Behind the Kit: Told Slant at Sundown Bar

Selling Out Sundownstairs

Almost every drum teacher I’ve studied with told me to record myself playing and watch back with close attention. Now that I own a discreet and better-than-decent camera, I’ve started taking their advice. I’ve built a small library of footage from behind the kit at my shows. Now, I’d like to share some of these recorded sets (along with my commentary & memories of the gig), with you, my paying subscribers. If you aren’t a paying subscriber, sorry, you’ll have to catch me live and in person instead.

Told Slant, Live at Sundown Bar in Queens, NY (11/8/2023)

Back in October while I was finishing up a session at my practice space in Gowanus I received a text from Felix Walworth asking whether I wanted to play drums for a one-off Told Slant show at Sundown Bar in early November. Despite already being booked for two other gigs within the same seven day span, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. This was a call that I had hoped to get for years. There was no chance of my turning it down.

I’ve known Felix for about as long as I’ve known anyone in the New York City music scene. Back in high school our bands would play shows together all the time, sometimes as friends, sometimes as rivals. However, because we were both drummers, the two us never ended up in the same band together even as the rest of the scene re-arranged itself every few years. As the only two drummers anyone knew (joke) we fostered an instrumentalist’s solidarity, talking shop and sharing tips back stage or in the loud hours after a show. These conversations were fascinating because the two of us could not have approached the kit from more divergent perspectives. I was all cold technicality, on my way to music school in Chicago with a booklet of Dream Theater and Porcupine Tree CDs under my arm. Felix, on the other hand, played with a punk’s cultivated simplicity, sacrificing sound technique for sound itself. Despite these differences in style, or maybe because we were so unalike on the kit, we always respected each other’s playing and expressed an interest in somehow working together down the road.

For a brief two-week stretch in 2011 we made it happen. Oliver asked me to fill in for a Bellows tour down to Tennessee and back after half the band dropped out from other obligations. Felix, the band’s usual drummer at the time, switched over to bass, and the three of us packed into Oliver’s Toyota Camry and hit the road. For more on the ups and downs of this two-week tour, you can read DU#37. Or, if you’d like to hear about the downs exclusively, you can listen to the Lamniformes song “Deep Despair In Covington, KY”.

I wasn’t the only one who left the tour inspired. The day after we got back home Felix jumped straight into the recording sessions that produced the first Told Slant album, Still Water. It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say that Felix stepped out from behind the kit in Told Slant. Instead, in order to perform their songs live Felix dragged their drum kit to the front of the stage with them. For years the idea of anyone but Felix playing their idiosyncratic standing kit in Told Slant would have been heretical. The standing kit is part of the whole deal! So even when I moved back to New York and started playing in bands like Bellows and Gabby’s World more regularly, I never saw a Told Slant set in the cards. Besides, Told Slant shows had become increasingly sparse over the years while Felix was busy with Florist and Tomberlin, and were typically solo affairs on guitar. Well, things change.

Once I signed on for the show, I had a month to close the gap between my style and Felix’s. Luckily, learning their parts for Bellows gave me some insight into their habits. Plus, I had years of conversations about drumming to draw on. But just to be sure that I’d be ready in time, I readjusted my Drumming Upstream practice schedule to feature more songs with looser, rootsy drumming. Finally, I had a list of potential songs for the set that I could drill until we could meet in person. Most bands that I play in practice weekly, but for this gig we carved out a short run of rehearsals in the week ahead of the show. As much I like the low-stress social ritual of a weekly practice, these “tech week” runs have started to look more appealing in recent years. The pressure keeps everyone focused.

In this case “everyone” meant Oliver (Bellows) on guitar and Hanna (H.pruz, Sister, GUNK) on bass in addition to Felix and I. Instead of their usual standing kit setup, Felix decided to play electric guitar, a first for them in this band. The sense I got was that our aim was to add a little old school rock and roll edge to the Told Slant sound. Felix’s instructions once we assembled were “everyone should have fun and listen to me”. Told Slant songs aren’t difficult, but they are particular. Instead of playing the tunes top to bottom and then starting from the top again, Felix would have us loop specific sections of songs so that we could find the right feel as fast as possible. We must have played the groove to one new song, “Manhattan”, for nearly 15 minutes straight. While playing Felix would give us instructions on the mic so that we could adjust in real time. We listened, and we did have fun.

We had even more fun at the gig.