Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  They unpacked their instruments—it was a six-piece combo—and tuned up a bit. Then we started jamming. It became apparent pretty quickly that I knew what I was doing, and I think one or two of the hard cases almost held it against me because they didn’t want me to be any good. But then we got into the spirit of the thing. One of the guys would ask me, “You know this song?” or, “You know that song?” Mostly they were into Kool & The Gang and Solomon Burke and Percy Sledge, whereas I’d grown up on the Kinks and the Rascals and the Beatles. So we had a little cross-cultural exchange to get started on, which was great for me, because these brothers started turning me on to soul in a big way.

  This is where I began to come into my own as a “feel” player. Whenever you hear a drum track, even all by itself, it has to make you feel a certain way. It was when I was working with the Unique Four that I learned to project a feeling onto the other musicians, as well as onto the audience. It was then that I truly experienced and realized that the drums have to provide the right groove so that the other players and singers can lay down their thing on top. It’s like a roadbed, all the gravel and shit they lay the railroad tracks across. The drum track is the roadbed that the song is built on. If it doesn’t feel good—even if it’s technically perfect—it’s wrong. A drum track has to make you want to move your hips. Music is really all about fucking and a great groove has to drive the rhythm for a great fuck.

  Tiny and the other singers and musicians decided that, as a drummer, I had possibilities, so before I knew it, I was buying myself some bib overalls—red polyester with rhinestones all over them—and platform shoes, because everybody in a soul band, they told me, had to “put on the dog.”

  Tiny and the band wanted to mold me further, so to advance my education, my new partners, (my band members) took me to this place called the Sugar Shack, which used to be down on Boylston Street, in the Combat Zone. “The Zone” was a nondescript, rundown part of the city squeezed in between Chinatown and Boston Common. It was mostly winos and strip clubs, and the name came from your likelihood of getting knifed on the sidewalk on any given evening. The Sugar Shack was a soul club down in a dingy basement, but once you got downstairs—if you could see through all the cigarette and reefer smoke—on any given night you could catch the O’Jays and even the Temptations.

  Our bass player sat me down and said, “Watch the drummer.” The drummers in these bands played to accentuate the singer’s dance steps. This was a whole new concept for me, and to back up the Unique Four, I had to get familiar with the choreography for each song, then work out drumming accents for each step. Later on, this made it much easier for me to incorporate off beats into the context of a regular beat of straight time and then add stuff in, because I had learned my chops from soul and from working with the dancers.

  Like all these kinds of acts, the Unique Four really worked up a sweat, and whenever they’d take breaks, the band had to be ready to fill in with instrumentals. This meant that I also had to get up to speed on some Booker T. & the M.G.s shit like “Green Onions” and “Behave Yourself.”

  We played a couple of gigs at the Prudential employee office parties and so on. But even after that I spent a lot of rehearsal time with just me and my drums and the singers. They would show me different spots in the songs where they wanted me to accent their steps, and I learned from them how to be the funky backbone of a band.

  As the ultimate training mission, the guys took me down to Harlem to the Apollo Theater to see the “Godfather of Soul,” James Brown. His band, the Famous Flames, had two drummers—Clyde Stubblefield and a dude who went by the name of Jabo—and they would alternate. One would play and one would rest, and then the other would play and the other one would rest, and I never saw that much sweat and that much shouting and that much spectacle in all my life. But the most amazing thing was the big finale and the encores that would go on forever. James had a guy on the payroll who apparently performed only two functions: one was to announce the show, and the other was to throw this cape over James’ shoulders as he was leaving the stage. James would sing his heart out for a couple of hours, growling and screaming and shouting until it looked like he was about to collapse. The audience would be on their feet clapping and stomping and going nuts, and then the announcer guy would come out with the cape. The show was winding down, and it looked like it was time to go, maybe time to get James to the hospital. The announcer would gently lay the cape over the poor man’s shoulders, and James would sort of creep off to the side of the stage as if he’d truly given it his all. There just wasn’t anymore to give. Then the music would pump and pulse, James would fling back his arms, throw the cape to the floor, and race back to center stage. He’d grab the microphone like he was going to wring its neck, then blast out another song, and then another, until it appeared that once again he’d screamed and growled and shouted his lungs completely out of commission. Once again he’d drop his shoulders, and the guy would come over with the cape. They’d do it all over again—the whole bit about slinking off to the side of the stage, looking like an invalid, and then the miraculous recovery, and then another amazing encore. They must have done it twelve times.

  Once I started playing soul, I got heavy into Earth, Wind & Fire. I loved the combination of the music and the singing, instead of the usual rock ’n’ roll thing of just one guy out front as the vocalist. There was another thing I loved about the Unique Four: the drugs—serious dope. These guys could get high and then just sit around for hours, singing. Sometimes they would be working out specifics of the vocal parts, and I’d sit there getting a little bit bored and not wanting to be “not part of,” so I’d get high, too, on these little monsters they called bug balls—a little bit of coke and a little bit of heroin. But the Unique Four never ever got so stoned that they couldn’t sing.

  Getting back into the music scene, and getting deeper and deeper into the drug scene, I started showing up for work at the insurance company later and later. Eventually they fired my ass, but it hardly mattered because this whole routine was about to come to a screeching halt anyway. Staying up all night and not eating right, not to mention consuming vast quantities of drugs, I ended up in the hospital with hepatitis and mononucleosis, and jaundice to boot.

  I was flat on my back in a charity ward when my father came to see me. He said, “You have to come back home to recuperate.” But even as he was reaching out to the prodigal son, he still had to lay down the law. “In order for you to come back to my house and stay there, you have to get a haircut.”

  It was really kind of laughable—as in, “you’ve been doing coke and heroin, hanging out with pimps and junkies in Harlem and fucking everything that moves, but in order to maintain your place in Eastchester society, the hair has gotta go.”

  Early ’70s

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  But the truth was I had no choice—I needed a place to stay where I’d be taken care of. So I cut my hair and went home to recuperate. Then when the big moment of reconciliation arrived, my parents and my sisters immediately took off for Europe for two months. I got left behind in the house all summer with my grandmother and some Saltine crackers.

  By the middle of July my energy was coming back to the point that I started going batshit with boredom. I came upon this guitar player named Bob Schuster, who we called Schroeder, and Tom, a bass player, and another guy named Jeff who played electric saxophone. I don’t think this band ever really had a name—it was so short-lived—but I remember being in Schroeder’s basement, rehearsing, when I started feeling sick again. I realized that I’d jumped the gun on this return to normal activities shit, so I had to stop playing. I went back and rested up for a few more weeks at the house with my grandmother, Anne Krouse, and the Saltines. By the time I was done with that, September had rolled around, and I decided that I wanted to go back to Boston, only now as a student at the Berklee College of Music.

  By this time, I guess my parents had given up on my ever amounting to anything
, but any kind of school must have seemed better than living on the streets. So my father agreed to loan me the money, but it was clear that I was going to have to pay him back. I went up to Boston with Schroeder, who already had an apartment on Hemenway Street, just around the corner from Berklee.

  Because we were living in the same apartment, it only made sense that we start up a band. We had a saxophone player living with us and a bass player and Schroeder and me, and we set up all our shit in the living room as our rehearsal space. We jammed our brains out, but it was pretty clear to me that we weren’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, Berklee was nothing but frustration because I was self-taught, and I used a matched grip, and they wanted me to basically start over and relearn with a conventional grip.

  Oddly enough, Raymond Tabano, my old buddy from Yonkers had also moved to Boston. He and his girlfriend, Susan, had opened a leather store on Newbury Street called The Yellow Cow. I used to go visit on a regular basis, and I told Raymond to let me know if he heard of anybody looking to put a band together. Eventually, he told me about these two guys from New Hampshire named Tom Hamilton and Joe Perry who were asking around. They were bass and guitar; they had a keyboardist and were looking for a drummer. Eventually, they came over to the apartment where I was living on Hemenway Street.

  I remember when they walked into the living room—Joe with his horn-rimmed glasses, bell-bottoms that only reached down to his ankles, cowboy boots, and a long shag haircut with a blond streak in it, and I was thinking, who the fuck is this guy? But once I started playing, I could see him and Tom smiling ear to ear. All of a sudden they were saying, “When can we rehearse? When can we do this? When can we do that?”

  Tom and Joe had just moved to town with the single objective of putting a band together. They had already scored rehearsal space in the basement of 500 Commonwealth Avenue, which was a girls’ dormitory at BU. They knew a guy named Jeff Green, who was the president of the student union or some such thing, and they’d made a deal with him that in return for playing mixers for the students, he would let them use the space. This seemed to be where all the musicians at BU left their shit, so the entire room was full of drums and amps.

  We jammed a bit, and these guys had a lot of balls when they played, but they were a little raw. After a while I was wondering once again if this was going to go anywhere. And at just about the same time they called me up and said, “You know, we don’t think we’re going to be able to use you because a friend of ours from New York is coming up. He’s a singer as well as a drummer, and we’ve been talking about playing in a band with him like forever.”

  I was kind of surprised, and there was what they call an awkward silence.

  “So thanks for coming around,” they said, “but now we’re going to use this other guy.”

  “I’m from New York,” I said. “Who is it? Maybe I know the guy.”

  “Steven Tallarico,” they said.

  “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” I said. “I’ve know Steven since junior high.”

  So Joe and Tom told Steven about me, and that the three of us had been jamming. “That’s fuckin’ great!” Steven said. “Joey can play the drums, and I can get out front and sing.”

  At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate just how much whoever was going to be the drummer in this band was going to be in the hot seat. Steven had a reputation for being a perfectionist, and the drummer was going to be a lightening rod for every obsessive-compulsive bone in the man’s body. At the time, though, as far as I was concerned, to have the opportunity to play music with Steven along with Joe and Tom in a band was just what I was looking for.

  Steven’s only other condition was that we would have Raymond playing the second guitar. So this new lineup really was like Yonkers all over again, with a little bit of New Hampshire thrown in for good measure.

  Joe and Tom had an apartment farther out at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, in the low-rent district of Allston. Steven came up and moved in, and I left school and moved in too.

  The apartment was on the second floor, and in the basement lived Gary Cabozzi, the building superintendent, and his wife, Millie. Gary was a greaser, supposedly an ex-marine, and he sort of looked out after us, in exchange for which we paid him in beer. Meanwhile, we were living on brown rice, peanut butter, and occasional meals scored at a BU dorm. (We were also not above walking past the checkout at the Stop & Shop with T-bones stuffed in our pants.)

  The only money coming in was from pissant day jobs. Steven worked in a bagel factory. Joe was a janitor, sweeping floors in a temple over in Brookline. Tom finagled his way into some federal program that paid him to study to become a draftsman at Raytheon, designing bombs or rockets or some shit. My job was to lay low and completely recuperate from hepatitis.

  One day I was coming home, and I was standing on the corner when I saw a taxi pull up, a guy lean out, put a suitcase down on the curb, and then ride away. I don’t think he saw me. So I stood there for a minute looking at the suitcase, then looking to the left and looking to the right. Then I went over to it and opened it up and looked inside. There was nothing in there but a bunch of dirty old clothes, so I closed it up and left it on the corner where I’d found it and went on up into the apartment.

  A few minutes later, Steven walks in, suitcase in hand. He opened it up in the living room, rummaged through it just like I had, then closed it, took it back downstairs and put it on the corner where he’d found it.

  A few minutes later there was some heavy-fisted banging on the door. We opened up to find these two fairly intense looking dudes, one of whom had a pistol pressed against his thigh.

  “Hand it over,” they said.

  “We put it back on the corner,” we said.

  At which point the pistol came into full view, aimed right at some of the jewelry hanging down onto Steven’s chest.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” said the guy with the gun.

  For a minute there, all we could think about was the business end of that gun, but then from out of nowhere comes Gary Cabozzi, running up the steps, screaming, “I’m going to kill you mother fuckers.”

  Our greaser/ex-marine/building superintendent was swinging this sword around his head, coming on like he’s storming the beach at Iwo Jima. These bad guys took one look at crazy Gary and made for the exits.

  The only thing I could figure was that there was something mighty valuable in that suitcase that I had missed when I poked around inside. The important thing was that we lived to tell the tale. Years later, Steven finally came clean, supposedly, and said that, yeah, there was money and dope inside and that he took it. I always thought he was full of shit, but as is typical when dealing with Steven—I’ll never know.

  This living arrangement was set up to be rock ’n’ roll boot camp, with Steven as the drill instructor. There were songs that Tom and Joe were doing that Steven loved and wanted to do, and there was stuff that Steven had done that Tom and Joe wanted to pick up. In New Hampshire, they had grown up seeing Steven’s bands at this roadhouse on Lake Sunapee, and they’d said to themselves the same thing I’d always said: “Wow, I’d give my left nut to play in a band with that guy. That guy is the shit.”

  With this band we all knew we had a real shot, and we were all determined to make it work, but first we each had to prove that we deserved to be in the lineup. What we meant by “making it” had very little to do with fame and fortune. That would come along later, but that was not really what we were striving for. Making it in a band at the time meant being able to play good-sized places for a lot of people, and to get our name around, and to become known for being good musically: both talent-wise, and performance-wise. The fame and the money are nice, but we achieved it because we did what we did from our hearts. It came from a true love of the music we played and a love for bringing it to the people and having other people enjoy it. So first, we had to enjoy it.

  One day I walked down the steps to our rehearsal place in the basement of the girls’ dorm at BU. I was a
little late, and there was the rest of the band, playing and working on a new song called “Movin’ Out.” It was the first song that Joe and Steven wrote together, and they were really anxious to get it down right and tight.

  The song has kind of an odd line to it. And I’m thinking, Wow, that’s a tough one. I don’t know what I’m going to play for that. I sat down at my drums and I started diddling and fuckin’ around while the band was playing the lines of the song. And within two minutes, I came up with a drum line that fit perfectly.

  I could feel a big smile coming across my face as I played; I looked at Steven and he was smiling back at me. It was a sense of accomplishment, really joyful, and I could feel my joy being reflected back from Tom and Joe and everybody. We were pulling the whole song together and making it happen, and each of us was living up to his part of the bargain. This whole back and forth, give and take, was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It felt like home.

  The band was the number one thing for each of us, and each of us was willing to sacrifice for it. Except for Raymond, who lived with his girlfriend, we all lived together in a shitty apartment for the band. We all ate crappy, cheap meals together for the band. And I loved it. I loved the camaraderie, the rehearsals, the getting high together. I loved the whole feel of it. I loved learning new things, which I always did when I worked with Steven. He was committed to teaching me everything he knew about drumming, and I was very open to learning. He saw some talent, but he also recognized that I really had no clear direction and that I needed to carve out my own territory. He had a better handle on what I was capable of than I did, and he helped me mold my talent. I was doing Mitch Mitchell, and he wanted more John Bonham, but he also wanted that Bonham sound filtered through something new and unique.