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MORE OF NED ROUSE'S
DIARRHEA OF A MADMAN

Band Science 101 Part II

GOOD FOR THE GOOD
OF THE BAND AND MUSIC!
There are many reasons to perform music and in my years of playing one of the best was being able to do it with positive and focused musicians. For a professional who is in it for the love of music, jelling with these few kindred spirits is both a kick and the real pay off. It’s like listening to really great music with a dear friend who reads your mind, then responds with deep eye contact, as to just what you are enjoying when you hear a song that moves you. Egos are put aside when the sound becomes more important than anyone's playing. I am not, by any means, the best musician around here, but I am creative, and dedicated to my visions. The fact that you have reached this level of musicianship puts you in a space where your ideas can benefit a greater purpose. Mediocre players don’t understand this concept and never will. It is simply reserved for the sharp edged, creative types. If you weigh your abilities down with limiting factors, such as partying, ego, sex, anger, or the quest for money, how can you ever hear the dynamics of instinctive playing? Many popular songs are sadly written from the pocket book and not from the heart. Just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it is right, and the way it should be. There are many famous people turning out dribble to consumers who never expect more than what they are given. I would never want to be called the King of Pop or the King of Rock n’ Roll. It would be like saying that, like most royalty, I wasn’t elected by anyone. If I was elected at all, it was by teenagers, who are considered too young to vote in any other of our societies elections that would effect the world. You can take this to another level of fun thinking. The kingdom I am ruling over is uninformed, overpopulated with simple people who are easily led, and they would drink from bedpans if it would attract a social life for themselves. This explains Acts like Milli Vanilli, and dancers that happen to sing, receiving praise from awards shows. Acts is a very appropriate description of what is decided for us to hear. Acts. I would also like to take it one step further and call it pretend music. When real musicians play real music, it doesn’t have to get all complicated, though it can be. They can smoothly deliver to you mist or a downpour. I give credit to anyone who tries to be their best at what they create. I feel this way about all of the Arts.

CAN THE DRUMMER COME OUT AND PLAY!
As I have said before, the most popular band I was ever in was the worst, and the best band was the least popular. I know how it all works and I tolerate it. Now here is where I will get a bit schmaltzy about people. I met my favorite guitar player when I was 24 years old. He was a little younger than me and had a great talent. His ability was amazing to me. We always had him over for dinner. My wife and I became great friends with him. He understood what he was doing and loved his instrument enough to really study it. He could play every style of music, and in our band, we did just that! I was the same way about my music, too. No one could tell us what, or how to play. We could feel each-others dynamics and read each-other's minds. He had little patience for the many musical hacks we weeded through to eventually come up with the best band line up we had ever experienced together. Anyone who ever played with that project benefited from it's power. I will always appreciate that time in my life so much. If we had only the wisdom then that we have now. At some point we all got bored and lazy. Disillusioned, I quit the band to play crappy music so I could make some quick and easy music money. I made a lot of money playing constantly. It was never music that I really wanted to play. Writing songs and poetry filled the creative void in my life. He went on to do many more things musically that I admired him for. His project seemed to become way more successful than mine. At the time I was a bit envious of his success, and that, along with other things, put a wedge between us that never had gone away. I called him up recently and made peace with him, by telling him what I have written here. I have to mention a sound man that still is a good friend of mine. He was introduced into my favorite band through the keyboard player. It was a little hard to get to know him at first, but once I did, he became a lifelong friend. Many times, over the years, he has stayed with my family and was an inspiring person to be around. He has a good wit and wonderfully warped perspective on things. I enjoy that the most about him. Many times I have been entertained by his conspiracy theories on numerous topics. He is truly as good of a sound man as most musicians are at playing their instruments. His skill at playing the bands he mixes and giving suggestions to them, is top notch. I will always appreciate the love of science that is at the root of his artistry, but it is his being a good friend that has made my life a bit better. Another person needs to be mentioned here. The best woman I ever played with was a wonderfully eccentric person, with a fierce wit. She sang incredibly well and played a proficient guitar. Boy could she put an egotistical male musician in his place with a couple of funny wise cracks. She had charisma and talent to boot. Having being also blessed with good looks was more than she could bear, so she often chose to dress down and do things to make herself look less attractive. I will always remember how much fun she was. She fancied herself a bit of a feminist, liked to rant about it to me, and to the others. I remember her saying that all that women wanted was to be equal to men. I answered her by saying that I thought she hadn’t set her bar very high. I added that I wondered why women would want to be equal to anything as generally miserable as men. It did appear to me that she did like some of the female privilege that was around at that time. Once our light man put a tremendous amount of flash powder in our flash pods and almost blew her up when he accidentally hit the switch one night. Because it wasn’t the best musical project around at the time, or very important to some of the band members, this project was soon history. She went on to safer bands. He accidentally killed a child while driving drunk and went into recovery to change his life. They were some of the nice people placed in my life. I will never forget any of them.

CAN YOU PLAY WIPE OUT?
Inevitably some drunken bar patron who was born around the later half of the century will ask the drummer that dreaded question. Can you play Wipe Out? I used to tell them that the band was sorry but we didn’t know the words to it. It would take a while to sink in while I could make my getaway. I bet you the band The Safaris played only 2 songs in concert. That would be Wipe Out and the flip side of the 45, Surfer Joe. They most likely wrote it by accident and it was set to be only the B-side of the record, but someone with a need for rhythm in their life paid radio stations a lot of money to play it. This really tells me that we are definitely judged by our mistakes. The rest is history. According to music lovers everywhere Wipe Out is the best damn drummers song in the history of the entire world! If that were true, everyone from Yanni to Santana would cover it. Nobody else wants to record it. It is odd that so many people think that is the way to measure percussionist’s abilities. Yes I can play it! I can do it on one hand, one foot, in different time signatures, and in my sleep!!! I never wanted anyone to hear me play it. One of the few times I was forced into playing it, I was on a rare drunk, in front of a large audience, and I was so intoxicated that I screwed it up royally! Then a redneck at the bar told me that I wasn’t a very good drummer because I f*%#ed it all up. I told him he wasn’t a very good redneck because he was soooooooo f*%#ed up. So there! I vowed that I would never do that again and never have since. I guess many of the Wipe Out lovers are dying off, as they get older. I wonder if the Safaris are still living?

STAND UP DRUMMING
In the late 70’s I was getting tired of playing the drums shoved behind guitarists and hidden from the audience. I wanted to be a performer. I began thinking one day that I could dance and tap out beats and that I may be able to play drums that way. The first thing I did was to rise up my drum kit to the height of where I was comfortable playing standing up. This required ordering some taller hardware and also moving my tom toms back six or seven inches. The real barrier was the high hat cymbals were cutting into me. I have to come up with something that would move them away from me about 1 foot. So I invented and designed this pedal accommodation that was to be made out of wood. I named it The Razz, after a drummer, nick-named Razz, who was always giving me critique behind my back. I also called this pedal Rouse’s Repining Rock n’ Roll Rump Pumper. It worked by using your toe movement. It worked very well. I was able to play as well as before and the musicianship didn’t suffer one bit. I wouldn’t have done it if it had not. My band was on a break, so I began to work with it in my basement. After I practiced with it a couple of months I was ready to debut it. It went over extremely well. Not only was I performing along side the whole band, I was able to jump fly and twirl without missing a beat. After a while I got so good at it that I invented a keyboard stand that allowed me to play keyboard with my right hand while I was adequately drumming with the rest of my limbs. Soon people were checking out the Stand Up Drummer/Keyboard Player from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I played successfully for many years until I developed some pretty painful tendonitis in the late 1890’s and had to sit back down. There is a video somewhere out there that recorded that band and this way of my playing. I wish I had a record of it for my kids. By the mid 1980’s I was having a heart fibulation problem that was making my timing terrible. Eventually I had surgery done to correct it. Just in time to retire from the night scene.

WHY THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, INCLUDING RADIO, SUCKS,
AND WHY REAL ARTISTS DON’T CARE
Talent is measured by sales. Sales are manipulated by marketing. Marketers orchestrate marketing with accountants. Accountants are also executives. Executives have little musical taste. Taste is not what you hear on the radio or the countless musical award shows. If a band gets something through at all fresh or creative most often it was probably a mistake and by their second album it will be carefully recreated, then tailored to resemble the first mistake. I am not at all saddened about the struggle and plight of the radio stations or record companies in the collapse of their systems. They have made themselves snobbish cliques that use and discard the talent they huckster like the other polluters littering fast food sacks all over the land and destroying the beauty of the environment. Disc jockeys and their radio stations are a big let down to artist/musicians. Most disc jockeys rarely understand music and aspire to be control freaks. They talk over the music that they pander and want to be more popular than the celebrities they play on the air. They are a special, little club unto themselves, and demand to be fed the decadent spoils of the power of fame around celebrities they bleed like leeches. This is the example the upper layers of their corrupt system gives to them. Stockholders want a sure thing. The owners stick it to audience and conspire to help sculpt sure things and hits. If you happen to hear something good it won’t be pure long. They will mess it up with over-saturation on the airwaves or insert clone bands. I can tell you what they don’t figure on are surprise phenomenons, independents or cult bands. These really mess them up. How do you manipulate true artists that don’t care? They are like flies in the ointment and are like unpredictable storms. A growing number of us buck their system and make our statements within our own control. We totally tune them out and use the Internet along with our other resources to find our own markets and fellow artists. If you ever want to observe the worst of what the music industry can be, go to a concert and try speaking to disc jockeys managers or promoters about music. Listen to them carefully. Act like you need them to mentor you. Don’t speak much. Remember always that they mostly lack musical talent. They will display arrogant self-importance, make you an outsider, and will act like the real center of the musical universe because by their industries standards they probably are made just that. Bands songwriters and musicians are expendable and secondary to all of the bullshit they have created. You will walk away wiser. I heard Dick Clark defend Ashley Simpson’s karaoke-like debacle and minimalize it as having been done for years on American Bandstand with no one objecting. The difference was that everyone knew it was happening on Bandstand because it was blatantly and totally obvious. The singers often stood there alone with nothing but zit faced teens as accompaniment. As the songs faded out as the singers or players gave up the charade before the tunes finished. I always hated that part about his show. When music lovers pay money to hear a band live, want to hear them live. They want to know if the artists can really sing. Are they in key? Can they play? Fans can be reasonable. If they see a drummer with headphones, they know a rhythm or backing track is being used, and they can understand the reasons. Music lovers like to see different and exciting interpretations of a song. Changed tempos or verses. We do however not expect the main singer to be a recording. If that were the case we would not pay the money and just watch it at home. At least some moron wouldn’t be standing on a chair and be blocking your $50.00 view. Dick Clark was probably OK with Milli Vanilli getting a Grammy for not even singing on their fabricated album! I tell you this quite plainly Dick Clark wants you to buy any damn recording that he can make a buck off of. He is not the only one. That is the sad reality of the whole industry from lawyers to the guy with a table at the flea market. Hail to the free and real musicians/artists of the world! May they make a living off their own sweat and invest in their retirement! Down with corporate music America! Long live radio free America!!!!!

The Smile
What is it called? I have heard someone say that it is the acknowledgement of comradery. I have often tried to figure out just what kind of smile it is that people use during those certain times. Now I am not talking about any old smile. This is the one where they seem to really be proud of something. It usually begins with eye contact and then a closed mouth joyous grin that quickly ends as they pass by. I first noticed it when video recorders came out. When your average citizen could now rent the VHS tape of their choice in their very own America. They would come out of the video store and give The Smile as you went in. It was like they were saying, I just rented a movie and I am so glad we share this experience with humanity, our lives are much richer today, and I can see yours is too! Come join us. Let’s become one. We’re going to become movie critics and judge artistic works down by the cement pond in our first ever alternative film festival. Over the years I began to notice this same smile coming from people at ATM machines, when CD’s first came out, drive through windows, computer stores, and when people discovered cell phones. It’s infectious, I am now doing it too, and I don’t know why. I never start it. It’s as if you can’t deny someone the reply and your face responds ahead of your mind. The really bad grins incorporate your nose wrinkling muscles. Again it’s just like someone asking you how you are doing on a day you are having tremendous problems and you blurt out pretty good instead of the truth. I usually then walk away saying, under my breath, pretty good, if I was on the space shuttle Challenger. Don’t get me wrong. Smiles are way better than frowns, but sincere is always better than phony to me. I always have thought we should try to behave ourselves the best we can just in case we are being observed by aliens, who are making the decision on either annihilating or sparing earth based on our behaviors witnessed. Our blessing may be that they might never land right in the middle of a Tupperware party or spot a painted sports fan acting like one of those belly whistler guys with their arms tucked up in their big top hats. In the end The Smile will probably keep evolving and spawning new variations.