If you haven't yet, grab a copy of Earl Swift's The Tangierman's Lament. Put it in your own stocking. It's a great collection of Earl's tales. Like this one:
THE CLUB IS PACKED. Two hundred heads are nodding to a cover band's take on ZZ Top's "LaGrange." It's near the end of the song, the part where the tick-tick-ticking whirls into a sonic tornado. Guitars are screeching. The bass is thumping and growling.
And the drums - the drums are totally out of control. You can hear them outside. You can hear them across the parking lot. Clear across Shore Drive you can hear them. Inside, you can't hear your conscience. An artillery barrage is what it's like, and ground zero is the concrete dance floor in front of the Fifty-One-Fifty's stage.
And check it out: The guy making all the racket, the one beating the daylights out of the drums, isn't some gorilla-armed musclehead. He's this tall, skinny dude, long face expressionless, sticks and feet working a small white drum kit a dozen ways at once.
The song ends. The crowd whoops. The drummer's face remains a blank through the applause, stays that way as the band kicks into another number. Doesn't look bored, exactly - nobody bored whales on drums with that kind of passion, that precision, that power. More like jaded. Like he's seen it before. Which is true enough. This is a bar, after all, and he's played arenas. This is a good crowd, but one time the guy played to almost a thousand times as many metalheads.
This is Plastic Eddy, a bar band, and see, the drummer is a rock star. His name is Scott Travis. And when he isn't doing this, he's the drummer for Judas Priest.
No lie: Judas Priest.
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