I got why Ash didn’t exactly chase me to join a band with him when we first met. I met Ash when I was seventeen, at a show. He was a year older than me, already finished school, already playing in a bar band and already way fucking cooler than me. That kid was fucking born cool.
I so fucking wasn’t.
I’d gotten into playing drums at fourteen, and by the time I was seventeen, I was pretty fucking good. Not great, but good, and I was starting to play in garage bands around town. At that point, I would’ve killed to be in a band with Ashley Player.
But as the years passed, the opportunity just never presented. Ash was always in some other band, always hanging down in L.A.. He’d always seemed so determined to make it big.
We had that in common. But what did he need with some geek like me?
Fortunately for me, I didn’t stay a geek.
I got better on drums.
I got better looking, too.
Inevitable, maybe. I grew up. Became a man, and a solid musician.
When I was twenty, a local bassist and a friend of mine, Andy Cooper, told me he was putting together a band with a guitarist named Eric Janner, and I auditioned for them.
The audition went well, and they told me I was in the band.
Sweet, right?
Not for long…
Because then they discovered Ash. I mean, they already knew who he was, but I made the mistake of introducing them to him when we ran into him at a party. We needed a lead singer, and I figured if we could recruit Ash to our band, we’d have it made.
And once they’d checked Ash out, Coop and Janner definitely wanted him.
For a moment in time, I actually thought I was finally gonna get to be in a band with Ashley Player.
But then Ash told Coop and Janner that he had a drummer. This guy named Pepper, down in L.A.. They were in another band together, but they were both willing to jump ship to join our thing.
As long as I wasn’t part of it.
It wasn’t that Ash didn’t like me. I was pretty sure he did. And not that I wasn’t a good enough drummer by then, but Pepper was one of his best friends. And as Coop and Janner explained to me when they sat me down and basically let me go, Ash and Pepper were a package deal. Ash had made that much clear to them. No Pepper, no Ash.
And by that point, they had to have Ash.
Therefore, I was out. On my ass.
Pepper was in.
And the worst part about it all, for me, wasn’t the rejection. Although that fucking sucked. The worst part was, once I’d heard him play, I knew I was a better drummer than Pepper was. And I was pretty fucking sure they all knew it, too.
They still chose him over me.
The four of them formed the Penny Pushers, and they went on to cut three albums over almost a decade together as a band. They toured heavily—and a lot of that touring, they opened for Dirty. They got pretty big, thanks to Dirty kinda taking them under their wing and bringing them on tour.
After the Pushers passed me over, I went on to play in another local band. And in the long run, it turned out for the best. Because after that, things really took off for me.
Maybe it was the burn of being tossed aside like that, missing that chance. But it just drove me to be better, push harder.
Over the next few years, I got crazy fucking good on the drums. For the first time in my life, I had other bands coming to me, trying to poach me from my band, telling meYou’re too good for these guys, come play with us.
I also got seriously into working out. I got into tattoos.
And I got plenty of fangirls.