It sounds like a cliché, but I’ve wanted to play the drums for as long as I can remember. I really enjoy rock guitar, and consider myself an accomplished air guitarist, but I truly feel like I was born a drummer. I recall having one of those junior sets for pre-school kids, complete with the paper heads that probably lasted a week. I finally started taking lessons when I was ten; before that I was pretty much driving my family crazy banging on just about anything in the house.
I did a lot of singing back then, too, spinning the 45’s that belonged to my older brother and sisters. Even during the summer I had to be in before dark, so I’d spend my evenings with Chicago, Three Dog Night, and Tommy James and The Shondells. I think we had every one of the albums from The Beatles; the one I really got into was Let It Be. I know some purists think it’s one of the band’s worst, but I’d sit on the floor for hours with my back right up against the speaker, singing along.
A lot of my influences came from the radio, but in those days radio wasn’t as corporate, so it wasn’t the dangerous practice it would be now. I owned a set of Realistic AM/FM headphones that I wore while mowing the lawn when Frampton Comes Alive was released. Call me crazy, but the reception seemed to improve when I did the lawn diagonally.
Aside from the stage band in junior high, I was just jamming on my own, playing along to bands like Boston and REO Speedwagon. It wasn’t until I was eighteen that I started hanging around with guys who had a band. And that’s when I started listening to heavy metal, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden at first. I remember when the first Motley Crue album came out. The sight and sound … it was a level of cool we could only dream of! I soon bought my first decent kit, a used Ludwig six-piece finished in champagne sparkle – a little sissy-looking, but it was double-kick, man!
A year later I decided to invest in a new kit, and ordered an 11-piece Tama, complete with double-bass and oversized concert toms, in metallic white. It was big and beautiful, but obviously I hadn’t thought much about what it would take to move the thing! It was around this time that I started playing with Steve Cone, a good friend and guitarist. Although we never formed a band ourselves, we did a lot of writing and a fair amount of recording, including my first experience with 24-track. We didn’t make the cut to get on the WCMF Homegrown album, but we did get an honorable mention and Unkle Rog (RIP) played our song, Skin Deep, on the air. Anybody who downplays the experience of hearing your own stuff on the radio is full of shit.
I continued playing, writing, and recording with different guys for the next few years, still without ever really getting a stable line-up that you could call a band. Even though we might have a few shows, it was always that fragile relationship that would fall apart, usually due to someone’s ego.
It was after one such break-up when guitarist Don Mancuso called to see if I was interested in forming a band with him and this left-handed guitarist friend of his. Don and I had built a friendship a few years earlier while working together in the same factory; we used to play our project tapes for each other over lunch. His guitarist friend? Anthony J. Carbone. Although that band, Tongue-N-Groove, only lasted a little over a year, it laid the foundation for what was to become JOHNNY SMOKE …
