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Mike Keneally: singer, guitarist, keyboardist, composer, former member of Frank Zappa's 1988 touring band, former bandmate in Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa's band Z, bandleader of the Mike Keneally Band (formerly known as Mike Keneally and Beer For Dolphins; the band name changed in 2002), mentor, partner, friend. Cornerstone of my musical life both professional and spiritual. It's hard to know where to begin. Over the past eight years, we've taken a flying leap of faith together, experienced bitter disappointments and savored many triumphs, toured under conditions both hardscrabble and luxurious, played Beer For Dolphins and Mike Keneally Band gigs as a power trio, a quartet, 5-piece, 6-piece, 7-piece, 8-piece, and 11-piece band. All the while, Mike and I have remained at the center, wielding a broadband musical connection nearly indescribable in nature. Our musical roles have cemented over the years. Mike pushes the envelope onstage, stretching arrangements to their very limits, changing forms on the fly, turning serious material into humor and comedy into art. I keep both feet firmly planted on the ground, feeling the sudden shifts more than seeing or hearing them, and relaying the smoke signals to the rest of the band when necessary—all the while providing a steady, constant contrast to Keneally's hair-trigger musical mood swings. Often it feels like steering a small vessel through a tropical storm, but one that never manages to completely overtake the ship, because I won't let it. The conflicting methodology-and, of course, Keneally's stratospheric songwriting and playing ability-is the core of the band's sound. Every year since 1996-the year that we left Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa's band Z together -the work I've done with Keneally has become more and more rewarding. Anything I consider to be a definitive statement of me as a bassist has happened right here. Live album? 1996's Half Alive In Hollywood. Studio album? 2000's Dancing. Touring band? The November '01 Quartet Tour. In countless ways, Keneally's material has defined me as a bassist, both onstage and in the studio. Even the core essence of the Keneally/Beller mainline has been distilled and made available for consumption, in the form of our "acoustic duo" clinic performances for Taylor Guitars. In this format, it's just the two of us with acoustic instruments, stripping the most complex arrangements down to the bone and laying bare the elements of the song's composition. It's yet another way to express the profound musical connection I share and value with Mr. K. Up until 2002, I'd never written music. It was one of those things that I'd never been inspired to do; I'd never woken up in the middle of the night with a startlingly original melody in my head. Thankfully I didn't have to, because it happened to Keneally just about every night. His influence and inspiration over the years were instrumental in getting me to the point where I actually could produce something original. That's as close as I can come to describing how much this material means to me. It's complex and challenging, but not offensively so; it's humorous, but not silly or stupid; it's spiritual and fraught with meaning, but without being overly grandiose or melodramatic. It's my favorite music in the world, and would be even if Mike Keneally had never heard of me. In this
space, I intend to write about the earliest of the early years, since
that is the only period not already documented in detail. Rest assured,
if you're looking for written material on the history of Mike Keneally's
several band lineups, this is hardly your only option. First, there's
the Official Mike
Keneally Website, which has enough text, graphic and audio content
to rival bryanbellerdotcom and then some. There's also The
Life of Bryan, a web journal which details just about everything
you'd ever want to know about my work with Keneally from 1995 on. Here's
a list of links that will help steer you to specific time periods and
events: The "Thanks, Toss" Tour, April/May 1996: The Life of Bryan, Acts 10-12 Keneally.com's "Tales From Them Tours"
The Steve Vai Audition (yes, this is a Keneally-related story), July/August, 1996 The Life of Bryan, Acts 15-16 Keneally.com's "Mike Types To You"
The album Half Alive In Hollywood, released in October, 1996 bryanbellerdotcom's "discography" Keneally.com's "Discography" bryanbellerdotcom's
"press"
The full-length video (VCR-format) Soap Scum Remover, released in October, 1996 Keneally.com's "Soap Scum Remover" page bryanbellerdotcom's "discography"
The "Half Alive In America" Tour, November/December, 1996 The Life of Bryan, Acts 20-21 Keneally.com's "Tales From Them Tours"
The album Sluggo!, released in late 1997
The Life of Bryan, Act 27, Part 2 Keneally.com's "Sluggo!-rama" bryanbellerdotcom's "discography"
The We're Not Here To Help" Tour 1.0, July/August, 1998 Keneally.com's "Tales From Them Tours"
The "We're Not Here To Help" Tour 2.0, October/November, 1998 Keneally.com's "Tales From Them Tours"
The album Dancing, released in September, 2000 The Life of Bryan, Act 37 Keneally.com's "Dancing" page bryanbellerdotcom's "discography"
The "Dancing" Tour, May/June, 2001 Keneally.com's "Dancing Tour Road Reports"
The "Quartet" Tour, November, 2001 Keneally.com's "Quartet Tour Pix and Missives" page
General Keneally/BFD Photography bryanbellerdotcom's
"gallery"
* * * * * Still reading? Good. I'm going to reach back to the nether regions of my memory and see if I can reconstruct the earliest of my early years with a guy named Mike Keneally. Part 1: Thank You For Hearing hat I joined Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa's band Z in September of 1993, a strange time to be new around the Zappa clique. Frank's health was going downhill fast, Scott Thunes had just been fired, and Z's second guitarist, Mike Keneally, wasn't thrilled about any of it. (For the full saga of the band Z, click HERE.) I was the new guy in the band, not a Zappa freak by any stretch of the imagination, and was having a hard time fitting in. Thankfully, drummer Joe Travers was there. My Berklee compatriot was now my bandmate, and he enjoyed a good relationship with everyone in the band, Keneally most of all. Sometimes we'd all hang out at Joe's apartment, where we'd listen to his audiophile-quality stereo system and talk about music, the Zappas, and anything else that came to mind. Keneally was quick with a quip-and a sharp-edged one for anyone who he felt deserved it. A lot of the time that person was me. I didn't know then what I know now, that he was upset that his good friend Scott Thunes had been so unceremonially dismissed, and that I was an easy target for his frustrations. I was 23. I didn't know much of anything. I'd heard that Keneally had released a solo album called hat. Then, as now, I could be closed-minded about hearing new music on my own time, but when you're hanging out at Joe's apartment, you listen to music and that's that. I think it was October before hat hit Joe's CD player while I was there. Mike was watching me as I heard "Your Quimby Dollars At Work" for the first time; it blew by so quickly and with such force that I didn't even understand it. Then "I Can't Stop," a ska-based pop tune that I remember liking, but it didn't overwhelm me. "Uglytown" overwhelmed me. Thick, dark, complex, progressive, hard rock, Zappa-influenced, funny, angry.it was all of these things at once, in a way I'd never heard before. It struck me in that familiar way that some of my favorite records had upon first listen. I think I need to hear that again. Mike gave me a copy of hat soon after that night. After three complete listens, my image of him was completely transformed. Before he'd been my bandmate, an older guy with a sharp tongue and more talent than I'd ever seen in a sideman anywhere. But now he was this icon, the kind of guy whose CD-liner-notes picture you spend hours gazing at while you're being blown away by the music. The adjustment was strange. I went into Z rehearsal the day after I digested the record and stammered to my bandmate, the new icon in my life, "This record is unbelievable." He thanked me, seeming genuinely thrilled for the first time since I'd known him. Sometime around then, Keneally the Solo Artist played one of his only gigs of the era, at a bar in Mission Beach in San Diego. The band was a power trio consisting of Mike, Doug Lunn on bass, and Toss Panos on drums. I'd become intimately acquainted with the CD, and was looking forward to live renditions of my favorite hat tunes. You can imagine my surprise when this outfit took to the stage and systematically destroyed the arrangements I'd grown to know and love. The band was aggressive to a fault: reckless, loud, furious, and purposefully ragged. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it anyway. I couldn't see myself being a part of something I didn't really understand, but somehow that didn't stop me from spending time alone in my apartment learning whatever Keneally material I could. Every once in a while, during those painful last months of 1993, I'd play a Keneally lick during a break in Z rehearsal. Something really obvious, like the chorus of "I Can't Stop," or the main riff in "Uglytown." Mike's initial reaction may surprise you: he ignored it completely.
* * * * * December, 1993. Frank Zappa died. Z was on hiatus for the year. And Mike had booked two San Diego gigs just before New Year's Eve, and Doug Lunn couldn't do them. Was I interested? You bet I was. I was a planner, a meticulous arranger of things down to their finest element. Surely Mike would want to rehearse several times before bringing a new guy on stage with him. Wrong. We rehearsed once, and it was nothing like playing along with the record. First, there was Toss. He was playing rhythms I'd never before encountered, and every time he played an across-the-bar-line drum fill I'd get so fucking lost it was silly. Then I got a taste of why the band sounded so ragged and reckless; Keneally was changing forms on the fly, extending sections that I thought had no business being extended, changing his part so much as to be unrecognizable-and differently every time. These guys were clearly operating at another level, and while they were as encouraging as they could be, I simply didn't know how to get there yet. It showed in the performances. One was in a ballroom-the Catamaran, I believe-and the other was in this gigantic airplane hangar that was mostly empty. I tried my best to hang in there, but I was exposed on the simplest song: "The Car Song," of all things. The coda has a section where you groove in D minor for a certain number of bars before switching over to D major to take the song home. I was so focused on making sure that Toss didn't throw me off the beat-because he was fucking with the meter like crazy-that I automatically switched tonalities at the same point as the recorded version. Well, I wasn't looking at or listening to Keneally, because if I had been, I'd have heard him clearly stay put in D Minor. I went to D major anyway, and wondered for nearly 20 bars why everything sounded so fucked up. In what must have seemed like an eternity, Keneally waited for me to catch on and switch back to D minor before giving me the cue I should have been looking for all along. To make matters worse, it was the show closer. Neither of us left that night feeling like any magic had occurred.
* * * * * The Z "K.A.O.S." tour of March, 1993 was no picnic for yours truly, but I did have some fantastic moments onstage with Mike and Joe. I think Keneally must have seen something then that he hadn't seen before, because he suddenly decided he wanted the Beller/Travers rhythm section magic to grace his sophomore album in progress, Boil That Dust Speck. Dust Speck was a dark collection of tunes. As if Frank's death wasn't enough, Keneally's father passed away in July of 1994. I'd heard some of the rough mixes already done, and they were dark, swirling, brooding collections of harmony and rhythm. The tune he gave us to learn was certainly no exception: "'Cause Of Breakfast." He'd recorded a rough 4-track demo of the song, and gave Joe and I cassette versions to play along with. It was a motherfucker of a tune. Difficult riffs that twisted themselves into musical pretzels across changing time signatures, non-repeating sections all over the place, a metric modulation that took over 25 bars to resolve, and a full-on Frank Zappa bridge that neither Joe or I could figure out with any certainty. One section in particular (from 3:24 to 3:37) was killing me, and I called Joe to talk about it. The resulting phone conversation was surreptitiously taped by Joe, as I worked myself up into a frenzy trying to explain what I thought it was by singing "di-gi-di-gi-di-DA" over and over again to the point of absurdity. Joe goaded me on, asking me to "just do it one more time so I can get it." I obliged repeatedly. The tape was later played for me.and all I could do was laugh. (One of these days I'll get this tape up on the "audio sampler platter," and you'll laugh at me just like they did.) We recorded "Breakfast" in one single pass! Uh, yeah, right.we did it in six or seven different sections. Still, considering how difficult it was, it came together very quickly, and the "impossible" part turned out to be not so impossible after all (hot damn that Joe Travers is a good drummer). The ease was directly due to Mike's vibe in the studio; compared to the Z sessions, everything seemed lighter, more creative, more "nimble around the turns" if you will. Maybe that's because it was pointless to put on airs about recording in a place as small as Double Time Studios, which had a tracking room the size of a decent walk-in closet. But maybe that was the trick after all-the project's visibility was lower, the pressure was not as great, and Mike gave me the feeling when we were tracking that we had nothing to lose, that anything could happen and he just might keep it. On the contrary, with Z, I'd often find myself punching in what I thought was a perfectly good bass track until, after the fifteenth punch or so, it became unrecognizable as a human's bassline. Once "Breakfast" was done, Mike taught us "My Dilemma" on the spot. Not too hard a tune, and funky as hell. The most important thing he did was take control of my sound to tape. He'd run me through a SansAmp PSA-1 to get the bone-crunching sound for "Breakfast"; now he was running me direct to the board, with only a tube mic-pre and a compressor to speak of for effects. This same bass, my Tobias Lacewood Basic, that Dweezil's techs and engineers were telling me didn't sound worth a shit, suddenly sounded like solid gold. When I heard the bass sound that eventually ended up on "My Dilemma" pumping through the studio monitors, I swear I almost cried tears of joy. We got "Dilemma" on the second pass. I knew it was magic right after it went down to tape. Something was happening here. Then it was time for the bass solo. In E-flat. I warned Mike it might be a few takes before I got something I wanted. No problem, he said. First, second, third takes.crap. Fourth, fifth, sixth.more crap. Seventh through tenth.worse crap. I became flustered. Mike was just amused. I kept waiting for the guy I feared to come out, the Mike Keneally who was quick with a quip, the guy who could cut you to the quick with just a few words.and it never happened. He was utterly human, the perfect producer, urging me on just enough, not pushing me too hard. Take 13, 14, 15."almost, you've almost got it".18, 19, 20."like that last one, but just wait a little longer to go up high".21.22.and finally, on what I believe was the 23rd take, I put down the solo that we kept. Practically reading my mind, he sensed my need to vent my frustration on the instrument, and quickly showed us the two 6/8 licks to "Land Of Broken Dreams." As soon as we got it-and I mean seconds afterwards-he rolled the tape and let us loose. I exploded all over the track, racing angrily up and down the neck for just over two minutes before the tape ran off the reel. When we listened back to it, I knew something I hadn't known before that session began: there was something about this guy, and this music, that brought me to a higher musical plane. And Z was never going to bring me there. No matter what.
* * * * * Boil That Dust Speck came out in late 1994, and I must have listened to it a hundred times the month I got it. In what felt like an involuntary movement, I started devouring the songs piece by piece. No one told me to do it, I didn't have a plan for doing it-I just did it. First "The Desired Effect" and "Skunk." Then "Weekend" and "Aglow." Finally I said "fuck it" and learned the whole "Dolphins" suite, back to front. Z wasn't doing much, so I had plenty of free time on my hands. As the year drew to a close, Keneally booked a couple of gigs that, once again, Doug Lunn couldn't make. One was at The Casbah in San Diego, the other an in-store appearance at a record store in Los Angeles called Heavy Rotation. When Mike asked me to do it, I had only one request: a nice, long rehearsal, even if there was only one. He agreed. That rehearsal, at Toss Panos' house on November 21st, 1994, changed everything. I don't know what clicked, but something did. I began rolling with Keneally's impromptu musical mood swings. Toss wasn't throwing me all over the room anymore. Also, landmark arrangements like the "Career/Quimby" show intro, the short version of "Dolphins," and a riff later to become "Sweating In School" were all shown to me for the first time. Finally, the Keneally/Beller/Panos trio played "Uglytown" to the hilt, with a wide-open middle section over a groove I introduced. When we started playing offbeats together over the crazed 5/4 coda, we became something we hadn't been before: a coherent musical unit. That unit leveled The Casbah on December 9th, 1994. I like to think of that show as my first real gig with Keneally, because it was the first gig I did with him where I really knew what the hell I was doing. Then came the in-store at Heavy Rotation the following week, where we did a frightening version of "Performing Miracles" and the original break-neck arrangement of "Cheddar." I was confident to the point of near-cocky, flaying my instrument with a fearsome abandon I wasn't capable of summoning with any other artist. Videotapes of the two shows were stunning proof that something entirely different was going on. Something Keneally liked. I don't know the exact date, but soon after these two performances, Keneally and I were hanging out at Joe's place, listening to music like we always did. I had a pretty severe buzz on, and I think he did too. So when he said, "I think I want you to be in my band," it didn't hit me with the impact it should have. Matter of fact, the first thing I thought was, Here I go again, taking another guy's gig. Man, everyone in this town is going to hate me. Keneally assured me that he'd handle whatever weirdness would result of it, and I relaxed and smiled, extremely satisfied.but never imagining it would change my life to the extent it ultimately did. Like I said, to me, being an integral part of Keneally's music has always felt like an involuntary response.like I just had to do it. Like I was pre-wired to do so.
* * * * * 1995 began with a study in contrasts. I had two NAMM performances scheduled-one with Keneally, the other with Z. The Z show was a private party for Peavey, with a special guest appearance by Dick Clark. We all got dressed up in fake costume stage tuxes and wore ZZ Top beards for a planned skit, before playing our only song of the evening: an even newer medley, one that spanned the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s. It was fun, it was silly, it was Z in a nutshell. Keneally, on the other hand, had a show in the lobby bar of a nearby hotel. We went about crafting newer arrangements of existing material, attracting some of the passersby with our loud, sometimes dissonant brand of power-trio rock. One of those who noticed was Steve Bailey, a NAMM fixture and incredible bassist. He actually took me aside after the gig and introduced himself. He'd heard my solo in "My Dilemma" and wanted to know who I was. Believe me when I tell you, that never happened after a Z show. The first half of the year was up and down. Keneally activity was light. A nice show at Club Lingerie, a piss-poor show at Musician's Institute (which we later avenged on 2/22/96, when we returned to the same stage and played the show that became Disc 2 of Half Alive In Hollywood), then a better show again at Club Lingerie. The Dust Speck material was still being worked out, and Z looked like it was about to gear up for the big push behind Music For Pets. But then something happened-again-and Z stalled. Keneally and I were increasingly frustrated. He began booking gigs at a seedy club in the valley called Bourbon Square, and it was there that we became a band for good. In the second half of 1995, we played six shows at this shithole venue, each one arguably better than the previous. Sometimes Joe was the drummer, sometimes Toss was. We weren't drawing very well, and we were usually one of four bands on any given night, but it was the first venue that ever felt like home to us. We could be loud-really, stupidly loud-and do just about anything we felt like with little risk. After two furious performances of straight-up hat and Dust Speck arrangements, I took the first step towards my ultimate role in the band by proposing we segue certain songs into others. Some of my ideas worked, some didn't. But Keneally seemed willing to try anything, and never accepted anything I proposed with less than complete validity. For his part, he seemed capable of anything while on stage, and watching the madness teem from his every pore-and flailing around to keep up with him-was one of the most pure joys I've ever experienced. It was the "honeymoon period" of our musical relationship. By November of 1995, a steady following began to develop. Our set was maturing, our confidence was growing, and our sound was becoming more whole with every show. There was a momentum that, in the face of Z's inertia, was becoming harder and harder to ignore. Most importantly, a bond was forming between Mike and I, and it was more than just about sharing space onstage together. Mike's longtime friend and webmaster Scott Chatfield noticed, and proposed that I write a "column" for Keneally's website, entitled The Life of Bryan. I agreed, and my web debut occurred that month as I posted the first two "Acts" of The Life of Bryan. The seeds were there for something big to happen. It would be less than three months later before we had to make a choice as to whether we had the nerve to follow through on it.
* * * * * From here on out, everything is pretty well documented. Let me point the way: November, 1995-January, 1996 (as it occurred in real time) The Life of Bryan, Acts 1-2, 4-6 Keneally.com's Mike Types To You, 12/10/95, 1/18/96, and 1/24/96
The Implosion of Z (Mike & Bryan leave the band), January 30, 1996 In Retrospect bryanbellerdotcom's "rap sheet-subject: z" In Real Time Keneally.com's Mike Types To You, 2/4/96 and 2/9/96 The Life of Bryan, Act 7
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