April 11, 2025
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What’s that? You don’t know who Larry Mullen is? Can’t blame you. Drummers are mostly anonymous. They sit in the back behind a wall of maple cookpots with the lids on. Anyway, Larry drums for the band U2. Well, I’m certain he did, and I assume he still does. I’m not looking it up.
At any rate, I’m a better drummer than he is. This is not bragging. It’s a verifiable fact. It’s capital S Science. I’ve performed an inadvertent experiment to prove this hypothesis, even though I didn’t start out with a hypothesis like you’re supposed to. I firmly believe that, as Mark Twain says, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
It’s a little weird, because I’m not a drummer. I never was one, really. I played other instruments, and badly at that. But I had always wanted to play the drums. Just like Little Larry, I’ll bet. Anyway, I was thwarted in this ambition by my circumstances, as was often the case in my life. Way back in the 1980s, I’d never owned drums, or played them or anything. But I was still a better drummer than Larry Mullen. This is known.
So let’s get out the beakers. Turn on the Bunsen burners. Gaze at stuff in Petri dishes. No, wait. Science will just let us down, I know it. Science ain’t very reliable lately. What we need is case law. I need to crowd in some expert witnesses, and Perry Mason the shit out of the jury. I need to make the judge scold the other attorney to be quiet while I’m speaking. Even though, you know, besides not being a drummer, I’m not a lawyer, either. I never could pass a bar, if you know what I mean. But put twelve good men and true in the box, sorta like a hockey game that’s gotten out of control, and I’ll convince ’em.
Exhibit A:
The Nashville Scene, November 29th, 2001 edition.
The Bar That Time Forgot. The Dusty Road may be Nashville’s last honest-to-goodness honky tonk
Snippet, your honor:
The authentic feel of The Dusty Road has not escaped the attention of Nashville’s film and video community, and the bar has been the setting for several music videos, most notably Ray Charles’ “3/4 Time” and Alan Jackson’s “www.memories.” A sign painted on the old Woodland Street location advertised “Coldest Beer in Town – Jam Sessions Nightly – Instruments Provided – Truckers Welcome,” and over the years many of the music industry’s grittier personalities have found themselves drawn to the tavern’s tiny stage. Country outlaw David Allan Coe played his first Nashville gigs there, Norma remembers, “although he probably wouldn’t admit it now…. He slept out back in an old car, and he owed just about everybody in the place.”
There was the night U2 dropped in a few years back. The Irish band had been in town working with producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement, and McLaughlin, who’d been hanging out in the studio, said, “Let’s go to The Dusty Road!” “Yeah, Pat came in here with a bunch of ’em,” Norma recalls, “and that drummer [Larry Mullen Jr.] got behind the drums and was beatin’ the hell out of ’em…. I couldn’t hear nothin’ else, so I went up there and threw him off the stage. My kids like to kill me when I told ’em about it the next day. ‘U2 who?’ I said. I’m still not sure who they are.”
Exhibit B:
Sippican Cottage, March 15th, 2013
Guitar Army
Snippet, your honor:
…we happened upon Irma’s Dusty Road Cafe hiding behind a banner that told wild tales of jam sessions being held with instruments provided, and it didn’t have even a passing resemblance to the place we were looking for, but we went on in because it was getting so late that OPEN seemed right on time to us, but there was next to no one in there and they only served Pabst in cans, that’s all they had, don’t you fellows even think of asking for anything else, you just hold up the requisite fingers for the amount you require and you’ll find Blue Ribbon succor in just that amount; and there was a blind man sitting at a table playing guitar, but in the back, nowhere near the stage, and my brother didn’t pick up on the fact he was blind and insulted him by accident in his innocence, and all of a sudden that man had enough friends of his to form an entourage or a military detachment or a lynch mob gathered in a circle around him, and us –mostly us– and there was a faraway look of PBR and anger in their eyes, the ones that weren’t glass, anyway, and I thought I’d better smooth things over so I identified my brother as a bass player and told the assembled posse that he was dying to play bass with the blind fellow, who was pretty good as I recall, and my brother looked at me daggers because he didn’t want to play bass in Irma’s Dusty Road cafe instruments provided because the instruments provided were all broken, and a very particular kind of broken they were, too; they were broken in a right-hand way, like insult to injury to my brother, who didn’t yet realize what he had done to poor us in his innocence, and one way or the other he was about to experience insult and injury, so I figured he might as well get it metaphorically, playing a broken bass upside down in an ad hoc country band instead of in the alley outside via the shod foot; so he figures he’ll fix my little red wagon, and tells them his little brother would love to play the drums, knowing full well that I have never met a drummer, never mind a drum teacher, and I’d be in a bit of a bother to play the things, but he didn’t care and I didn’t care and the audience didn’t care because they were so full of Pabst Blue Ribbon that they could barely hold up their fingers in the correct number to get the additional amount they required to stay lit, and we set to making country and music noise, my brother upside-down, and me, more or less sideways, I think, and it was jolly, I guess — or at least the audience thought the noise we were making was jollier than beating us like carpets in the spring, and then they started going up to the bar and holding up two fingers for every one Pabst that they desired at the time, and put the extra on the bandstand for us to drink, free-like, and soon I lost any idea of striking the floor tom because it was crowded with cans of beer I was just getting to, and so was every other horizontal surface on the band stand, and the application of so much PBR to my nervous system made me play the drums with a wild abandon commensurate with great ability, despite the fact I had no ability, and it was then that a fellow told me that it would be considered a great insult if we didn’t finish a beer that the audience had purchased for us, and the fact there was a dozen and one in my bullpen and it was only the second inning wouldn’t cut any ice with anybody in that place, and then that same fellow, who was obviously having more fun than me and my brother put together, went up to the bar and told the assembled throng gathered there that that carpetbagging yankee drummer and his confused brother that don’t know which way to hold a bass, never mind which end to blow in, well, those fellows claim they can drink more Pabst Blue Ribbon beer than we can buy them.
I didn’t get thrown out of Irma’s Dusty Road, and I didn’t even have to pay for my beer. I rest my case.
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