CHC EP ANNIVERARY (PT IV)
by ADAM BAILEY (DRUMS on “FILM”)
While my intersection with Children Having Children was a concise one, I would like to think it was as duly formative and exciting for the band as it was for myself. I was recruited by my friend Matthew Fugel, whom I had forged a friendship with through our band classes in middle school and had maintained through high school, mostly through irreverent side splitting half-hours in the cafeteria during lunch. It was that shared sense of humor coupled with a love for music, specifically the Smashing Pumpkins (devout Jimmy Chamberlin worshipper here) as one of our all time favorite bands, that provided the galvanizing force for us through the years. Fast forward to 2007, I’m in my junior year at University of Georgia when I get a message from Matt, gauging my interest in coming in to record the drums on a track for the band he is playing rhythm guitar for in Atlanta.
I jumped on without hesitation. I had never (and to this day have not again) recorded a track with a band in a recording studio situation as a drum set player (no, I do not count recordings of my high school jazz band). I was excited not only in a creative and musical sense but for the opportunity it presented to reconnect with Matt and bridge some of the distance that the college years naturally bring about. I trusted that any group that he was playing with would be worthwhile to be a part of despite having not heard a note -- our aligning musical sensibilities would be enough of a bedrock to jump into this project without hesitation. As I understood it, the need was dire for a drummer that had the musical aptitude to come in and record not only an intricate enough arrangement to satisfy the song but who could record it all in the small window of time we would have together.
The reason for the time constraint was simultaneously a personal additional motivating factor for coming onto the project. We would be recording in the quickly legendary Southern Tracks Recording studio, a boutique production “house” that was literally just that -- a house nestled in northern Atlanta that had been converted into a state of the art music recording studio that now churned out a bevy of commercially and critically successful albums for world renown acts. I would have been happy to record the track in a storage unit wrapped in sound blankets. But this? Getting to lay down my first drum recording in the epitome of a professional setting was the cherry on top of a sundae I was already very eager to eat, regardless if that meant we would only have one full night to pull it off.
The studio space was accessible to the band in the first place because their founder, Steven Kaiser, earned an internship at the studio, and so this one singular weekend of allotted studio time was the culmination of his hours of devoted hard work during his tenure. This would not be a creative venture that could sprawl across multiple nights and days, free to tither along with no hard out time -- we had hours to minutes to work with. I would have it no other way.
I met up with the band to have a practice in a storage unit that was their usual area for rehearsal. I met Steven and David Palatsi for the first time and after some quick getting to know you time we got right to it. What I knew immediately about this collective was that everyone involved had a shared passionate intensity for music coupled with that certain vulnerability so identifiable in artists across every medium. I trusted Matt to bring me into a project that was dynamic and engaging, but it’s every drummer’s fear in the back of their mind that they’re just needed at the end of the day for 2’s and 4’s slapped on the snare with a palatable, top 40 radio bass rhythm.
To my delight it looked early on that this arrangement was going to be challenging not only to play but to flesh out completely with Kaiser’s collaboration. I was not simply being dictated to what the part would and should be, I was being cited to bring my own ideas and bridge the gap with what I brought to the table as the percussionist on the song. This was all the equity I would require as we moved through the recording process.
A few weeks (months?) after our one practice session it was time to record. I was home from UGA on fall break coincidentally to when they would be recording for the EP so the congruency was perfect for me giving the night of recording my full attention. I navigated the northern Atlanta streets winding along a part of town I had rarely gone to but felt indistinguishable to the suburban streets in the outer city limits that I had traveled down thousands of times before until I finally came to my destination. The sun had just set so the early nightfall only added to the inconspicuousness of the building I was examining for the first time. The house off the nondescript road that countless drivers had passed on their daily commutes, never truly knowing the iconic figures that descended upon it in repetition to record their latest musical offering for the world. I was enthusiastically greeted by the band and brought inside.
Even with the prior knowledge of the pedigree of artists that had made music at Southern Tracks, to step inside and immediately be surrounded by plaque after plaque of platinum after gold after platinum record completely filling the walls was completely flooring. Acts like Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Bruce Springsteen, Stone Temple Pilots, and Train to very literally name a few were smattered across the walls. The nu-metal loving preteen in me couldn’t help but be giddy to see plaques for Korn and Limp Bizkit’s “Significant Other” also adorning the space. The prestige was instantly upon me and I hadn’t taken 4 steps into the place.
As I was getting the tour, we came into the main recording room and I realized that I actually recognized this space on a documentary I had seen on the recording of one of Incubus’ most recent albums and was blown away where I stood all over again. I would be sharing a studio space with some of my favorite and biggest bands in the world. We had a coffee in the kitchen to chat about the game plan for the evening but all I truly remember was trying to contain my excitement from bubbling over about getting to play in a space that had been shared by some of my most personally formative influences. I could tell that excitement was providing an energy that the band was happy to attach to, as they had no doubt overcome the base novelty of working and recording in a place that was such a fixture in the music industry.
The actual recording process itself was a bit of blur. Everyone was working with the knowledge that we in essence had until sunrise to get what we needed so we kept a steady albeit frenetic pace. This was a creative energy that I would come to experience in a similar way again and again on various film sets and projects that would fill my time as a graduate film school student in Savannah, GA -- the hopeful yet focused grind of creative endeavor having only a finite amount of time to amass it’s final result through a tapestry of rolls and takes.
The pursuit of my MFA in film marked in my mind the closing of the chapter of my life of playing music. I had filled my years at UGA playing in various drumlines both at the college itself and in independent competition ensembles -- groups that practiced every day of every weekend from November to April until world finals were held as a culmination to the “season.” I would spend thousands of dollars in member dues, gas money, food, all for just the possibility of performing during Finals Night and competing for a world title in this incredibly niche albeit devoted subculture.
The groups at the highest level have an “age out” that keeps the participants in the activity to age 22 or younger. I had amassed a small collection of medals from being fortunate enough to perform with one of the most successful and acclaimed of these groups, Music City Mystique. I would come to march Mystique the two years after I recorded on “Film” for Children Having Children, but my previous years of experience with the marching activity had kept my hands progressing even if my drum set skills had atrophied ever so slightly, given that my kit was not with me in my college town.
When the time came and I could no longer participate in an art form that had become my biggest passion for the previous six years of my short life, I figured I could transition from my undergraduate years fueled by music to my graduate years filled by film making. I figured I would simply trade one passion for the other as my driving creative undertaking -- as if passions are the kind of things that can just be compartmentalized and put in a box, stored away like an old sweatshirt you can’t bring yourself to part with.
Not so fast.
About 2 years past my “playing days” I was starting to get an itch to play music in a group again. Turns out holding a camera and editing a sequence, while exquisite fun in their own right, are simply not the same as a unit of people locking in to a tempo and key to create something that so wholly ties everyone to the singular moment that it links everyone involved for life.
The universe must have received my exasperated transmission, because I was approached by my buddy Jeff who I knew in the student film circle and who also played bass guitar in a local band called Word of Mouth. Their original drummer was off to music school for the foreseeable future and they needed someone who could fill in. Finding a replacement drummer was no easy task given the type of songs this band wrote -- genre-bending to an eclectic fusion of multiple stylings replete with meter changes and sweeping transitions found in every song. Whoever was to come in needed to have the ability to keep up with the song writing. Jeff was privy to my marching background and knew I was literally just sitting on a drum kit with no one to play with (living in a house for graduate school meant my kit was now under the same roof as me).
I would play in that band for the better part of two years. These would be some of the best years of my life as I experienced fully the joy of playing music in ways I could have never expected. I was now outside of my usual forum of the marching activity -- where you meticulously rehearsed and refined one show over five months to culminate in one final performance to an audience of thousands in person and thousands more online. The slightest misstep in execution not only in your playing but in your marching or coordination could result in deductions that separate ensembles by hundredths of a point, sometimes determining who takes gold back on their bus ride to their normal life or who takes home silver, or nothing at all. Playing in a “gee-tar band” was a freeing experience musically in a way that I had not anticipated, and it breathed new life into my passion for music.
The band’s run would in essence come to apex as the headlining act for a music festival generated specifically to feature the band as the main Saturday night act. It was an apogee of the traction the band had gained through playing countless shows across Savannah and neighboring towns. The festival was held in the main park of the city, which boasted a large outdoor stage that had become the de facto outdoor venue in Savannah.
As we played our first song, I was too shrouded in the stage fog to accurately gauge how big the crowd that stood beyond might be. I had modestly estimated a few hundred people were filling the park to see us. When we hit the final note of the first song I was floored to be met with a WALL of sound from what turned out to be thousands in the crowd roaring their approval. It is a sound I will never forget. I had played in front of crowds of thousands with Music City Mystique, but at those events I was one of roughly fifty people -- the goal was to move as a unit rather than draw individual attention. Never had I ever played drum set as the one and only percussionist on stage for such a large crowd.
After that show the band’s original drummer returned, and they would go on to record an album in Nashville. What they believed to be the next step of the band’s evolution turned out to be the final moment of the ensemble's creative offering -- as it seems to happen in life, members would start to be taken in new directions, to new cities and new projects. I myself was completing said MFA and was too immersed in getting across that finish line to feel the sting of once again missing playing music, this time freshly off the heels of one of the most engaging and energizing chapters of my life.
I’ve never consciously linked that night recording at Southern Tracks with CHC as the seed planted for wanting to one day play drums in a band. Sitting here writing this though I realize that it can't be overstated how much getting to step into that prestigious place and make music lit a fire for wanting to replicate that same experience, however modulated. The constraints of time and rapport with most of the band members only added to the zest of the pressure cooker.
We were each of us in our own capacities swimming in the deep water -- my inexperience with playing record drums and for them trying to bring their first EP to a concrete medium using state-of-the-art equipment that everyone was doing their best to navigate properly. Each party did their best to come to a collective syntax where I was playing what Kaiser was looking for while simultaneously being able to provide revisions and suggestions.
It was a collaborative process I would come to emulate many times on various film sets -- the free flow of creative input with the impetus of time never being on your side, forcing the train to move along the tracks. We pushed and scraped and clawed our way across an entire all-nighter of work but left the studio feeling like we had done exactly what we came to do as we greeted the morning sun with our exhausted, over-caffeinated faces.
I would come back to Southern Tracks one more time before it would shut its doors. This time to film a friend and one of the best drummers I personally know, Darren Stanley, for a YouTube series featuring him playing along to a track in the exact same room I had recorded with CHC those years before. It was still a Mecca though clearly a shadow of itself in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
As I pushed my camera along it’s dolly slider tracking shot after shot, I couldn’t help but think about the irony that both of my main art pursuits brought me to the exact same place, the exact same room -- separated by years and fine arts degrees. I thought back on that night when a few young men converged to try to produce a musical offering that would end up linking us even almost a decade and half later as I draft this. It is still the only recording of myself playing drums on a full blown find-it-on-a-Spotify-near-you track.
For me, this is a beauty that both film and music share -- that souls converging for even one evening can create something that, whether to the world at large or to they themselves, can last throughout the rest of our lives, becoming snapshots in time that link us to a sense memory and remind us of who and what we were.
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