“Fly in the Ointment, Pt. 1” — Worlds Collide

Los Angeles was a dream when I first moved there in 1980. Seven years later, it had become a nightmare.

My SoCal sojourn began with a nice run of gigs with Steppenwolf, The Naughty Sweeties, Billy Vera & the Beaters, and The Pop and ended in a dank studio apartment nailed into the corner of a garage in Burbank. It had enough space for a bed, postage-stamp bathroom, hotplate, and little else. I’d hear rodents scuttling inside the wall beside my head as I fell asleep at night. It seemed as if everybody I met was addicted to hard drugs. Some worked in the porn industry.

Hard drugs and pornography. That was the Valley in the mid-’80s. A playground for losers and lowlifes.

I leapt into auditioning again once the last of those good gigs wound down but never managed to find the right fit. Bills were due, so out of necessity, I took a minimum-wage shipping-and-receiving job, which lasted a couple years until I was laid off. I tried to survive on unemployment checks for a while, but after my phone and electricity were shut off a couple times, I began to suspect that I wasn’t wired for the undependable life of a freelance drummer.

Just then my brother Bob threw me a lifeline. A temporary job opened up in the warehouse at GPI Publications, where he’d worked for years on the editorial staff of Keyboard magazine. Desperate to escape L.A., even if only for a month or two, I sublet my hovel to a friend (who meanwhile was dating a porn star, if “dating” is even the appropriate verb, since another friend was “dating” her at the same time) and headed north to the Bay Area.

I couch surfed with my brother and sister-in-law in their bungalow in Palo Alto, strolling distance to the verdant grounds and hallowed halls of Stanford University. With spotless streets, great restaurants and pubs, easy pace, and college town vibe, Palo Alto glistened like Main Street Disneyland to my weary eyes. Pristine. Safe. At last. I felt like I could finally breathe and really didn’t want to go back to Los Angeles. It turned out I didn’t have to. Through a series of unforeseeable twists, within a few months, I was offered the opportunity to edit Drums & Drumming, GPI’s brand-new magazine for drummers.

With a new, prestigious job, grown-up salary, and excellent benefits, I rented a studio apartment in downtown Palo Alto, just a couple blocks from University Avenue, the town’s humming main drag. My place had been carved out of a funky Victorian house divided into small units and owned by an elderly woman with a vaguely Eastern European accent who kept parrots. Lots of parrots. She had at least one balancing on a shoulder at all times.

I loved my new life.

When it became clear that I was staying put, I arranged to move what few belongings I’d left in L.A. to my new place, including a battered Wurlitzer electric piano once played by David Jackson in The Naughty Sweeties. Now all the elements were in place. My unexpected change of luck inspired me to write some new songs on that piano, which was set up by a first-floor window overlooking the quiet tree-lined Everett Avenue.

A few songs developed during the couple years I spent in those cozy surroundings, including both versions of “Fly in the Ointment,” which bookend the other eight tracks on the Waldo Picasso album of the same name. I’ll address (or at least try to recall) in a later blog what led me to compose two songs with nearly similar titles, but today, more than 30 years later, I find a couple aspects of “Fly in the Ointment, Pt. 1” interesting.

The song kicks off the album with a bouncy quasi-Caribbean romp marked by marimbas, ukuleles, and horns. But while “Fly in the Ointment, Pt. 1” features a buoyant arrangement that echoes the jubilation I felt after putting L.A. behind me, the doomy lyrics reflect the depth to which my life had sunk while living there. Without consciously setting out to do so, I wrote woeful lyrics to a gleeful accompaniment. Somehow, in my own private Bizarro World, the incongruity made sense.

However, all these years later, its message is now poignantly timely. With war, white supremacy, pandemic, inflation, climate crises, threats to democracy, domestic terrorism, and the rise of authoritarianism on our doorsteps, turbulent lyrics like these — written in the giddy ’80s during a roaring economy and the hope for world peace that accompanied the fall of the Soviet bloc — read as if they were penned about today’s gloomy circumstances:

Fly in the ointment and I hope you understand

The purge of the nations is upon your fellow man

The whole situation is beyond your command

A turn of events is going to do you in

I said, yeah — the next and last line of the song reads like another kind of contradiction: “Everything’s falling apart! Yeah!” But while this declaration might appear to be the raving of an unhinged sadist, it in fact more closely mirrors the often-misread Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

And we most certainly do, like it or not.

About the horn parts: They were arranged and played by my dear friend, trumpeter Darrell Leonard, who has performed with everybody from Elton John and Bonnie Raitt to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Taj Mahal. Darrell still lives in Los Angeles with his lovely wife Lindy and a garden full of enormous tomatoes.

Back in the day, Darrell hired me to play in his 18-piece horn band, Darrell Leonard’s Lineup, which featured some of the busiest session players in L.A., including Doc Krupa (Tower of Power), Lee Thornburg (Rolling Stones), Lon Price (Elvis Presley), Kenny Lee Lewis (Steve Miller Band), Mike Murphy (REO Speedwagon), Jerry Peterson (Eric Clapton), and future solo jazz stars Rick Braun and Gary Meek, among a laundry list of other luminaries. You can check out the Lineup on some live recordings posted on my Soundcloud page.

Darrell was also instrumental in helping me get the gig with Billy Vera & the Beaters just as the band’s single “At This Moment” hit the #1 spot on the Billboard Top 100 and dangled there for weeks. It was a thrilling time to play with Billy.

There’s nothing quite like driving a big horn section from the drum riser. Even the best of them can let their phrasing drift a little, especially after blowing through a few tough arrangements. I’ve always felt it’s the drummer’s responsibility to wrangle them back into the groove by playing with authority and resisting their tendency to drag the beat. It’s a beast that must be tamed, kind of like trying to hold a semi-truck between the lines while barreling down a steep grade.

Thanks to modern technology, Darrell and I were able to fine-tune the horn arrangement from opposite sides of the continent. We transferred files back and forth online, then conferred about minor tweaks over the phone, and managed to do it all without leaving the comfort of our homes. You’ve got to love the convenience, but like so many other high-tech contrivances, DAWs continue to amaze and confuse me at once. Hey, I’m a drummer. What do you expect?