King Dork Approximately by Frank Portman Read Free Book Online

Wire.” But when it came to our own songs, well, here’s something I’ve noticed about band practices: the first time you run through a song, before anyone really knows it, it sounds rough, perhaps, but kind of great. It has boundless potential, and often there’s even a real feeling of true rock and roll energy and spirit about it. Wow, you feel, this is the real thing; this is worth doing after all. And if it sounds this good now, just think how great it’ll be when everybody has had a chance to learn it properly and work it all out.
    But somehow, the more you play the song, the more it degenerates. The drummer will gradually start to add fancy bits here and there, and soon the fancy bits take over till it’s all fancy bits and hardly any beat. The bass player will then be unable to play with the drummer very closely because what he’s doing is so unpredictable, so he figures he might as well noodle it up himself because just playing it straight actually makes it sound like he’s off compared to the drums. The guitar player hits the chords in what he hopes are the right places, but since the two one-man rhythm sections are contradicting each other, there’s no possible way to know exactly where those places are, so he starts meandering as well. After a few practices, everyone is increasingly lost, and soon the song isjust
done
, so damaged that it is no use to anyone and no fun to play, and can only be retired and forgotten. We’ve lost some of my best songs this way. “Live Wire” works because there’s an official recording to follow, and for some reason we all seem to participate in an unspoken pact to rein in our excesses, just for those six minutes, possibly because there’s a way to prove that you’re doing it wrong when you do it wrong. “My Retarded Heart” and “Mr. Teone Killed My Dad” weren’t so fortunate, and they bit the dust, as far as I was concerned, in that very practice. I hated to lose songs like that, but that’s the music biz, folks.
    Now, you couldn’t ask for a more amiable guy than Shinefield. Sometimes he seems almost like a young, tall Little Big Tom in his relentless good humor and easygoing-ness. He hadn’t minded I Hate This Jar at all, after the initial disbelief had worn off, and he hadn’t even been all that stoned, either.
    “I Hate This Jar, man,” he said with a lackadaisical chuckle. “Where do you guys come up with this stuff?”
    And then throughout the day, he started referring to us as “the Jar” and saying things like “Man, that’s so Jar.…” There was an element of mockery, to be sure, but it was good-natured.
    So Shinefield was as cooperative a bandmate as you could ask for. But his drumming was another story. It was … what’s the word I’m looking for? Atrocious? Loathsome? I almost have it. Ah, abhorrent, that’s it. His drumming was
abhorrent
.
    The way Shinefield saw it, there was no kick drum hit that couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be doubled, or even tripled, or even quadrupled; he was a skilled craftsman when it came to slowing down and speeding up, and he sometimes even managed to do both in the same measure. He took the term “fills” quite literally, assuming that the object of the game was to “fill” every available moment with arbitrary, arrhythmic tom-hitting.He was completely innocent of any awareness of the concept of the “rest.” Songs would usually finish at a tempo at least twice as fast as the one at which they had started. It was heartbreaking.
    “Live Wire” showed that Shinefield was capable of playing a steady beat, with a relatively even tempo. It’s only that when it came to our own songs, he just didn’t feel like it.
    As to how real bands manage to avoid this relentless song degeneration, I’ve got a theory. And if it’s correct, let’s just say I’ve always felt sorry for Phil Rudd, because it was pretty mean of the Young brothers to kidnap his family, tie them all up, and hold them hostage in a