I'm one of those weirdos who thinks Suicidal Tendencies' best albums are How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can't Even Smile Today and Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit ... Deja Vu. Ditto for Fishbone; and I'm not the only one who loves The Reality Of My Surroundings. Along the same lines, I don't exactly trumpet it about town but I LOVE Bad Religion's big budget shit like No Substance (producer: Alex Perialas) and The New America (producer: Todd Rundgren). TNA is practically a fucking XTC record for all the jangly guitars and reverby harmony vocals but it's so awesome that when its follow-up, The Process of Belief, came out I bought that shit sight unseen. Or wait that is sound unheard.
The big story about TPoB was that it heralded the return of former guitarist/co-principal songwriter/recovering heroin addict/Epitaph Records honcho Brett Gurewitz, and that was cool and all. But what wowed me -- besides the very unpunk three-guitar attack and some of the most memorable, singable tunes EVER -- was their mighty new drummer, one Brooks Wackerman. That name sounds like an alias, like the producers credited to the Sly Stallone arm-wrestling vehicle Over The Top (Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus) but dude's for real. Wackerman played on Suicidal's lame "reunion" record Freedumb, an unfortunate outing which found ST frontman Mike Muir succumbing to all the phony nostalgia for the band's punk roots. But anyway, man alive Wackerman makes longtime BR drummer Bobby Schayer sound like he'd been playing with uncooked linguine. What a creative metaphor.
And then I find today that Wackerman, brother of Frank Zappa drummer Chad Wackerman, was a member of Bad4Good, that hideous all-teenager rock band assembled by former Zappa guitarist Steve Vai. It boggles the mind to discover that besides Wackerman, B4G also featured that annoying kid from Vai's wacky "The Audience Is Listening" video, Thomas McRocklin. Yep, a drummer named Wackerman and a guitarist called McRocklin. I'm afraid to look but I imagine the other two kids were named Slaps Pickenstein and Piper von Belting.
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