driver’s side door. The crowd came down to the freight deck the cars used to exit the boat because it was too rough to put up the passenger ramps to the boat. The crowd came down and trampled the puke away. There was nothing left at all when I looked down, I couldn’t believe it. CW and I got a hell of a laugh at that one. Quite the ride home too, I heard every drunk joke my brother knew used on me. Shortly after that boat ride we didn’t play down the island much again until years later.

Quite a few times we went back to the Vineyard when my sister Pat would find some great event that would showcase the band. One such special memory etched in my mind was an event celebrating the town of Oak Bluffs’ anniversary. It would be called Tivoli Day. Our band PAX will be playing at the beautiful gazebo in Ocean Park. Our band banner was strung across the background in full display. People that were on the Steam Ship getting ready to leave were dancing to the band’s music a quarter mile away. Cars on Beach Road were stopping, and people were dancing all over the park. Looking at the balconies of the gingerbread-type homes had dancers on them, living it up and enjoying the day. It made us proud to see our effect on the masses that day. The very next day the band performed on a flatbed tractor trailer on Circuit Avenue, the main street going through the center of Oak Bluffs. Again, the street was blocked off and all the people in the streets were smiling, singing along, and yes, dancing. It was such a joyous feeling to see the crowd into the music and the performance of our band PAX. We were also proud of the fact that we were brought in for the first such celebration. We did others, but as always in life, the first is the best! These many years after CW passed, it reverberates in my head; September Thirteenth, Nineteen-Eighty, the date we rocked Tivoli Town, Oak Bluffs. Pat commemorated the day with an inscribed memorial brick in the spring of 2021. Pat has her own CDs that sell out, and her...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.4.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-9063-8 / 1667890638
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-9063-0 / 9781667890630