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Web Exclusive Interview
Mickey Curry
by Billy Amendola
Not many people get to do exactly
what they love and get paid for
it - much less with two of the biggest artists in the world. Mickey Curry
toured and recorded
with Hall & Oates at the peak of their career,
laying down a solid backbeat with perfect feel and emotion. He's
done
the same with pop superstar Bryan Adams for the past twenty years.
Mickey was born on
June 10, 1956, and his dream of banging the
skins began when he saw Ringo Starr on TV in 1964. "I was living at
my
grandmother's house," Mickey recalls. "The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan,
but my grandmother really didn't
want me to watch. So she watched it
with my parents, while my brothers and I - I've got six brothers - we're
all
fighting to look through the little keyhole in the doorway. We
could just see the corner of the TV, but that did it for me. I
was
gone. I just thought, Wow! That's the coolest thing.?
Mickey came from a large and musical family, and it wasn't long before
he was asking his parents for drum lessons.
"Everyone in my family
plays an instrument, so I just picked up sticks," Mickey explains. "I
thought it was cool having that
little rubber practice pad and the
Haskell Harr drum book. Then my music teacher, Ned Tarantino, told my
parents that they
should buy me drums because he thought I had a
natural aptitude for it. Ned was a great guy - he died a few years ago,
and I
really miss him. He was also the first jazz cat I ever knew. He
had a little goatee with red hair, and he used to wear a beret all
the
time. And he could really play. So with his encouragement, my father
went out and got me a drumkit.?
Mickey's been on that kit ever since. Most successful players have a
career in the studio, or if they're
lucky enough, maybe join a band and
tour behind some hit records. Mickey is one of those rare players
who've
successfully done both throughout his career. And for anyone who
knows him personally, it's really no surprise, because
Mickey is one of
the most humble, lovable people you'd ever want to meet.
MD: Sounds like you had music all the time in your house growing up.
Mickey: Oh, yeah. There were seven boys in my family, and everyone
played something. My oldest
brother played piano, my brother George
played guitar, my brother Gary plays guitar, and Todd plays saxophone.
There were
also some local guys who I picked up stuff from, just
watching them in the garage. And they always listened to great
records.
They had all the early Motown records.
MD: Would you play along to records?
Mickey: Yes,
I used to play along to 45s: Motown, early Stax, Sam &
Dave, Aretha?. Now that I'm older I'm fascinated when I
find out who's
playing drums on those records. These guys are my heroes. There was
also a lot of rock music like the
Animals, Herman's Hermits, and of
course The Beatles. And I'd turn on the radio and play along to it.
That was how I learned to play the kit.
MD: Did your parents play
also?
Mickey: Not really, but my father was very musical. He's one
of those
guys who could sit down at the drumkit and start playing this funny
sort of bebop thing. And he'd sit at a piano
and plunk something out,
or pick up a guitar or harmonica.
MD: Did you ever go the route of super-chops drumming?
Mickey: When I was a kid I used to play along to Billy Cobham
records.
I'd pick up one fill on an entire record and I'd go, "Man, I can do
Billy Cobham." [laughs] I just don't
have the discipline for the chops
thing. Probably because of those early days listening to R&B, my
whole thing was just
about groove and feel, and you do that by keeping
time and just feeling it. All my real hero drummers played that
way - Pistol
Allen and Benny Benjamin, Bernard Purdie, Roger Hawkins down
in Memphis, Al Jackson?. They're all unbelievable! And
the other thing
was the fact that because I love that stuff so much, and I could play
it, it got me into a lot of bands. I was like
fourteen, fifteen years
old and auditioning for guys who were playing in bars and clubs, and I
was getting gigs. I'd have to
sneak in half the places, or it was, "He
can play but he can't have any beer."
MD: When was the first time you went into the
studio?
Mickey: When I was fifteen. There was a little studio here
in
Connecticut, and I went in there to do some commercial stuff, little
demos for these local ads. The guy liked me, so they
called me back a
few times. And I dug it. The studio was really happening. The only
problem was that I was having a hard
time with the click track. It was
very time-specific recording; a piece would be exactly thirty seconds.
And this was way
before they could fix anything after the fact.
MD: When did you learn the importance of the
click?
Mickey: After high school. I took lessons with a guy named Nick
Forte.
He's a jazz guy who taught me a lot about how important keeping time
is. We had a metronome [in the lesson
room], and that helped me out
tremendously.
MD: What was your first big
session?
Mickey: There was a band called The Scratch Band that I was in for
five
years. We played all up and down New England. I learned a lot in that
band because our manager owned a studio, and we
recorded there all the
time. We were also playing in clubs and bars.
MD: How long after that did you hook up with Hall &
Oates?
Mickey: Less than a year after that. I quit The Scratch Band
because
even though there was a lot of money coming in, I wasn't getting any. I
didn't want to just play in bars for
the rest of my life, and
fortunately Peter Lubin at Mercury Records, who'd seen me play with The
Scratch Band, asked if
I'd be interested in recording with a band in
the city. It was a band called Tom Dickie & The Desires, and it was
at
Electric Lady studios, so I freaked. Anyway, I did that record, and
the band's manager was [famous record company exec]
Tommy Mottola, who
asked me, "Would you like to leave your drums up and record on a Hall
& Oates record next
week?"
MD: Were you familiar with
them?
Mickey: Oh, yeah, I was a huge fan because Bernard Purdie played
on
their album Abandoned Luncheonette. He's on "She's Gone," one of
my
favorites. So I said, "Yeah, I'd love to." Then while I was recording
with them, [legendary producer] Bob
Clearmountain called me. I had done
a record a few months earlier for guitarist G.E. Smith, who used to be
in The Scratch
Band as well. He had left about a year and a half before
I did, and now he was working with everybody.
MD: wasn't he in Hall & Oates at that
time?
Mickey: Yes. So G.E. and I got to work together again. He had
actually
called me when I quit The Scratch Band and said, "I'm doing a solo
record, come into New York." So we
recorded that at the Power Station.
That was a couple of months before the Hall & Oates session. I was
also doing
some demo stuff with other people in New York around that
time, and it was just great. I drive my VW to the train station in
New
Haven, take the two-hour ride into Manhattan, work, and get back home
at two in the morning.
MD: How did you meet
Bryan?
Mickey: Bob Clearmountain, who had worked on G.E.'s record
with us,
called and said, "I've got this kid from Canada. I'm going to produce
his record, and I want you to play
drums on it." So a couple of weeks
after I finished the Hall & Oates tracks, I was back up at the
Power Station working
with Bryan Adams on the You Want It, You Got It
album. That summer I went on the
road with G.E., and by the fall I was
back out on the road with Hall & Oates. Even though I was with Hall
& Oates
between 1981 and 1987, when we were off the road, I would
be able to go to Vancouver and record with Bryan. I got to work on
all
of his records in one capacity or another.
Around mid-'86, Darryl Hall was supposed to
go do some solo stuff,
so Hall & Oates split up and I was sort of scrambling for work. I
was doing a lot of session work,
but I didn't know what I was going to
do next. My brother died that year too, so things were kind of wacky
personally.
But I had gone up to Vancouver that fall to record Into The
Fire with Bryan, and
that's when he said, "Come on the road with us."
I'm very lucky that it worked out that
way.
MD: It may have been partly due to luck, but it's also
your
personality. People dig playing with you and they want you in their
band.
Mickey: Thank you. You've got to be nice to people and give
them what
they want, and you've got to be positive. Once the attitude starts,
you're screwed. If you're an
asshole, nobody's going to work with you.
You're not making your own
record, you're working for someone else. So
you've got to give them what they want, whether you particularly like
it
or not. You've got to trust the producer and you've got to trust the
artist. These are the people who know what they
want.
MD: You also recorded with The Cult. How did that come
about?
Mickey: That happened through producer Bob Rock, who is from
Vancouver.
When I first started working with Bryan, we were always recording at a
place called Little Mountain in Vancouver,
and Bob was there all the
time. He was in a band called The Payolas. I worked with Bob on a bunch
of bands, like
Honeymoon Suite, and I got to know him really well. So
when he was going to produce The Cult's Sonic Temple album, he said,
"I'd love you to play drums on it."
MD: Were you familiar with
them?
Mickey: I knew a little about them, but not much, so I went out and
got
the first two albums. This was before Matt Sorum was in the band. As a
matter of fact, I remember when Matt auditioned
for them, because it
was when we were recording the second record I did with them, Ceremony.
We were recording in LA and they were going out at night auditioning
drummers for the tour,
because as much as I would have loved to, I
couldn't tour with them. I was pretty busy. Anyway, I went to the
first
audition night, and Matt was the first guy I saw play. I went, "Listen
to this guy - as a matter of fact, get him in and let
him finish the
album." [laughs] He was so good and so nice. I'm a huge fan. That's
when they hired him.
MD: You also did a Carly Simon
record.
Mickey: I did Let The Rivers
Run. And I did a song that she co-wrote
with Bryan that he also produced. I did the video for the title track,
which was
a big song for her. It was on the Working Girl soundtrack.
She got an award for that. I
remember that we did the video on the
Staten Island ferry at six in the morning. We had the drums set up out
on the back
deck, and it was freezing. It starts to rain, and I'm
wearing a suit and tie with an overcoat, and I'm sitting at the
drums
trying to play that track. Thank God we got it in a couple of takes,
because that was really tough.
[laughs]
MD: How was working with Elvis
Costello?
Mickey: Elvis is fantastic. He's one of those guys who are
constantly
misunderstood. He was pinned as such a bad boy. I was a huge fan back
when his first record came out in
'77. The Scratch Band opened for him
in New Haven on the first tour he ever did in America, and we've been
pals
ever since.
MD: So with Elvis, or basically with any session, what's
the procedure when you go in the studio?
Mickey: I sort of write myself a chart. I note whether I'm in
during an
intro or the first verse, where they want a big fill, where they might
want some weird pattern, and then I'll just
sort of write out the
pattern. I write myself these little notes. When you go in fresh,
you've got a lot of energy and
you're sort of right on the edge all the
time, because you're not really sure where the song is going. I think
that
guys like Elvis feel that energy, as opposed to just hearing the
part you're playing. They're getting a vibe off it, not
necessarily
listening to the notes.
MD: How does Bryan show you a song for the first
time?
Mickey: He usually has demos with either drum programs or just
some
sounds keeping time. And he's usually got the song pretty well mapped
out. There are certain specific things he
likes - like a certain fill or
pattern. But there's a lot of freedom as well. He trusts me to come up
with stuff. A lot of the
newer material, when he writes songs and demos
them up, he's taking some drum tracks from something we did ten
years
ago. He might take eight bars of it and move it. So it's all me
playing. When I hear that, I know what he's
going for and I can do that
for him in the studio. With Pro Tools now, it's so much easier to
record, at least for
me.
MD: So you like Pro
Tools?
Mickey: Yeah. I like it because you can go in, get a good feel, and
if
you screw up it's okay, because you only need to do a few passes of any
particular song. You're not doing thirty
takes of something, trying to
find one that feels right. What does bother me about Pro Tools is that
a lot of guys overuse it.
Like, I'll go in and play, and by the time
they're done Pro Tooling the drum track, it sounds like the demo
again.
MD: How was Bryan's new record, Room Service, recorded?
Mickey: The drums were put on after a lot of the other parts
were
recorded, so I was playing along to sequenced parts. He loves Pro Tools
too, so he uses it quite a lot. I'd been
used to this sort of thing
from the Hall & Oates days, because they were the first guys I knew
about that would use a
Roland 808 or drum machine and I would play over
it. You know: put big live drums over the drum machine. We did that
on
everything.
MD: How did you feel about drum machines at that
time?
Mickey: I didn't dig the fact that there were certain songs they
opted
for only using the 808. That was part of what the sound was, and they
had big
hits with those songs. But I sort of dug being able to do it,
you know, just go in and just drop in for the middle eight, or drop
in
and out with the Linn machine. I used to love that.
MD: Jimmy Bralower was programming a lot back then,
right?
Mickey: Jimmy Bralower was the programmer. And I loved him. He's on a
million records. We used to call him "Dr. Bralower."
They'd do a bunch
of tracks with him, then I would come in for a few days and put drums
on things they thought needed
to be beefed up a bit, or where they
wanted a change in sound or tone or texture. Things like "Adult
Education," "Private
Eyes," and "Maneater" all came out of that.
MD: This goes back to your being able to play along
comfortably to a click.
Mickey: Exactly. I can't say I depend on it now, but I'd
rather have
one because then I can play in and out of it. You just play with it
like it's another instrument. Then there are
certain guys who I love
because they don't do that. Keith Moon obviously never
played to a
click. He probably didn't have to because he was just so phenomenal at
what he did.
MD: Who are some of your other drum
heroes?
Mickey: Ringo, Levon Helm from The Band, Jim Gordon, Carmine
Appice,
Dino Danelli, Jim Keltner. Jim is one of my absolute favorite guys,
there's nobody better at what he does. Then
there's Danny Seraphine
from Chicago. When I was a teenager he was the guy for me. They were
one of the all-time
greats in the early days. Even now: Tris Imboden is
a great drummer.
Growing up, I always
wanted to be a session guy. I started buying
any record that Jeff Porcaro's name was on. He's one of those
guys,
like Keltner, where every note was perfect. Lately I've been listening
to Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue album. Jimmy Cobb - what a great drummer he
was on that record. That first song, "So What,"
when he comes in with a
rivet cymbal - you just melt. Then there's Billy Cobham and Tony
Williams. When you watch a
guy like Tony Williams, you can't figure out
what he's doing. Elvin Jones was like that. Back in the late
'80s,
Charlie Drayton, Jim Keltner, and I went to the Catalina Club in LA to
watch him play. Every once in a while Keltner
would put his head down
and go, "Oh, man."
MD: Do you practice when you're off the
road?
Mickey: Yes. I have drums here at home, and I make sure I pick up
a
pair of sticks all the time and bang around a little bit. And we always
make sure we get a little soundcheck where we end
up doing Jimi Hendrix
or Led Zeppelin or something, where I'm dying after twenty minutes. I
don't know how [Jimi
Hendrix Experience drummer] Mitch Mitchell did it.
[laughs]
MD: What is
your practice routine like?
Mickey: A lot of rudiments, just sort of getting around the
kit,
practicing not catching the rims, and getting up on the cymbals. It's
funny, the older I get the closer I'm making
my kit. Everything gets a
little bit closer.
MD: And I notice you sit really
low.
Mickey: Yeah. I've always done that. You know what's
funny, I've talked
to other people about this, and a lot of the Yamaha drummers sit low. I
don't know what
that's about. But it's been comfortable that way for
me. A lot of guys sit on my seat and they ask, "How do you sit
this far
back?" I think I'm sort of on the edge of the seat. But it's
comfortable and I get around the kit that way.
I'm also finding that
lately I'm bringing my gear in a lot closer - like the ride cymbal is in
a little more, and the crash
cymbals are a bit lower. And I'm tilting
the floor toms a little more.
MD: Do you
exercise when you're on the road?
Mickey: I just try to stay healthy. I walk a lot, I watch what I
eat,
and I try to get good sleep. I don't drink or smoke, I don't do drugs,
and I eat
healthy.
MD: I read that you're a
vegetarian.
Mickey: Yeah, about eight years
now.
MD: Does it make you feel
different?
Mickey: Yeah, I feel like I'm a lot less aggressive. And
I've got a lot
more energy. I don't have anything against anybody eating meat, it's
just not for me. And I feel
better since I stopped.
MD: Finally, what advice do you have for drummers going into
the studio?
Mickey: You've got to pay attention to what they want. So
many guys
now, especially some younger players can play anything. But the
biggest
mistake - and I learned this the hard way - is trying to play everything
you know. But you've got to play the
song. And listen to the songwriter
or producer. Those are the ones in charge. Be
confident, without being
cocky.
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