When last we saw  Jonathan Mover he was planning to put together his own band, Einstein (see cover story in TD #6). Now, two years later, the group's finally about to see the light of day, and in a very big way. Joe Satriani, with whom Jonathan is currently touring, will headline a guitar extravaganza that will roll its rock across America for five weeks in late summer. Joe has given Einstein the opening slot in the multi-act show, which means Mover will do double duty, warming up the crowd with his trio and then closing it with Satriani, whose road band also includes his lonq time session drummer Jeff Campitelli on rhythm guitar, keyboards, and percussion. This, then, is the story of how Jonathan Mover put together and launched a band. Big deal, you say, he's got a name, he should have no problem. Well, does the cautionary tale of Missing Persons ring any bells? In a lot of ways Mover's efforts echo Terry Bozzio's optimistic dreams of over a decade ago when that drummer left the predictable path to put together his own band, Missing Persons. Let's hope the world has become a better place since then and that history won't repeat itself. It's been a long, arduous struggle, and Jonathan's had to put down his sticks for a year and swap bass drums for business meetings, paradiddles for percentage points, and cymbals for CD pressings. When you're a professional drummer, there's a lot more to life than hot licks. The music business is just that, a business,and this is a story  not about the art of music but about the art of the deal. And make no mistake, if there were no deal, there'd be no music.

Fest in the West

TD: You're doing this tour with Satriani, but what's up with Einstein?

JM: We recorded the record very quickly. The band's a trio: me, Stan Jankowski on guitar, and Jane Mangini on keyboards. We had discussed some possible lead singers and this and that, but we decided to keep it a trio. I picked up the secondary vocals. We pretty much scrapped most of the old material we had been working on before, rewrote everything immediately, went right into Longview Farms Studio in Massachusetts, recorded it pretty much live in about 12 days, then mixed it at Sound Techniques in Boston, and mastered it at H&R in New York.
     We pressed the first thousand ourselves because I wanted to have them in time for the American leg of this tour.We've been selling it at the gigs, and we're almost sold out, so I'm happy about that.

     The best news of all is we're wrapping up our distribution deal, so it should be in the stores by the middle of the summer. That's perfect timing because August 1 through September 5 Joe is going across the U.S. for five weeks with a guitar festival thing that he put together. It's kind of a Lollapalooza of Guitarists. and we'll be doing mostly outdoor sheds. It'll be Joe headlining; SteveVai; maybe Eric Johnson; possibly JohnMcLaughlin; and Einstein will open the show.

TD: So you're going to be doing double duty?

JM: Yeah, I'll open with Einstein, have a couple of  hours off while the other bands play, and then finish up with Joe. That'll be a nice way for us to get out and establish ourselves in front of anywhere from 150-200,000 people over those five weeks.
     So that was kind of the trade-off. Joe called me in early spring '95 to see if I was available and interested in doing this last record of his. I was definitely interested, but I wasn't really available because Einstein was busy recording and mixing, so he went on and recorded with a different band with Glyn Johns producing.

     I kinda thought that was it, although we're still friendly, because he knew that I was totally focused on Einstein. But he telephoned back a few months later to see if  I'd be available to tour, and I told him I'd like to come out and do as much as I can, but that I couldn't put my band off to go out for another whole year on the road - we started last October ('95) and we're ending in September of this year ('96).         Around Christmas time, after we had done all of Europe and were getting ready to do Australia and New Zealand, his management asked me to continue Joe's tour through September, includingSouth America, the Pacific rim, the Far East, back to Europe, and more in theStates.

     At that point I said I'd love to continue but I couldn't unless Einstein was involved in one way or another. I didn't want to bring the band out immediately in February because it would've been too difficult to get ready that quickly, and I didn't want to try to do a double bill without having the CD pressed.
     So we came to an agreement - and I can't thank Joe enough for this - to allow me to sell the CD for the first three months of the tour, and then I would commit to the short legs for the summer - South America, the Pacific rim, the Far East, and back to Europe for the festivals - and then Einstein would be part of the guitar fest in the States in August. That would end my year with Joe and begin my new year with Einstein. And it's been great because every night after my drum solo Joe announces "Jonathan Mover on drums, and by the way, he's got a great new band called Einstein and the CD's available." That's been helping out a lot, so thanks, Joe!

DIY

TD: Once you've found the right people, what do you have to do to get a new
band off the ground and get a record deal?

JM: It's all based on money, bottom line. That's it, plain and simple. What ever you're going to do, whether it be go to the studio and record, or do demos, rehearse a band to do live gigs, or go on the road, any or all of those endeavors cost money.I did it my way because I knew I wanted to do my own project, which we talked about last time (see Jonathan's cover story in TD #6). I saved up a lot of my money to put towards that, so I paid for the recording, the rehearsal time, the mixing, the mastering, and the pressing.We did it that way because I could fund it.
     If you're lucky enough to get the interest of a record company, they may either sign you or give you a derno deal or maybe hand you five or ten grand to go into the studio to do some stuff live-to-tape. That's one way of getting it started.

     There's another way to do it, which is to hit the road yourself. A lot of new bands are starting to do that because the record companies just don't know what they're looking for; they're looking to jump on the newest Pearl Jam, so then a ton of Pearl Jams come out. Then they want a new Hootie and the Blowfish, so the new Hooties come out. But we're not similar to any of those bands.

     A lot of new bands and many guys on the same level that I'm at - professional working musicians with established names in the business - who want to do their own thing are not finding the record companies paying too much attention unless they sound like Silverchair or the flavor-of- the- week 15-year-old sloppy alternative band. So a lot of guys are doing it themselves: selling their own CD's and hitting the road themselves. We had a really great band open for us on the West Coast called the Mustard Seeds.That initially was Greg and Matt Bissonette. Greg split for whatever reason - rnaybe because he was doing Toto last year - and Matt kept it going, and they did their own CD and are selling it on the road. It's going great, and hopefully when you do it that way, you'll generate enough attention or sell enough copies that somebody will sign you.

TD: How do you go about pressingyour own CD?

JM: Not that expensive and not that difficult to do. We started our own record label, Radio Free Records, pun intended. It was pretty easy, outside of the trademark search and copyright. You just get your artwork together. What the CD looks like depends on how much money you have. You can have just a dual fold, which is four sides to a foldover sleeve (front, back, and two middle), or you can do multiple sleeves inside for lyrics and photos, and so on and so on.

     Usually you can get a CD pressed for around $2 to $2.50 each when you get them done in quantities of a thousand or more; there are many companies around the country that will do it that way. Instead of going with a small - maybe too small - independent label that would not be able to give us enough money to get us going and still want do a typical percentage point structure, with my lawyer's help we decided to do our own label and then just go for distribution.That way we get a much larger chunk of percentage and points to keep. It means that we have to take the risk in the beginning, but the payoff will be greater in the end.

TD: What do you put up front andwhat do you get back?

JM: The CD's that we pressed cost about $2.40 to make and we're selling them pretty cheap at the gigs, only ten bucks. That funds us to either do another load or hit the road. But going with a distribution company helps you because even though they're not giving you $100,000 to do your own record, they're putting money behind you to get your CD out across the country. And that money, in turn, you can use for press, promotion and hitting the road.

The Deal

TD: What kind of percentage would they take?

JM:  In a typical record deal, you're looking at 10-12 points for the whole band
to split, a point being one percent. A unit averages these days around eight or nine
cents, meaning the average between a CD and a cassette. If you're lucky enough to be able to do all this yourself and have a good, sharp lawyer, you might be able toget 20-25 points off the deal and get an independent deal so you're not tied to the record company with your publishing either, which is something we didn't want to do.

TD: When you set up a publishing company, what exactly does it do?

JM: There are different ways you get paid on records: 1) mechanicals; 2) points of unit sales; and 3) writer's royalties.There's also how the music is played and sold; that's part of what publishing is. Divided up into publishing not only is how many units of the record are sold, and how many times is it played on the radio or video, you also have who wrote it and who has the copyrights on the actual writing of the song, not just the publishing. Some bands can share publishing, but the writer gets more if the song is used on a soundtrack or if somebody else covers it. That's a separate issue.

     Most bands that work with record companies have to do a publishing deal because publishing is where all the money's at. Everybody should know that by now, and every drummer should learn how to write music, one way or another, and have a piece of publishing. There's always that one guy in the band - usually the guitar player or the singer - who writes all the music, and at the end of a tour or the end of the year, that person does much better financially. While everybody else is scrambling to get their money together to buy an apartment because the record only sold 20,000 units, if it got a lot of radio play, he might be putting in a pool or buying his second condo. So learn how to write some music! [laughs]

     In doing a record deal, most companies will ask for a 50-50 split or a 60-40 split. On one hand, they may offer you $150.000 up front. but if you have a semi hit record then there's a lot more than 150 grand coming in, and they're going to have a big piece of it. We didn't want to do that; we wanted to retain all of our publishing, so we decided to do it this way first. Those are pretty much the steps we've taken to this point.

TD: You're just selling the CD at Joe's gigs now, but are you eventually going through a distributor?

JM: Yeah, my lawyer's wrapping that up as we speak. Twelve points is the nonrm for a regular record deal, but on the distribution deal, we're bargaining in the 20-25 percent range.

TD: Is that what someone can expect to get?

JM: In a really good situation. Fortunately we have a lot going for us.We have endorsements by our companies behind us, which gives us built in press releases and world wide promotion. My guitarist is Ibanez and Laney, and I'm Tama/ Evans/ Zildjian/Meinl, so we're fully covered there. We also have the opportunity to offer the company my lawyer's talking to right now a five week tour across the states that could put us in front of a couple hundred thousand people. That's much more attractive than just going out on the road to do five weeks in clubs, where we'd only play to 10,000 people. So we have some nice things to offer, so I think we have a stronger bargaining position than maybe the average band.

     But that's the difference between the two: when you go for the record deal and they give you one or two hundred grand for the record, you're obviously not going to get very many points because they're taking the big risk. In our situation, we took the risk, so that's why we're asking for more.

Time & Timing

TD: Sounds like trying to set up aband takes up a lot of your time.

JM: Yes it does!

TD: Chops-wise, have things deteriorated to the point where you feel like you've gotta go into an intensive practice schedule to get yourself into shape?

JM: Unfortunately, my situation is the same as the last time we spoke: I still don't practice. Living in New York City and having a drum set in your living room just don't go together.

     I'm still in a situation where the only practice I get is when I'm playing professionally, when I'm either recording or touring with Joe. That's still something that drags me, and I took forward to either acquiring a place outside of New York at one point to be able to do that, or - if I'mever in New York long enough - get a stu-io where I can hang out.

     But it does take a lot of time toget a band off the ground. Since we last spoke in '94, I pretty much took off almost an entire year of work just to write the new record, get together with the guys, book the studio time, and take care of business. We recently hooked up with a manager, but up until now I've been doing everything for the band. It's taken up an awful lot of time, but it's been worth it because it's my baby. If it was a situation where it wasn't completely my band, there might have been less incentive. Don't misunderstand me: all three of us make up the band equally, but it is my group, so it's been worth the time and effort.       And getting back together with Joe for this tour has really come at a good time because taking a year off of work and keeping up the sarne lifestyle in Manhattan as I did when I was working wasn't an inexpensive thing to do![laughs] And on top of not having an income, I was paying my band members because I wanted them to be able to concentrate on the band and not worry about making ends meet while we put everything together. Everybody pitched in what they had, and my pitch in was money. It's worked out good, and this tour with Joe came at a good time to get it all back up and running.

Keeping It In The Family

TD: You're not using your regular tech now. Why not?

JM: Couldn't find him. [laughs] My little brother Marc is on the road with me. For years he's been saying he'd like to come out and see the world and do a tour. It happened to be this one, and it's good timing because Gavin couldn't be located.       He's the best drum tech I've ever had, probably because he knows nothing about drums. I gave him a quick explanation of the kit and the rack and told him how it goes together and what it's all about. He did it once on his own, and then it took him about two or three days to learn how to tune the kit with that Tama Tuning Watch or whatever it's called, and it's flawless. I come in every day and everything's in the right place and the kit's all tuned up and sounding like a demon.

TD: And nobody's banging on your kit.

JM: [laughs] And nobody's banging on my kit, nobody touches it. He's doing a great job. He sets me up in the morning, grabs his golf clubs and hits the local links, then comes back and does the show. He's having a great time playing golf around the world.

Back to the Big One

TD: What's with this new mega-kit?

JM: I started out this tour with anoth-er four-piece kit. I was using just a 12 anda 16, and every once in a while I'd throwup a IO/ 1 3/16 (with a 24 kick) for a five-piece kit. I did all of Europe, Australiaand New Zealand, and the West Coast legof the U.S. tour around Christmas time ona small kit.

     This new Starclassic kit I had designed custom - custom paint, customsizes, custom everything - for Einstein. It wasn't ready in time to record the CD, so I used my Artstar II's: a single kick and 8,10,12,14 sometimes, and 16, 18 toms. I wanted the big spread.

     This kit was actually ready shortly after the beginning of '96, right before we started on the big leg of the American tour. I drove down to Philadelphia with my brother just to set it up and have a look at it, and the minute I set it up I decided I wanted to start playing it to get a jump on playing a bigger kit again.

     I've gone back to playing left handed primarily. I've got two rides, depending on the sound I want, one on the right and one on the left. My main hi hat is set flat and to the left of my snare drum and I don't cross over anymore. I have a symmetrical cymbal set-up: from far left I've got a crash, a china, a ride cymbal, and a crash, with a hi-hat below, and a splash. The right side exactly mirrors that, the only difference being that I've got 12" closed x-hats in place of the splash.

     The drums are even sizes: 6, 8,10,12,14 toms, 16 and 18 floors, plus a 20" gong bass drum with a 22" head on it. For every 2" increase in head size the toms increase 1" in depth, so they run 7x6, 8x8, 9xl0, l0xl2, 1lxl4, and then 15xl6 and 16x18. The kicks are 16x24. My main snare is a standard Tama 5xl4 brass, and the one on the left is a maple 5xl4.

TD: Many guys use different depth and shell material when they use two snares. Why do you use the same depth for both snares?

JM: Most of them usually use a piccolo on the left. Piccolos sound cool, but I don't like the way they feel. I've only played one piccolo that feels great instead of like an uncontrollable, overly cranked marching snare drum. The one that I have that I absolutely love is a one-of-a-kind that Tama made for Billy Cobbam years and years ago: it's an amazing 3xl4 solid stainless steel. Billy forgot he ever had it and left it at the factory, and I scoffed it one day. So Billy, if you read this, thank you so very much! [laughs] It's one of the greatest snare drums I've ever had, but I won't take it out of the studio.

     I don't like most piccolos because of the way they feet: there's no air inside; the sound is really live; and I just don't like them. I like a high-end crack, but the piccolos get too much of a ping in their crack, and I don't like the sound of it.

     I use the left-hand snare a few times during the night, not for a piccolo sound but as a different-sounding main snare. I go over to it in "Ice 9," in "Cool #9," and during my solo. There's a double snare drum thing that I've been doing for years whenever I've had two snares set up that I've gotten back to doing again.

     I like the two drums to be distinct, but not necessarily super-high and super-low. They're both pretty much inthe same register, but different sounding. Stewart Copeland and Bill Bruford have piccolo-sounding snare drums, but they're not piccolos; that's kind of what my left-hand snare drum is like, whereas my main one has more of a Bonham type of sound.

TD: Same heads and same tension on them?

JM: Same heads but different tensions. I'm using the ST drys, the ones with the pin holes, on both snares. I just started using the regular Evans ST tom heads with the Resonant bottoms, and I can't believe how great they sound. I was afraid that they were going to be a little bit too heavy and not give me as much sustain.

     Before that I was using G1's on the whole kit, top and bottom. Real live, real open, and they sounded great, but I was changing them every night because of how hard I play, even though I probably could have gotten two or three shows out of them if I had backed off a little bit. In the studio I'd change them after everysong.

     So I decided to take a chance and go with the ST's. They're single ply smooth white mylar, but they're amazingly strong material - I can't dent them. The ST's I've been getting four and five shows out of, and I'm still not really denting them, I'm just changing them for consistency. They're really holding up great and they sound   wonderful. Same thing on the kick drums; the only one without the ST's is the gong bass, which gets the thinnest head Evans makes, the Uno750. I change it every night. After one gig it's cratered.

TD: Do you use the gong bass that much?

JM:  Yeah, I do. I wouldn't say it's necessary for Joe's material, but I like to use it. The octobans come and go - I took them down when I put the 6" tom up - but the gong bass I absolutely love. It's a very different and distinct drum sound that most people don't have in their kit.

Groove

TD: Why did you swap the octobans for a 6" tom?

JM: Because in the Einstein recording I found that I was doing more of the tom tom type of runs. Most of Einstein's music is in odd time, and I found that I wanted to get more into the composition of my grooves and make the grooves fit the music rather than just using different sounds to play simpler grooves.

     I wanted to get a lot deeper into what my groove was all about. Basically like Bonham, like the stuff he played in"The Crunge" or "The Ocean." Some of the grooves he bad were so hand-tailored for the songs. I never really looked into it that much until I started writing my own music. Then I realized how I could make or break a bass line, guitar run, or chord structure by doing so many different types of grooves.

     I wanted to concentrate more on playing my kit for the groove of the song rather than concentrating on using different voices, which I might have done in the past. So I opted to stay away from the eight little voices of the octobans and get a six and an eight up there as an integral part of my drum kit. I used them occasionally for grooves but mostly for fills, and I approached the songs in that fashion, which I really hadn't done before.

Off With Their Heads

TD: Did you use any particular miking technique for the Einstein recording?

JM:  I recorded the whole record single-headed. Because I didn't have this Starclassic kit at the time, I used the bigger set up of my Artstar II's and took the bottom heads off.

     We got into the studio at Longview and spent an entire night with my engineer, Bob St. John - who did the whole record with rne - getting a great drum sound double-headed. Then everybody went to bed.

     I had wanted to go back to single-headed drums for three reasons: 1) I hate doing records with fantastic-sounding drums that get buried in the mix, and that happens eight out of ten times; 2) I absolutely love Phil Collins' drum sound and the old single-headed sound Simon Phillips got on his early records; and 3) I wanted to approach Einstein in a different way.

     I thought if I went back to single-headed drums, I would play the drum kit differently, and I definitely did. I felt my fills came out differently, and I approached my fills and how I accompanied Stan and Jane with their runs differently than I would have on a double-headed kit.

TD: How so?

JM:  Because hitting a double-headed drum gives me so much sustain and so much less attack, would tend to not get into double strokes or particular stickings. But when I hit a single-headed drum, it was like playing something as sharp as a snare drum - except with a tom-tom tuning - all over the kit.

     And you'll hear a lot more of that with Einstein rather than the kind of playing I've done in the past with Joe. A lot more complex stickings and a lot more polyrhythms came out because of the increased definition in my sticking.

TD: Wouldn't it be more di.fficult to do that since you don't have a bottom head to give you a push?

JM:  It wasn't easy. Sound-wise it was a lot better, but playing-wise it was twice as difficult. I had wanted to go back to single heads a few years ago, but I got dissuaded. I was on my way to dinner with Simon Phillips in LA when he first moved out there, and when I told him I wanted to go back to single heads, he was so upset with me that he almost crashed the car! [laughs]

     He hated them during all those years he played them, and he said, "No, Jon, don't do it, please!" So I stayed away from them for a year, because I figured if Simon says don't do it, then don't do it! [laughs]

     But then when we were ready to do the Einstein record I couldn't resist. After we had set the kit up, miked the whole thing and got it on tape, it was four o'clock in the morning.  I just couldn't sleep so I got up, snuck into the studio, took all the bottom heads off, taped up the lugs so they wouldn't buzz, and put all the microphones up inside the drums.

     Bob came in at about 10 a.m. and totally freaked out. He was very upset. He had never recorded a single-headed drum kit, and we had spent so much time the night before getting sounds that he was quite pissed off.

     I asked him to give me five minutes and if he didn't like the way it sounded, I'd put the bottom heads back on. I played for about 30 seconds and he came running out of the control room saying they were the greatest sounding drums he had ever heard.

TD: Did you use any muffling on them?

JM:  Didn't have to.Without a bottom head, one thwack and the sound's gone. All the drums had Evans G1's on top, and they werer pretty tight.

     You can get two tones out of a single-headed drum, depending on how you tune them.You get the old Rick Marotta/SteveGadd/early Simon Phillips sound, which is a very deep, low, right-to-the-point thud. Or you can get that PhilCollins/later Simon Phillips sound, which is a very bright, thin-but-articulate sound; that's what I wanted because I had the drums pretty tight.

     I didn't use the six; I only used the 8, 10, 12, and sometimes the 14, so I really cranked them because I wanted the 8 up there in the 6 range. If I had used fewer drums, I might have gone for the deeper tone, but because I had three and four racks in front of me - and now I have five - I tuned them much much higher.

TD: You hit a double-headed drum in the center to get maximum tone, but you have to hit a single-headed drum closer to the edge to get tone. How quickly were you able to adapt?

JM: I was looking for impact, not tone, so I hit them dead center, the same as I'd hit double-headed toms. I wasn't looking for sustain, just a sharp response and gone. Everything that I played on the Einstein record is audible without having to ride faders up and down. We did itv ery quickly, and however we played it was the way it came on to tape.

     On so many sessions tom toms are not audible because their frequencies get taken up by guitars or basses or other instruments. I didn't have to worry about any of that with my drums on the Einstein recording; everything came out loud and clear.

TD: But aren't you're going to be doing this same material this summer ont his double-headed-albeit expansive-kit?

JM: I haven't made that decision yet. Primarily I have to concentrate on playing
with Joe. I'm going to use the same drum kit with two different bands, Joe and Einstein, and I'm certainly not going to be able to take the bottom heads on and off.

     I'd love to play both gigs single-headed, but I have to give more consideration to Joe's music than Einstein's for that five weeks. I've gotta think about what songs we'll be doing on that leg; if I can get away with a single-headed kit for both, I'll use this kit and cut holes in the bottom heads and leave about an inch all the way around, just enough to keep the hoop on the toms.

* Although a proponent of "smaller is better" for a number of yearsnow, in mid-tour Jonathan moved from his customary four-and five-piece kits to what can only be described as a drum set of cosmic proportions.

Exclusive spy satellite imagery reveals that Jonathan's humongoloid Starclassic kit is bigger thanmany Third World countries (the U.S. Post Office is thinking about giving this drum kit its own zipcode). The bilateral symmetry of the kit is clearly visible, the only exceptions being Mover's belovedgong bass on the right, which is mismatched by the wood snare to the left of his primary hi-hat.Photo on the facing page reveals that Jonathan opted to secure mounting brackets directly to theshells of the toms instead of using Tama's  pseudo-RIMS Starclassic mounting system.

Used by permission Talking Drums

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