Into the Pit: On Musicals, the MTA, and Melville

Today is my day off. For the last week I’ve been honestly employed as a drummer in the pit for a high school production of Chicago. Tomorrow I start preparation and packing for the first Bellows tour of the year, which starts on Thursday. Somewhere in there I’m going to film the video portion of the next entry of Drumming Upstream. I’m not going to spoil what song I’m playing, but for reasons that I will describe in this letter and which will become doubly clear in due time I’m glad that my live theater chops are warmed up.

The commute to the school where I was hired to play show tunes with teens was a 90 minute ride from Brooklyn to the Bronx. For some perspective, I was 11 stops short of recreating The Warriors twice daily, excluding the murderous baseball players and rollerbladers. This means that I had a lot of time to read. Last we spoke I was 36% finished with Moby-Dick. Having only read while on the train for the last six days I now stand at 92%. I’m giving you such a needlessly precise mathematical figure in part to emulate the book’s tone of specificity and detail-orientation and to further demonstrate how long I was riding the A train.

The other thing I had time for was thinking.

I thought about a summer job I worked between semesters of music school that also sat at the end of long trip on the 1 train. I hated that job, even more than the one that I quit last year. I thought about the 1 train itself, how tight its aisle is compared to other trains and how that tightness, combined with the cross-section of the city that lies upon its route, makes it feel like a caricature of the MTA experience. Crossing the bridge over the tracks at the 168th street station I’d hear A$AP Rocky’s voice echoing out from a decade past: “anything is better than that 1 train!”

I thought about how long ago that Bronx job felt by the time I was a rookie music blogger writing about Long.Live.A$AP and how now both that job and that review feel like the same chunk of my life and an old chunk at that.

This was my first musical since moving back to New York. There was a stretch right before I moved where musical theater gigs and music criticism checks were enough to cover my expenses in Chicago and left me enough time to play in a legitimately killer version of the Lamniformes live band. Then I moved to New York and got stuck in an office job lmao.

I thought about how I got my first musical theater gig at a Bellows concert. During the brief window when the band was based in Chicago we played two shows where everyone was convinced that we sounded like mewithoutYou (we did not, and do not now sound anything like mewithoutYou, but you know what? Catch for Us the Foxes is a pretty cool album, so I don’t mind the comp). After the second show, in a basement in Wicker Park, a friend of mine from college asked me to play drums for a production Little Shop of Horrors just around the corner at the Den Theatre.

I like playing musicals. I’m not always a fan of the music, frequently not in all honesty, but I relish the challenge of pulling it off. Playing drums in a pit band requires rigidity and flexibility in equal measure. You have to follow the book as closely as you can because it is tied directly to the script and action of the play, but if an actor jumps a line or takes extra time getting to their mark then you’ll have to ignore the written word and follow their lead. Luckily the books themselves have a lot of contingencies for chaos built into them in the form of optional repeats. To balance these two poles of strict literalism and spontaneity the pit drummer must keep one eye focused on the present bar of music and another on the future, so as to prepare to abandon the present at a moment’s notice.

Unlike most of the rock music that I’ve played, which by way of its derivation from the dance floor still maintains a drum-centric orbit, the musicals that I’ve played in revolve entirely around their piano players, who typically double as the music directors. The pianist is the fulcrum between the actors and the band, who issues cues to both and translates the dramatic necessities of the action on stage to the musicians below it. As fine of a percussion instrument as the piano is, and to be certain pianists have far better time-keeping than your average guitarist¹ or god forbid your average singer, the tempo of a band oriented around the keys operates in a noticeably different way. Here again flexibility is key. Unlike the drums, an instrument of precise demarcations of time, the piano can glide from tempo to tempo freely without ever appearing to be internally inconsistent. I enjoy how much the task of ceding control to the piano forces me to invert my instincts, and I am certain that doing so has helped me be a more elastic player in other settings.

Riding above ground on the 1 I thought about how even to a born and raised New Yorker the Bronx retains a full throated New York-ness that I recognize less often in Brooklyn. I thought about Joaquin Phoenix dancing down a long flight of stairs in the Bronx in a scene from Joker that went viral a few years back. I thought about bonding over Bodega Boys jokes about New York with a music director in Chicago who then hired me for this mounting of Chicago in New York.

I thought about whales. How could I not while inhaling nearly 300 pages of Moby-Dick like so much krill? I thought about the blue whale model hanging suspended in air in the Natural History museum. I thought about an old episode of Nature featuring a CGI representation of a fight between a giant squid and a sperm whale that scared the absolute bejesus out of me as a kid.

I thought about Dark Souls. I tried not to think about how badly the Bulls are playing.

I recalled an old video of pianist Sam Abbott playing through all of Mastodon’s Leviathan on piano in a single take with no sheet music. I thought about how much time it must have taken him to learn all of that music and how many takes it must have, uh, taken to nail all of it in one go. Later I looked up the video again and was shocked to find it had less than a million views.

The back cover of my copy of Moby-Dick says that the book was under appreciated at its time and only much later became the classic we know it as today. I thought about how Melville must have felt after going that god damn hard on draft after draft only for the book to flop on impact. I wondered whether he, looking back at chapter after chapter describing the minutest details of the whaling profession, saw a lack of public interest coming and kept plugging away at the book anyway.

I found myself feeling weirdly proud of the folks at FromSoftware, who made Dark Souls a decade ago, for scoring such a huge hit with their latest game Elden Ring without budging from their commitment to making their games punishingly difficult and largely indifferent to their players.

In Dark Souls your in-game avatar barely qualifies as a character. They have no past, no personality to speak of. As you trundle through Lordran you end up wearing the armor and clothing of more notable figures in the world’s history. You are a pretender, an empty husk acting out the memory of better men all in service of a historical cycle that you have no real control over.

Moby-Dick is barely about its central narrator Ishmael. The real meat of the story revolves around Ahab’s quest to kill the whale that chomped off his leg, and about how the rest of the crew responds to his increasingly unhinged leadership. Once he reaches the Pequod² Ishmael gives the reigns of the plot over to his new superior officers, only interjecting to explain nautical terminology and to speculate baselessly about whale phrenology. Admittedly this is a vast “only” as these interjects happen quite frequently. But even these digressions only serve to highlight how little of Ishmael is actually apparent to us. Unlike the principle actors he is not a whaler, only a seafaring dilettante that splits to the ocean to escape the drudgery of land life. He isn’t even really Ishmael, he just asks that we call him that. At his core he is hardly anyone at all. He does not exist on the stage of the action, but just beneath it, always watching but never interfering, framing the story but not driving it.

Trundling myself and my cumbersome drum gear back to Brooklyn from Van Cortland Park on Saturday night I thought about my favorite scene from The Warriors. Our heroes, exhausted from their narrow escapes and hard fought battles against every gang they’ve run across on their homeward trek to Coney Island sit silently on a deserted train car. The train stops. The doors open and two teen couples in full prom regalia cavort onto the car and sit unwittingly across from the beaten and battered Warriors. With each glance across the aisle their jovial smiles and frivolous laughter fade in the face of the Warriors’ weary silence. The prom-goers could never, not in a million nights, imagine what the Warriors have gone through, how much sweeter their homecoming is by virtue of their struggle compared to the hollow pageantry of perfectly quaffed hair and rented tuxes.

Riding home from the 1 to the D to the F I passed reveling party-goers, maskless, careless and loud, as well as grimly mute workers in the midst of their commute whose eyes returned no gaze. What did either of them make of me, drenched in sweat and buried in my book? How did they reckon me, if they reckoned me at all? Who is that Ishmael that hovers at my surface to hide the greater depths of my thought? Oh! if only I could see him myself.

1. I say this, and yet the second tightest time I’ve ever played with was 90s singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins on acoustic guitar. That guy’s tempo is nailed straight to the bedrock. The single best time I’ve ever played with was with my friend bassist Jeff Smith who I did a pair of musicals with in Chicago. Jeff is one of those guys so damn good at his instrument that you’d have to go out of your way to sound bad playing with him. He plays bass in Psychoid who have a new album coming out on April 1st.

2. I haven’t stopped thinking about the Chicago deep dish pizza restaurant that shares the name Pequod with this much ballyhooed literary boat. For my money it’s the best deep dish spot in the city.