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"We may be human, but we're still animals."
---Steve Vai

It's been a long month. Want to hear about it? You do? Really? Even if you have to read a lot...and I mean A LOT...to find out what you really want to know? You still do? All right, you asked for it...(the proper background music at this point would be the opening swell to Yes' "Close To The Edge", and the downbeat would be the beginning of the next paragraph. 1, 2, 3, 4...).

Let's go back to Mon., July 15, just a couple of days after I wrote you last. Money has been pretty tight around these parts, and with the introduction of a 100%-my-idiotic-fault car accident into my balance sheet, the red ink was really beginning to drip off of the end of the ledger. Thankfully, Frank Briggs referred me to a part-time employer of his, a specialty vinyl/limited edition CD distributor in the LA area, for which I could work every Monday and make some decent money considering the time involved...the only catch being that I'd have to drive all over LA for five hours. You couldn't pay some people enough to perform that hellish of a task, but off I hopped in my super-bitchen rented Chevy Blazer to do it. Why am I telling you this? Because during my initial discussion with the CD bossman , somehow we got onto the topic of people who had formerly done what I was about to do. One of the names was Scott Thunes. So I figured I was merely fulfilling my destiny of forever walking in the footsteps of the lovely Mr. Thunes by taking this job. Next thing you know I'll be on the road with Fear, God forbid...anyway, considering the fact that Scott had also been on Steve Vai's last tour, I liked the karmic implications of the whole thing. Yeah, I've now officially been living in this city for too fucking long, using words like "karmic" in a semi-serious fashion.

The rest of this week was spent basically waiting for Keneally to get a copy of Steve Vai's upcoming release, "The Fire Garden" (I'm 94% sure about the accuracy of that title), so that he could make me a copy of it before he left to teach a master class at some summer music program in Connecticut. I really wanted it as soon as possible because on Tuesday, July 23, I would have to start teaching for the annual "Berklee In LA" program, which cuts severely into "new music absorption" time (I'll talk about Berklee in a bit). Mike finally got the tape on Saturday the 20th from Steve Vai's manager, Ruta Cepetys (I'm right around 3% sure on the accuracy of the spelling of "si-PET- eez"). He rushed on over to my apartment and dropped it off, and as fast you could say "promotional copy only--do not sell or duplicate", started to dub the fucker. As soon as it was done, I began the first of many rituals I have when learning an entire CD...I took the tape, popped it into the super bitchen Chevy Blazer's stereo (which was far, far superior to the transistor radio which comes stock in a '93 Eagle Summit Wagon), and headed for a five hour scenic tour of the Angeles National Forest, with the tape playing non-stop. Hey, I had to return the car on Monday anyway...I wanted my $9.95-a-day's worth, and I got it.

Things I noticed upon close inspection of the tape...the first side was all instrumental, the second all vocal. It was long--over 70 minutes. 13 true songs, but one of them, "The Fire Garden Suite", was over ten minutes. Each one had its little tricks specifically designed to throw off the person who just may be trying to learn how to play it. Steve's tunes tend to have lots of little form weirdnesses in them that only happen once, or they'll come around again but this time with the accent on a different sixteenth note, or something. "There's A Fire In The House" was your typical guitar-album opener, and a good one at that..."Blowfish" was a mid-tempo chugger with eight million licks in it that are all different, but all sound the same if you don't pay close enough attention..."The Fire Garden Suite" was an Indian- influenced four-movement epic with enough form to kill a large cow; I was born to learn and play it..."All About Eve" was a gorgeous grunge- tempo vocal tune..."Aching Hunger" was a test of anyone's sixteenth- note accent accuracy..."Genocide" was the only truly weird tune on the CD, seeing as that it sounds like it was written for Japanese radio airplay...but besides that, the whole thing was going to be tough, but definitely doable. I'd heard from Toss Panos that Steve liked hard workers, and especially people who took the time to learn his material to the letter. I figured that learning his entire new CD might make him take notice. By Tuesday, the day I was supposed to start working for Berklee, I'd already learned the first four instrumental tunes, and the entire "Fire Garden Suite". I felt pretty good about that.

Certainly better than I felt about my car not being ready on the day that they promised it to me. First they said 6 days, then 8 days, then they said they ordered the wrong part, then they said that they discovered additional damage...and all the while I have to pay for this rental car, and not at the $9.95 rate either. Now, I have insurance, so any additional repairs that they suddenly "discovered" were paid for by the insurance company, as well as a portion of the rental car (the body shop, conveniently enough, also had a cozy relationship with the car rental agency), but if you're ever wondering why car insurance is so high, look no further than this type of symbiotic and corrupt back- scratching and circle-jerking. The end result of all of this? By the end of the Berklee week (7/27), my car was still in the shop. That's 13 days, abacus-users. My butt was getting kind of sore, you know?

Now, about "Berklee In LA". Every year, in the last week of July, Berklee College Of Music rents out the campus of Claremont/McKenna College in Claremont, CA, and holds a one-week session for people of all ages, but mostly high school students attend. The idea is to recruit kids from the LA area to spend their winters in blizzard-laden Boston at their expensive and prestigious school. One of the more convincing techniques they use is the "ensemble"...guitarists can choose what musical style they want their group to play, and they end up with four or five other guitarists with similar tastes in a room with a Berklee faculty guitarist and a "rhythm section", so that they can jam with bassists and drummers who can at the very least keep time. Well, me and Joe Travers are the official "rock rhythm section" for the program. Have you ever been in a room with five 17-year-old guitarists, plugged into inadequately small Fender combo amps, all trying to get sounds and play fast and tune their guitars all at once? At 10:00 in the morning?? Four different groups, starting at 10:00 AM, 11:15 AM, 1: 15 PM and 2:30 PM. Everyone solos, in every song. It's a nice little ego boost and a cool hang, and I love watching kids grow musically, don't get me wrong, but add in a 45-minute commute in both directions, a couple of kids with attitude problems (there's always one kid that me and Joe just want to mangle) and other unpleasant variables and the week starts to get really long. But the funniest part of this whole experience for this year (I've done this for 4 years, Joe 3) was a relatively new Berklee faculty guitarist named Joe Stump. Usually Jon Finn, the guy who saved our ass when our "tour bus" exploded in New Hampshire this last April, is the teacher that me and Joe work with for the week. This year, Jon couldn't make it, and instead we got Joe Stump. An unfailingly nice man (you all know what's coming next when you read a line like that), he used to have a band in the Boston area back in the 80's named "Joe Stump's Guitar Dominance". He wore tight- as-Ralph-Reed's-ass black jeans, pointed boots, a bevy of silver bracelets, sunglasses 24/7, played an Yngwie Malmsteen Model Strat, complete with the scalloped frets and all...this guy could play faster than Paul Gilbert on crack. But you already knew that, didn't you? So Joe Travers starts working on him a little bit when he's about to break out his guitar for the first time in front of us, saying, "Man, I want to see your fastest stuff, I mean the total, full-on, fucking shred- maniac shit!!!" And nice as pie, Mr. Stump replied, "Well, yeah, that's what I do." It was sheer genius. We ended up playing a show with him for the kids, and he really kicked the shit out of "Manic Depression", as well as his own stuff. Say what you will, that guy must have played a trillion notes during that 45-minute show, and I don't think that he chumped a single one. And Joe Travers sounded fucking fantastic playing that stuff...it brought him right back to his own glory days at Berklee, when he used to put on his own shows, entitled "Shredfest!"...but we don't need to talk about that.

God, I really digressed there, didn't I? Sorry. What I meant to say was that all during the grueling daytime sessions with the rockin' out Berklee kids, I had my Walkman with me, learning as much of the Vai stuff as I could in between breaks and during lunch. Every night that week I had either a rehearsal or a gig. The Jewish guys fired their drummer and brought in a supremely talented guy named Gordon Campbell, who had just returned from a tour with Barry White. Yes...Barry White!! He had to be good. And he was, but the Jewish guys have a hard time explaining what they really want, so I had to give all sorts of cues and the rehearsals were very long. Janet Robin also had a rehearsal and a gig that week (at the infamous Luna Park), but bless her professional heart, her gig is always smooth as silk. I was playing about 7 to 9 hours a day at this point. So much that, during the final tune of Janet's gig, my D string simply collapsed and uncoiled from fatigue. That's happened to me now three times now in my life.

Slowly but surely, I was swallowing the Vai CD whole, pig-into-snake style. But I still didn't know when the audition really was, so finally I broke protocol and called his manager Ruta myself. She explained that he was in Europe doing some promotional work until August 5, but that the audition could happen anytime after that. I also informed her that I had just about the entire new CD under my belt. "Are you frightened by this?" I asked her. "No," she stammered, "amazed, actually." My confidence was growing. For all I knew, my rival Phil didn't even have this tape yet. I talked to Jon Finn, a former bandmate of Phil's, and Jon thought that I'd get it hands down. It was now Tuesday, July 30.

I had really wanted to have the whole CD nailed by August 1 for two reasons: first, because when I first got the tape I e-mailed Keneally and asked him if he cared to wager on when I would have the thing nailed by, his response was, "You'll be playing it with your dick by August 4." Second, because my very best friend in the world, Stephanie Petersen, was coming all the way from my hometown of Westfield, NJ, to visit me from the 1st to the 5th. Six weeks ago, it had seemed like the perfect time. Now? Well, it wasn't exactly the ideal timing for the kick-back-and-be-tour-guide mentality required to host an Easterner in LA, but I wasn't going to let it spoil her already-booked plans for fun in the sun. Unfortunately, something else spoiled it for her--a horrifying family emergency that occurred the day before she was supposed to arrive, which left her father in intensive care at a hospital in Las Vegas. I did everything I could to help and support her (God knows she's steered me through some dicey affairs), but I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that I had very little energy to give at that point. I was going through withdrawal from not being able to practice the Vai tape 2 or 3 times a day like I had been, and my stress level was building in general. Thankfully it seemed by the time that she left that he'd recover somewhat, but the whole thing had taken a toll on both of us.

Monday, August 5, was the day I almost snapped. Stephanie had a 9:45 AM flight out of Los Angeles airport, which means that you have to leave for the airport at around 7:30 to truly enjoy the rush hour festivities. The round trip took two and a half hours. When I got back, I called Ruta to see if Steve was in fact back in town and ready for me to demonstrate just how hard I'd been working on his material over the last couple of weeks. Believe it or not, she said yes to all counts...the audition would be at 3:00 PM, Saturday, August 12, at Steve's studio in the Hollywood Hills. Then she said something I didn't want to hear, something like, "And these are the tunes Steve wants to jam: 'The Animal', 'Juice', 'Answers', and 'Kill The Guy With The Ball'". None of these tunes were on the tape that I'd been slaving over for the past three weeks, rain or shine or Berklee or friends in crisis or anything else. Hopefully Steve would even notice that I'd bothered to learn all of that stuff. Then, it was off to the car rental place to fucking FINALLY get my car back and return the Blazer, which by this time had run me several hundred dollars...that's 21 days of car rental for those of you still flicking the abacus beads back and forth. And then, to really spice up this beautiful day, I headed straight for my CD delivery job. That day I spent almost nine hours driving around Los Angeles, but it didn't stop me from learning "The Animal" and "Answers" when I got home. "The Animal" really scared me, it being a slow funk shuffle and me being a relatively white person concerning such musical matters, a matter Phil needn't have concerned himself with. As for the other two songs, I didn't have "Alien Love Secrets", so I needed to go to Santa Monica and pick it up from Ruta's P.O. box the next day. I hoped against hope that a song named "Kill The Guy With The Ball" didn't sound like I thought it would.

Well, of course, it did...it was a completely maniacal six minute piece of constant form, strange accents, time signature changes and special little Steve Vai tricks as challenging as Dweezil's "Purple Guitar", Keneally's "Uglytown" or "'Cause Of Breakfast, or anything I'd ever played. I looked at the calendar...four hour rehearsal with the Jewish guys on Wed. (8/7) afternoon (yet another new drummer to be broken in by yours truly), two hour BFD rehearsal on Wed. night, Jewish gig on Thurs. night, BFD gig on Fri. night, audition on Saturday. I got back from Santa Monica that Tuesday afternoon and started to learn it and didn't stop until I could play it correctly one time through...about 6 or 7 hours later, with a break to eat. "Juice" was a typical up-tempo rock shuffle; I learned it in about 15 minutes. If there's only one thing that I can do, it's learn hard material, fast. I didn't think that Phil could possibly have done what I had just accomplished...or that anyone except for Scott Thunes could have done it in less time. I called Mike, who knew of the tune, and told him that I could do it, and that very few others probably could. We allowed ourselves a bit of unchecked optimism for probably the first time.

I'm hungry, so I'm going to order in a sandwich and come back and write the rest of the true story (cue MTV voiceover..."TRUE STORY!") of a bunch of musicians...forced to live in a band...that could only have one bassist...and see what happens when they stop being polite...and start getting real..."The Life Of Bryan", Los Angeles. In Part 2: More karmic goodness, the BFD gig on the eve of the audition, and the answer to the BIG QUESTION...how can Bob Dole and Jack Kemp be on the same ticket??!!.................B.B.