I, uh, inadvertently blew up a gas station," says Drums & Tuba drummer Tony Nozero.
Appetite for conduction: Brian Wolff (from left), Neal
McKeeby and Tony Nozero are Drums & Tuba.
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With That One Guy, 9:30 p.m.
Friday, November 28, Cervantes'
Masterpiece Ballroom, 2637
Welton Street, $10, 303-297-1772
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Come again? Blew up a gas station?
"It was outside of touring," he says, laughing sheepishly as he tells the story behind the band's latest release, Gas Up, Blow Up. "I was in New York. I had just moved there. I was delivering for a place that made fountains and shit out of stone. I went to Jersey to pick up a bunch of granite rock from this granite supplier. It was January, and it was like freezing, icing rain -- just the worst weather ever. I had over a ton of rocks in the back. I was running out of gas, and I saw this gas station. I was going just a liii-ttle too fast, a little sputtery. I pulled off the highway, and I hit this patch of ice and went flying towards the gas pump. The van just smashed right into the pump and burst into flames. It was insane. I ran out of the van and tore across the parking lot and jumped over a fence, [thinking] the whole freaking block was going to go up.
"Still had a coffee in my hand," he adds, recounting a scene of him standing near a snowbank on the other side of that fence watching the black smoke and fire.
So exactly what happens after you blow up a gas station? Surely there's paperwork, questioning, a string of legal hassles.
"You know what was totally nuts about it? I just walked away from the whole thing. The cops came, the fire department -- all these people came. I could have gotten totally pummeled by The Man. I was so, just, not happening at that point," he says, summing up the tangle of interstate license, registration and insurance complications that could have come back to haunt him in a big way. "The tow truck came, and they put my van on the truck. I hopped in with them, went to the yard, and that was the last I heard of anything. It was just like the scene in the movie where all this crazy stuff is happening and the guy who is responsible for it all just kind of slips away, and there's so much commotion that nobody notices. I don't know; it was so weird!"
Nozero seems to fare better when sharing driving duties with the rest of the band (Brian Wolff on tuba, trombone and trumpet, and guitarist Neal McKeeby). And it's a good thing, because the trio has logged countless miles crisscrossing the country since forming in Austin, Texas, in 1995. Drums & Tuba currently averages 200 shows a year; needless to say, Nozero doesn't have plans to get another job anytime soon. And while he jokes that he'll conveniently forget to write "granite delivery" on future applications, the fact is, he may never have to. With each successive road trip, the outfit's diverse fan base keeps growing -- and as more people discover that one of the most forward-thinking acts in music today, Nozero and company are closer to being homeless once again.
"We all used to live in New York, and we'd sublet our places and hit the road and then come back and live in our place for a month and a half and then leave again and sublet," Nozero says, conveying the merry-go-round sense of movement in his life for the better part of the past decade. "That got old, and at a certain point, I was just like, 'Forget it -- I'm just gonna move out completely.' I didn't have a place for probably eight months, just kind of scraped stuff together in between tours. That got old."
What remains fresh, though, is Drums & Tuba's sound. Though comparisons to other outfits are common, they often miss the mark, because the subjects of comparison are spread all over the musical map. In reality, D&T walks a fine line between an assertive post-Zeppelin brontosaurus stomp and jazzy looseness. Though McKeeby, Wolff and Nozero consider their music to be "just rock," their sense of interplay, for many, evokes the unexplored, undefinable territory of jazz. Similarly, even though they don't "jam" in the strictest sense, the jam-band legions have embraced them. And while people hear different levels of improvisation in the band's work, Nozero says the compositions are, in fact, quite structured.
In a typical session, Nozero starts things off with a funky groove, and either he or Wolff takes it from there, sampling, looping and adding effects. At the same time, Wolff uses a tuba to lay down a low-pitched bass part, which he then loops and mixes with his other horns -- perhaps applying the trombone as a keyboard before articulating upper-register melodies with the trumpet. McKeeby, whose individual style defies description, comes in with oddly textured chords and single-note lines with a mostly clean tone -- sometimes with two guitars concurrently, often in opposing rhythms. Then Wolff loops the others (who all employ a wide array of effects pedals) and fades the various loops in and out of the mix. Often there are six parts going simultaneously.
