"End
of the Beginning"
It smacked like a
fist to the midsection, straight out of nowhere. Without missing a beat, Jonathan Mover
casually remarked, "This is the end of the trio." Naturally, the trio in
question is the one with which he's been closely associated since 1987, featuring the
string gymnastics of guitarist Joe Satriani and bassist Stuart Hamm.
So what gives? It's the last night of a wildly successful tour that saw
the band rise from the trenches of obscure clubs into international stardom. Along the way
they've earned a devoted following, against all odds. Their largely instrumental,
guitar-driven rock/fusion sound once had been a stomping ground reserved exclusively for
the guitar hero's hero, Jeff Beck. Others had tried to conquer the genre, but still Beck
dominated.
Yet the Satriani trio had secceeded. And confoundedly, Jonathan was
dead serious: This was the end. Backstage after the show, there was no sign of discontent
among the band-members. Backs were slapped, hands were shaken, congratulations offered all
around-leaving confused journalists to bump into one another tangling microphone cables.
At the hotel, the 27-year-old drummer-whose reputation prior to
Satriani had been built upon a handful of gigs with Marillion, GTR, and Mike Oldfield-was
glad to explain everything in detail. He was anxious to talk about his head-spinning
ascent into the limelight. We simply turned on the tape recorder. The following is his
story, in his words.
THE LONG TOUR
A native of Boston, Mover first sought fame and fortune in London,
England, at the tender age of 19. Although he played with a number of progressive rock
heroes-such as guitarists Steve Howe and Steve Hackett-he also witnessed the hard
realities of the music business, and decided to come home.
"I moved back to the States in '87, and hadn't really decided
where I was going to go-L.A. or New York. I hooked up with Satriani, which kept me busy
through the beginning of '89. When we began touring in '87, Surfing With The Alien
(Relativity) entered the charts at 186, and we had a party like you wouldn't believe. An
instrumental record made the charts! We saw ourselves as a little hard fusion band playing
small clubs and having fun for as long as we could."
A Brief Respite.
"Our last actual tour dates with Joe were through January '89. We were going to have
a little break, and then record Joe's Flying In A Blue Dream (Relativity) album. He
started the record in mid-February, but his father got very ill, and Joe had to put off
the recording."
"In the first week of June, I moved to Manhattan. Joe was out of
time, out of money, and the album was already done with drum machines. The decision was
mine. I could stay at home and cut one or two tracks with him or I could look for another
gig. Then I heard about the audition for a band called Skollie."
"Skollie is a South African slang term for a punk type person. A
rebel with long hair is a Skollie. The lead singer and guitar player was [South African]
Blondie Chaplin-he was the lead singer with the Beach Boys when they did 'Sail On Sailor,'
and he's worked with Mick Taylor."
"I got the gig, subbing for Anton Fig, who couldn't tour because
he couldn't leave Letterman for that length of time. It was about 10-1/2 weeks through the
summer in the Soviet Union. I learned most of the songs on the flight over, because we
just jammed at my audition."
"It was one of the most valuable experiences in my life,
culturally, musically, spiritually. The band was incredible, and the music I was playing,
the emotion in the music, the experience of covering unmarked territory. In many places,
we were the first band to ever go there. We were playing 20,000-seat stadiums every
night."
Back From the USSR.
"I got back at the end of September and had a few R&B gigs lined up in L.A. in
October. I called Joe, and because the album went over budget and time, he decided not to
go out on the road until January. At that point I had waited four or five months to
record, which didn't happen, and it was going to be another four or five months waiting to
tour with Joe."
"When I got home I got messages that Gregg Bissonette had called.
Alice Cooper was having trouble finding a drummer, and Greg had recommended me. I called
him and said 'I'm coming out to L.A., so I'll call the manager and we'll hook up.'"
"Alice Cooper was the second concert I ever saw, back in '75 at
the Boston Garden. I listened to him up until Welcome To My Nightmare (Atlantic), and then
kind of lost track. So the morning that I got on the flight, I picked up Trash (Epic), and
listened to it on the plane."
Chamber Of Horrors.
"An hour after I landed in L.A., I was in rehearsal with Alice. He is a very, very
nice guy, and wasn't demanding in any way. I said, 'Why don't we play 'Trash'?'. I counted
it off, and we were ten seconds into the intro when he turned around and gave me a big
smile. We played maybe a verse and a chorus and he stopped and said, 'I don't need to hear
any more. Go speak with the management.' I said, 'All right. But let's just have some
fun,' and I started playing 'Billion Dollar Babies.'"
"I called Joe immediately and said, 'This is what I've decided to
do.' He was a little stunned and hurt by it. But he realized it was something I needed to
do for professional reasons."
"There were 36 songs to learn, and we had two weeks of regular
rehearsals and ten days of major production rehearsals. So we did 12 songs a day for three
days. I had a Sony Walkman glued to my ears, and within the first week we had the whole
set down."
"I wanted to play with Alice, to take a real hard rock gig,
because I'm primarily known as a progressive fusion player. I thought I was just going to
be a strict 4/4 drummer with no frills, but Alice was really cool about it. I started
doing some wacky things, and Alice would say, 'Yeah, put that double bass in there, use
polyrhythms-just as long as you don't lose anybody.'"
"I took some liberties with Alice's older songs. For example, the
whole song 'Billion Dollar Babies,' is based on that particular drum beat, so there was no
question whether I'd play it or not. But I did it with double bass. I led it in with three
32nd notes before the 1 on the bass drum. So instead of it just being..."
"...it went..."
These riffs, and all the musical
examples that follow in the story, were drummed by Jonathan on a tabletop. We've assigned
specific cymbal, snare, bass drum, and hi-hat notes where they seemed appropriate, and
left the others as unspecified beat patterns.
More Phone Calls.
"We did a few months in Europe, and about a month in Canada. Around the middle of the
Canadian tour, Joe contacted me. He had tried a few different band formations, and it
wasn't working. We talked for a couple of days by phone and I decided that I wanted to go
back to Satriani."
"Alice was taking five weeks off at the end of January. Joe's tour
started on the day after my last gig with Alice. So every day for the last two weeks of
Alice's tour, I would take a 5:00 a.m. flight through a connecting city, show up in San
Francisco, and do all the programming and whatever else I had to do with Joe and Stu. Then
I'd fly back at midnight to the connecting city, sleep in the airport, take and a.m.
flight to the gig city, do a gig with Alice, and fly out again the next morning."
"I went 36 days without a day off, and got brutally ill with a
severe case of bronchitis. I got through the first three-week leg of Joe's tour, and then
I had four days off where I stayed in the hotel and slept. Then we went to Australia, and
we've been on the road since then."
"We're actually an arena band now, and the audience is more
diversified. In the beginning it was only the guitar, bass, and drum fanatics that knew
who we were. I was playing a single kick, and a couple of rack toms. We were playing songs
in five and in seven, and doing jams off the top, experimenting. But now we're doing a
rock and roll show. There's a big light setup and bigger audiences. When you play for
5,000 to 6,000 people, you have to try to please everybody. So we have some vocal tunes
now, which are geared towards the MTV crowd, we have our heavy rock songs, we have a bit
of our odd time signatures, and we have a couple of slow, beautiful ballads for the
couples in the audience."
"There are a lot of subtleties that just aren't going to come out
in big arenas. If a fill is built on grace notes, and the audience isn't going to hear
them, then the fill is going to sound very different from the way it would in a small
club. So you either forget it and play through it, or you create something else around it
so that it comes across in a big place."
THE SET
It was the last time that Jonathan ever would play the Satriani songs
with which he had come to be so closely identified. Over the years his drumming had taken
on new proportions, especially through his integration of electronics-a necessity brought
on by the trio's increasing desire for more lush orchestrations. By the final performance,
every last nuance had been embedded permanently in his memory. And he documented the set,
step by step.
"Flying In A Blue Dream" "It
begins with me hitting the intro sample on the second Octapad. Then I play the rhythmic
theme on the main Octapad, which continues throughout the whole song. The drum part''
pretty straight, with some gong bass drum accents, and a few single-bass fills. The groove
never stops and my left hand never takes a brake from the Octapad. We finish it up with
the accents of the basic rhythm..."
"We hold onto that, do a couple of chord changes and dynamic
changes, and then I count off the second tune."
"Ice 9"
"Almost everything I do on this song is single kick, even though a lot of things
sound like double kick. [See Fig. 1 for Jonathan's 'skipping' foot technique.] We recently
changed the ending by bringing it down dynamically. We play triplet-feel dotted
quarter-notes at one point, across the bar line. That came about a couple of months ago
when I was trying some cross-patterns, and Stu picked it up immediately. Joe liked it, so
we kept it."
"Can't Slow Down" "A
straight-ahead rock vocal tune. It's up-tempo thrashing from start to finish, with lots of
fast sixteenth-note double bass. I lead with my right foot because I play the song
right-handed. It's funny, the couple of times a night where I'm playing left-handed, using
the swish for a ride, I'll start my double-bass fills with the left foot."
"Crush Of Love" "This
is the heavy-duty sample song. I'm using both Octapads from the very first note, and all
the samples are rhythm guitar. Some are just four beats, others are six and eight beats,
so I have to keep my mind on the Octapad. And, unlike 'Flying In A Blue Dream,' where I'm
playing the Octapad without any fills, in 'Crush Of Love' I'm still trying to play cool,
funky drum fills."
"One Big Rush" "I
play this very differently from what was on the album. The beginning is all 32nd-note
double bass, almost as fast as I can play it, while hitting all the accents with Joe on
the snare and crash cymbals. I accent all the changes kind of like Terry Bozzio did on the
Chinas with Missing Persons. There are two breaks in the song where it's just drum
fills-combinations of various linear phrases that work out in the same time frame-rather
than what's on the record."
"Circles"
"It's an old standard that we've done with Joe since the Surfing tour in '88. It
starts with just me playing kick, hi-hat, and cross-stick. Joe gets the people clapping
and I do a couple of little single-bass polyrythms in and around the groove. On the record
it's like..."
"...but I'm
doing..."
"...with a bass drum
roll underneath it, which brings the whole song in. From that point, start to finish, it's
a high-energy rocker."
"I Believe"
"That was the single off the last record. We started out playing it fully electric,
like the record, but it wasn't coming off the way Joe wanted to hear it. So Joe and I
played it on Unplugged, an MTV acoustic program. He played acoustic guitar, and I had a
couple of shakers and a tambourine. Everybody loved it, and we decided to try it on stage.
I get to come to the front of the stage-something most drummers don't get to experience.
That goes into the bas solo, and Joe and I leave the stage."
"Ride"
"This is a very straight-forward rock and roll tune. The only samples are the
harmonica in the beginning of each chorus. That leads into 'Always,' the big love ballad
that helped crack the Surfing album. It has a drum machine on the record, made up of
shaker with the accents on all the straight eighth-notes, and the unaccented notes on the
upbeats, like..."
"The kick is straight and
the part on the record uses hand claps instead of a snare, which I play with a
cross-stick. I play all the eighth-notes with the right hand on the X-hat, and all the
upbeats-e and a sixteenth-notes-by stepping on my hi-hat. Our sound-man pans the two
hi-hat sounds right and left stereo in the P.A. so we get an accented beat."
"Midnight"
"This is Joe's electric solo piece, from his first album, I believe. Then we go into
the reggae jam-an eight-bar structure. We start with the kick on the 3. A lot of my
rimshots and accents are on the 2 and 4, in and around the kick. Almost all the fills at
the end of every four bars are polyrhythms. Joe drops out. Stu plays a little bit with me,
then Stu drops out, and I go into my drum solo."
The Drum Solo. "The
solo starts off with a question and answer theme. I do a pattern on the snare, answer it
with the kicks, and then answer with the hands and feet on the Chinas and kicks. I do
three or four fills that start off simple..."
"...and end up a
little more difficult..."
"Then I go into the
open/closed hi-hat, the heel/toe kicking, and I solo over that. That leads me into the
connection to the third part, which is a very fast snare drum type of military
roll..."
"I do the question
and answer thing again with the Chinas and kicks, then I go into slow eighth-notes on the
snare, followed by eighth-notes on the kicks with the cymbals-faster, faster, faster-until
I'm playing as fast as I can on the double bass. Then I go into a 3/4 samba. The right
kick is playing..."
"...the left foot is
on the hi-hat. So I set up a 3/4 samba..."
"...and I solo over
that with different polyrhythms. I do a lot of single-stroke rolls around the toms-off the
snare, ending on the gong bass drum-three or four times."
"Then I drop the kicks and play on the Octobans, using different
stickings. I finish that with a run from the lowest Octoban to the highest tom through to
the gong bass drum. Then I do a very quick roll between the snare drum and the gong bass
drum, which leads back into the 3/4 samba. I play four sets of polyrhythmic phrases that
double the snare drum and the cowbell against the open hi-hat."
"That leads into my favorite part: I play a four-over-three
polyrhythm, with the three in the feet on both bass drums, and the four on the bell of the
cymbal and the snare drum. My hands play three measures of 4/4, with the accent on 1 and
3, so it's..."
"...for three
measures, and then I do..."
"...twice, and then I
play the last measure with the snare drum on 1. So it's..."
"That goes into
double-bass abandon, the lights are going crazy, and I go into a run around the toms. I
use one hand for the accents on all the tom-toms, with two kicks in between each note
which go right to left. I do that musical line..."
"...in a downward
motion. I come back with an upward motion, and then I finish the solo the way I start it.
I get a double-bass roll going, and really slow it down and stop it, until I'm all the way
up on the snare drum again. And then I do a very open flam twice, answer with open flams
on the kicks, then kick and Chinas. And then I do..."
 |
"...with the kicks, then kick and
Chinas. And then I do it on a four..." "...and
a five..."
"...is the last one. Once everybody hears the last
China, I pick up the Burma bell, hold it to the microphone and give it a whack." |
"The Mystical Potatohead Groove Thing" "It's a programmed
song on the record that sounds like six drummers. There's cowbell, tambourine, hi-hat,
tom-tom fills, accents that can't possibly be done with four limbs. But I set up two
cowbells-one for my right hand. One for my left. When a cowbell rhythm starts with the
right hand. I use my right hand on the X-hat. For cowbell rhythms with the left hand. I'll
play the hi-hat with my left hand. That's one place my ambidexterity has helped out."
"Back To Shallabal"
"It begins with an intro sample of all these crazy effects that Joe did in the
studio. I trigger all of that, and we play an accent line through it. Then we go into the
song, which is hard rock and roll. The ending is a four-beat sample which I hit on the
very last note, and it's another crazy synthesizer, guitar, whammy-bar extravaganza."
"Satch Boogie"
"I start on my own on a hi-hat, playing a swing pattern. The song is completely
single bass. The hi-hat goes through the whole song, which I play alternating right handed
and left handed. The kick and snare come on the opposite accents."
"Surfing With The Alien" "This
is a straight forward rock and roll song. We do lots of crazy drum and bass fills. Stu and
I have a good time without losing the integrity of hard 4/4 rock and roll. I'm playing
about eight different samples on the first pad-the intro theme, and a variety of sampled
airplanes."
CHAPTER TWO
It's late. 3:00 a.m., to be precise. Mover has an early flight to
catch, and in a way, the gravity of the situation seems to be sinking in.
"This is the end of the trio. Everybody wants to do different
things. Joe wants to write different types of music now. It's time that Stu established
himself as a solo artist, and not just as Satriani's bass player. And the same with
me."
"One goal I've accomplished was to see and play all over the world
at a young age. I think all I have to do now is hit South America and China, and I've
pretty much covered all territories for touring. Now it's time to go back to New York and
spend more time in the city. I've gotten a few calls for records over the past year, so I
want to get back and tell these producers that I'm in town, I'm available, and start to
get a little more on vinyl."
"It feels good, like I'm closing Chapter One of Jonathan Mover.
It's not disheartening, but it's a little sad."
Stay tuned. D
HAMM on MOVER
By Phil Hood
When Joe Satriani needed to put a band together for a music
industry trade show in '87 he ended up calling Stu Hamm and Jonathan Mover, two players
who never had met one another. Joe sent them both tapes to rehearse by, but Mover and Hamm
never actually laid eyes on one another until about five minutes before they went on stage
with Joe for the first time.
The pairing clicked. "I thought Jonathan was great, very
energetic," Stu recalls. "He's a very strong player from a bass player's
perspective, because he is a take-no-prisoners kind of drummer. He sounds great on the
Kings Of Sleep [by Stu Hamm on Relativity] album. He played to a click track and scratch
bass parts. His playing with a click track is spot-on, one of the best I've ever
heard."
Joe's no-group-rehearsal approach continued throughout the band's
four-year run. Stu says, "The funny thing is we never really rehearsed with Joe. He
would send us tapes with all the parts. We rehearsed maybe three days in the whole time we
were together. Joe is a perfectionist and usually has things the way he wants it, although
Joe and Jonathan would work together on constructing live drum parts for the show."
Some of those parts got pretty wild, for Jonathan Mover is not one to
lay back during a gig. He would work the entire kit, and also kick out samples-rhythm
guitar parts. Hamm says, "Sometimes, trying to figure out what he was doing was the
toughest thing with Jonathan. He knows rhythms inside and out. He is really into a Zappa
thing. If I wasn't paying attention at a sound check he might start playing strange
rhythms and try to goof me up, and he could usually do it. During the show, there were
just those times where I couldn't really hear what he was doing to divide the beat. When
that happened I'd have to trust my internal clock and go for it."
Though the trio has broken up, Hamm's own career is doing well, and he
is looking forward to hooking up with Mover in a collaborations that is not dominated by
Satriani's perfectionist arrangements. "Playing with Joe is a little like sleeping
with someone but not having sex with them," Stu says. "He was going to use
another rhythm section on his next album anyway, so it was really time for all of us to
move on. But Jonathan is going to be on my next album. Absolutely. I mean, we're the
rhythm section from hell."
|
