This is not a bio as such, it's more of a confessional/uber-mini memoir of my days with the band...
--TD
The thing about Rhythm Akimbo was that the band was always unabashedly about itself. It wasn’t about parties, or changing the world, it was just about going to this peculiar place together and bringing the audience with us (if they wanted to come; they usually seemed to). I was always kind of out of step with that when I was in the band. I was too serious, too old, in those days, to really appreciate what was happening. I thought the band should be saying something, creating music that would get played on the radio, and trying to get a record deal.*
But there was a pretty long stretch of time in the early 2000’s when it seemed like every third or fourth band sounded a little like Rhythm Akimbo to me. My wife, Bev, who was at the band’s first gig in the Sequoia dorm at Cal Poly, still notes this or that song that sounds like we did. Sometimes it’s the measure or two of odd time; sometimes it’s the snare, the guitars, the horns. What I didn’t get while I was in the band was that we might have been too far ahead. Now I think that the fault for this lies mainly in the musicality and innovation present in everything that KC brought to the band. KC always called the band’s achievements “charming.” We were playing music at a time Tom Petty would later sum up by saying that what was on the radio didn’t sound like it could be made by humans. Part of that was the utter lack of humor in those days. Most everything on the radio was cool to the extreme; U2 was becoming huge by being earnest to the extreme—the opposite of cool. But everyone was completely serious. No one seemed to be laughing at themselves or anything else. Rhythm Akimbo was laughing a lot, and I, missing the joke, wanted us to be serious as well.
From a certain perspective that sounds like one big fat “we should have made it,” I guess. It’s easy to say what if for any unsigned band. And there are a lot of excellent bands that never get signed for one reason or another; others are good and get signed and then dropped, even if they can play, even if they have a number one (anyone remember Nine Days?) Still, I think that if RA had figured out a way to keep together, or if everyone, including me, had even wanted to stick together, we might have made a noise more people heard.
I do think that if we were ahead it was because KC was ahead. He didn’t accept the regular view of what a band should be, even though he loved regular bands. Musically, and even more especially lyrically, KC was a pop cubist. The linear narrative did not seem to interest him except as a point of reference. If something was obvious he didn’t care about it. KC was the first person I ever heard use the word “MacIntosh” as a verb, back in the late eighties (it was in a song lyric.) He brought in material that went from breakfast cereal to personal nuclear devices in two verses. I’ve been in three bands that were all fairly ambitious in their own way, but RA was the only one wherein the “working up” phase of a song—I mean those transcendent minutes or hours when someone brought a new song to the band for arrangement and incarnation—actually did feel like a journey.
KC always downplayed his songs, he had to be sly about how to bring this or idea that in: he knew he was working with opinionated, highly stubborn people, and he had to let us think we were making things up more than we actually were. Usually what we were doing was just making the obvious response to the architectural framework he had set the band inside. But his songs always went from one place to another. There was no static in his work. I thought KC should basically be spending all his time writing Rubber Soul era Beatles songs—and he did write some of those—so I was alternatively impatient with what he brought and swept along by it.
Only now, looking back, do I see what a misfit I was in the band as someone in love with more traditional pop. After Rhythm Akimbo and I parted ways I spent months listening to Simon & Garfunkel and Bruce Springsteen—the American lyricists. I am not sure what I expected as an English Major in a group with a bunch of people who were really good at math. I thought songs should convey a narrative, or an overwhelming emotional sweep, and our songs never really aspired to that; they were too busy with string theory.
Not that they weren’t entertaining. But the rest of the band took a lot of music theory with KC and had no patience with the radio either. Rhythm Akimbo had a decent amount of musical muscle, certainly more than many rock bands out there then or now. Alec Little is pretty much the best bass player I’ve ever seen aside from Daryl Jones, and he should be famous—for his stellar, soul-filled playing and also the fact that he looks like a movie star. He didn’t mind playing nothing, a little, or Jaco Pastorius. Also he could do all those things and sing well too. He came up with great harmonies, simple harmonies, complex harmonies. He was tough, his bass playing was strong, ballsy, solid as his faded old P-bass, especially live. He sounded like a big, black, badass Englishman. He played fretless like a monster and I don’t think I ever heard him hit a wrong note on that thing. As KC’s oldest friend in the band he also seemed to me a kind of first mate or second in command, in one way or another; the role seemed right all the way around, and I began to miss it eventually.
Brad Zell joined just before the first album as I recall, basically as a lead guitar player and the guy who could sing really high, I thought—though later he wrote some songs that captivated everyone. Brad brought a surfiness to the band—he grew up in San Clemente—and an immediate appreciation for zaniness and musical complexity that fit KC’s aesthetic: I thought he added both charm and a certain location to the sound. Also he was really nice. I think Brad Zell was basically the nicest person in the band, except maybe for Chuck Mattox or the super-achieving Bradley Bennett. He didn’t mind chipping into the sound or chipping into the recording budget or chipping in to the personal emissions in the band room. He clearly had his own world happening, Zellworld, and somehow through Brad I began to see that the band, or a band, could essentially be made up of people whose personal orbits intersected at the necessary times, rather than having everyone living on the same planet.
I should say that from my standpoint, which was brazenly self-centered, I felt that the musical core of the band was the rhythm section—that is, me and Alec—and KC, who wrote everything, and who sang lead for most of the first album. My immature collegiate churlishness had as one source the apparent failure of other members to recognize the self-evidence of this fact. The NAME of the band was Rhythm Akimbo, dammit, and I was the one behind the gleaming black seven-piece TAMA drumset in black gloves and a suit vest, with a chrome samba whistle around my tanned neck. I used to get irritated when my drums weren’t up on risers, and in the next band I was in I stood up to play. Good God. Imagine what would have happened to me if we’d had a single.
Anyway, the band wouldn’t have been what it was—whatever it was—without the horns: the RA horns were an incredible source of mojo power and brought a level of musicality and joy to the material that no one else in town could touch—but, again, even though Jen Elson joined when we were all still in the dorms, my impression was that the horns, too, were essentially a voice that KC formed and re-formed by his writing. They could all solo with the authority of jazz players, they all studied theory like broke alcoholics studying liquor prices, and they all brought a communal can-do that made every part of the band’s work seem inevitable. As the band grew, though, I began to miss the bass/drums/guitar core of some of the earlier stuff, like KC’s beautifully absurd “Glad It’s Not Later Than That.” And as the crowds became larger and Rhythm Akimbo’s life became more complex and absorbing on every level, I felt the band begin to drift, ironically, from what it might have been best at, from what might have made it a singular force.
Of course I was also impatient with the length of time it took to figure out the horn parts, and made jealous, as well, by the musical code everyone spoke but me. I did adore the feeling of sitting behind—and helping propel—the gorgeous storm of sound that came off the stage when everyone was going full on, a fury of electricity and brassy air and drums that we never really came close to capturing on tape. I suppose I wanted to find some magical midpoint between that and KC’s brilliant rhythm guitar parts, a place we seemed to shoot past from time to time, and one I wanted the band to occupy permanently.
I admit that I felt a loss when Robynn Ragland joined as the lead and de-facto singer, around the time of the band’s second studio recording at Rick’s Honeyhut in Atascadero: we’d had one or two other singers before and gone back to KC, but neither of them could really sing. Robynn could sing anything, so I knew she would stay on. She sounded great, but—and nothing against Robynn, who has now shared the stage with the likes of Tom Petty himself, and Fleetwood Mac, among others—I always thought KC’s voice simply fit the music he wrote better than anyone else’s. When Robynn joined I felt the band lost a certain authenticity. I think we did some great stuff with her as the singer, and the palate opened up considerably: I thought it opened up too far. There’s always a delicate balance between limitations that deepen creative output and saying yes to an entire new direction, and my gut from the very beginning was that more limitation would have served the band far better. Fatally, at the time I was also trying to advocate for the pop songs I thought we needed; in the end, perhaps that perfect balance would have been the one we couldn’t reach. I had tried several times to tell KC that he was a better singer than he knew, that his voice was original and great, but I sensed that he didn’t agree, and that some part of him wanted to not be the front man as well.
To the end, I felt that the missing piece was a real, fully committed producer, someone who could see the obvious wonder of what had been created and help to set its foundation more firmly in place: help steady my sometimes shaky time, work to simplify the sometimes overly busy rhythm parts, help define the vocal sound of the band, give the untrained listener the occasional point of entry, make sure that we were heard in the right places and at the right times—and most of all, on occasion tell us no. I suppose the achievement of some of those things would have lessened the charm KC loved, and at the time I wanted us to get closer to that glittering absence of humanity that marked the music of the time because it WAS the music of the time, and the band so obviously had something grand and powerful and beyond the sum of its parts. Still, even aside from whatever personal dynamics went on in the band (I never knew about the deeper ones until after they’d transpired, it seemed), a producer, even a young, green-but-talented one, could have changed quite a lot for us, I thought.
The band was ambitious musically, wildly ambitious; no idea was too far out to try. I remember an early rehearsal in some engineering room on campus where we had to write out the song map on a chalkboard because no one could remember its order. But in terms of selling records and promotion, the band seemed to have little ambition at all. I seem to remember being in charge of the booking for a week or two, or at least a show or two, which is ridiculous in and of itself. The idea of actually moving somewhere all together never really came into focus while I was around (even though some of us shared a house for a while). Yet what band had ever made it out of San Luis Obispo? The only act anyone knew of at that time who had was Weird Al Yankovic. I don’t know if the ambition was there and buried, or whether the whole thing was viewed by everyone else as a grand but finite experiment. Some of the best bands are desperate, of course. Maybe RA wasn’t desperate enough.
As a drummer, easily one of the best performances of my life was at a Rhythm Akimbo show. Hardly anyone was there aside from the band, which was odd at least in memory because most of our shows after a certain point had lines stretching around the block. It was at DK’s, just a regular show, and all I remember is that I played far better than I knew I could play. Everything I played was exactly what I meant, it came out exactly right. I didn’t think about it much then. But I don’t remember getting to that place again.
*Once on a family trip to New York I brought a tape of our first album to Phil Ramone’s office. There were three or four beautiful 30 year old women sitting around this office, which in my memory at least had a huge jukebox in it and a lot of gold and platinum records on display, along with photographs of Mr. Ramone having dinner with Billy Joel in various Italian restaurants. I guess I was about 19 or 20. I thought of Phil Ramone because RA songs had a certain orchestral quality to them, in terms of their construction and musical scope. Well, these ladies looked at me with unconcealed amusement and fascination as I declared my intent. I didn't get in to see the man, but they took the tape. A month later or so I received a letter in San Luis saying that Rhythm Akimbo “wasn’t right for Phil,” but that we should keep on trying. I’m not sure we sent out any demos to anyone else while I was in the band.
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