My former bandmates in Flaming Tusk are busy recreating an audience-friendly version of what happened, which is fine for them, I guess, but I'd rather my friends know what actually happened, and since they're flung to the winds, Internet will have to do. This is the account as I remember it. My memory isn't perfect - dates may be fuzzy and dialogue couldn't possibly be precisely verbatim - but I've done my best to represent everything (and everyone) honestly.
I wrote this really fast, I didn't proofread a thing, and I used a text editor with no spellcheck, so please excuse any blemishes. It's pretty long, but hopefully worth reading.
First, a small bit of background, for those of you who've never met these people. FT was founded by five members:
1) Me
2) Zach, the drummer. 23 then, 25 now. Raised in wealth, went to private school. I've known Zach since he was 16 - we frequented some of the same Internet communities. He's always had a reputation: very intelligent and well-studied, but thorny at best, pretentious ass at worst. Repairs Macs for a living.
3) Keith - rhythm guitar. My age (low 30s) and a fellow Masshole. Went to NYU, worked as a video editor, now a camera tech. Diplomatic to the point of never expressing an opinion. Hates conflict. Generally laid-back. I've known Keith almost as long as I've known Zach.
4) Andy - bass. Late 20s, has been working as a temp for the last seven-ish years, extremely quiet, also hates conflict. Grew up in Ohio to middle-class parents.
5) Chris - vocals. Has known Zach since they were in summer camp together. Son of a prominent writer and a defense attorney, so, you know, mega, mega money. Wears the metalhead thing on his sleeve - septum ring, tons of tattoos, black combat boots, jacket with tons of patches - though he only settled on "metalhead" after doing the same thing for "raver" and "hippie." Hey, we all have to find ourselves, I guess.
For the first year and a half of FT's existence, everything functioned very smoothly. We started with two songs Zach had been writing in the years before the band started (My Red Sun and 26 Legions), and practiced them incessantly. Meanwhile, I was learning to play metal guitar, and started writing songs at a rapid clip. We were never without new material for long; we'd be practicing a new song while I wrote the next one.
We started playing shows. I've always loved playing shows (anyone who saw me as Don Red or in OUCH/The Thungs/The Crust can attest); these were difficult, given the level of musicianship demanded by the songs, and we had some off nights, but on the whole, there was a lot of improvement.
Working with Zach, though, was a challenge at the best of times. He considered himself a scholar, and once he started listening to metal, he applied the same dispassionate rigor to studying the musical landscape as he had to, say, learning Latin or studying denim. He'd even written a long discourse on metal taxonomy (that he refused to share with anyone, because it was never "done"), breaking down the various genres and subgenres and tracing their history. In Flaming Tusk, we established the following roles: I would write the songs, and Zach would tell me which of my parts weren't good enough, in no uncertain terms.
When this worked, it worked well. A couple of the songs were greatly improved by Zach's criticism. At worst, though, I had to defend parts that I knew were perfectly fine, and constantly. Like, every single practice. The reason: Zach is hypoglycemic. If he hasn't eaten, he becomes a raging asshole. He only divulged the condition after we'd been in the band for over a year. (In the months to come, I would start bringing Clif Bars and muffins to practice, in case Zach started getting bitchy.)
Which led to exchanges like this, which happened during work on "No Smiles":
Zach: "That part is stupid."
Me, gritting teeth: "Okay, well, how? What don't you like about it?"
Zach, shrugging: "I just think it's fucking stupid, you know?"
Me: "Why don't we take a break."
Zach: "Is it just me? Isn't that part just really fucking stupid?"
That may seem hard to believe, but trust me, it happened. At that point it wasn't surprising to anyone in the band, since this was a natural extension of our creative process to date.
I tried to keep a level head, since the important thing was that the work get done, and the songs come out as I'd heard them in my head. If I had to swallow a bit of abuse, so be it. I do it all the time at my paying job - it's called "management."
Like in the conversation above - we took a break, and I tried to talk some sense into Zach:
Me: "Listen, I understand we need to make changes to some of this stuff, but when you talk about it that way..."
Zach: "What way?"
Me: "When you say the part is 'fucking stupid.' When you use language like that it's unproductive, and..."
Zach: "I'm not unproductive! YOU'RE unproductive!"
Again, hard to believe, but I swear this actually happened. This is an egregious example, but not unrepresentative of daily life in Flaming Tusk, and in fact it would repeat itself almost verbatim a few months later, during the recording of "Old Blackened Century." It had been a long day of recording, and we were almost ready to pack it in for the night, but we wanted to try a take of "Icy River." Chris and I had been talking about turning the lights down in the studio, since we were accustomed to playing in very low light. Chris raised that with Zach.
Chris: "Hey Zach, we were thinking about turning the lights down during Icy River."
Zach: "Well I think that's a really dumb idea. We're not here to fuck around."
Chris: "It wouldn't be fucking around. We just want to set the mood a little."
Zach: "That's really fucking stupid. I won't be able to see my drums. We're not here to waste time."
Me: "We wouldn't turn them off, just turn them down, like in practice."
Zach: "Well I think that's really fucking stupid."
[Chris and I exchange a knowing glance]
Zach: "Am I the only one who thinks that's fucking stupid? That I can't see my drums?"
Me: "Zach, calm down. Nobody's going to make it so you can't see your drums."
Zach: "Fuck off."
But we got the record done. We didn't work on new material for a while; I was a little burned out, and we had plenty else to do, between getting the record mastered, designing packaging, planning the record launch, etc. So things went a bit more smoothly.
A few notes before continuing. First of all, from the time we formed the band until the time we left, I wrote every song except one. I recorded, mixed and mastered the Abigail EP. When we made Old Blackened Century, I added to my duties - I learned the parts Keith played under the solos and recorded those as well, and more importantly, I was second engineer. Tom Beaujour, who engineered that record, quickly figured out that I knew about recording. Once he'd done a rough mix of a song, we'd go through together and make adjustments until they were up to my specs. After every 12-hour day of recording, I went home, listened to the mixes and made notes for the next day. It was a ton of work. Rewarding work, yes, but when you're putting in that level of effort, while your bandmates are reading magazines and seeing their girlfriends, your tolerance for abuse drops considerably.
Secondly - starting with the lead-up to recording OBC, and ending two weeks ago, Keith and Andy would privately express their sympathy for the amount of shit I was taking from Zach. They would never say anything publically, or talk to Zach directly; it just wasn't in their nature. But I knew, at least, that I wasn't crazy, or overstating things. In fact Andy came close to quitting the band over frustration with Zach. (I'm pretty sure no one has heard this story before, since it consisted of private emails between Andy and I.) Andy wasn't particularly in Zach's line of fire, but Zach is such a grating personality that Andy couldn't stand to be around him anymore. For a month, Andy and I conversed over email every day, and I gradually convinced him that the problems would work themselves out, and that the most important thing was to continue making music. This is deeply ironic in retrospect.
Anyway. We continued playing shows throughout the Spring of this year, while planning the production of physical CDs. I wrote a couple more songs. We started working on something Andy had written over the course of the previous six months. And I started to reach the end of my patience.
Andy had composed his song - which consisted of four unrelated parts in succession, with no repeats - on the computer, using a keyboard to enter notes, and then changing their pitches and duration manually, using the mouse. There was no consideration for how these parts would be played on the guitar, and Andy had never tried to actually play them on any instrument. The ensuing process was disastrous. We worked for weeks just to massage the parts into something playable. And when we did... well, they weren't good.
I talked to Zach, Chris and Keith privately about this. Everyone agreed that something had to be done. And in a theme that started with the band's founding and ran through to my leaving, I was the only one willing to talk publicly about it. So we began a very long discussion that pitted me against Andy, with the other members looking on, completely silent about the opinions they'd expressed in private. Letting me be the fall guy, so to speak. They didn't want to get involved.
Finally, Zach decided he'd write something that would bring the whole song together. And he did: three parts, each consisting of the same three chords. (A) the most common and overused chord progression in all of metal, and (B) the same chord progression as "Anathema." (That chord progression is E-F-Db, by the way.) As far as Zach was concerned, all the problems were solved, and he spared no occasion to remind me how great his one part was.
Meanwhile, the rest of the band was getting frustrated with Zach, since he refused to haul any of our gear anywhere. And Zach's shitty attitude during practice, the constant sniping, continued.
Finally, this summer, I realized that I was going home after every practice, burdened by the accumulated effort of keeping my mouth shut. After we'd finished playing I would leave *immediately*, since I knew if I stayed I'd end up saying something I regretted. And there were a few times I made snide remarks, or where my pointed silences were obvious. The atmosphere was becoming poisonous, because I was done putting up with any shit, was quickly growing tired of the smarm, the laziness, the prep-school entitlement and arrogance from Zach.
So I called a recess. I wanted to take some time off from Flaming Tusk, to figure out which problems were real and which were the natural consequence of working too hard for too long. We took a month off, starting in late July. During that month, I meditated on everything that had come before, separating the core problems that had been there since day one from the minor bullshit that is inherent in any band dynamic. I tried to isolate what I'd need to change in order for the band to continue. I came up with four things:
1) We were practicing too much
2) Andy's song didn't fit with Flaming Tusk
3) Zach needed to practice his timekeeping (more on this in a minute)
4) Zach needed to start treating me like grownups treat each other
Zach is not a good drummer. He suffers from the classic self-taught drummer's affliction: he likes to play really fast fills, but he can't play them in time. He's never practiced with a metronome, so his tempos are all over the place, and he can't switch parts without helplessly switching tempos. Almost every song I wrote for Flaming Tusk has a transition that I wrote to be in constant time but that Zach gradually mangled into two arbitrary tempos. We'd have to try to guess what tempo he was going to play a given part in; the result was that at the beginning of every part, Keith, Andy and I would be hunting for the tempo Zach had decided on. It did not sound good.
It was bad in practice, but it was even worse when we played shows. Take all the problems in practice, and add an arbitrary 20-30 beats per minute for each part, and the variation becomes downright disgusting. Metal is supposed to be at least marginally tight and we were a total mess.
Listen to the drums on "Old Blackened Century." They're pretty rushed and inconsistent, right? That's AFTER the engineer edited them to make them tighter.
As the recess came to an end, I talked to Andy and Keith about the problems as I saw them. They agreed wholeheartedly. Which was fine, and not surprising, since we'd been over these issues, time and again. But this time I wanted to fix things. I couldn't stay in a band where one member was causing so many grave problems and no one would say anything, for fear of confrontation. So I told Keith and Andy:
"If I'm going to talk to Zach about this stuff, I need you to back me up. If it sounds like this is just coming from me, it'll be easy for him to dismiss, and we won't get anywhere."
They pledged their support. I also made it clear that if we couldn't work this out, I'd be leaving the band, and taking the songs I'd written (aka the great majority of Flaming Tusk's music) along with me.
So the time came for our discussion. I laid it all out there: that I thought Zach needed to spend some time practicing with a metronome, first of all, but then about how unhappy I'd been, that I'd been leaving practice feeling angry, that I'd started acting like an asshole because of it. I used the direct-yet-respectful language I use in my job every day.
Andy said nothing throughout the entire conversation. Keith said a few vague words about working in film, and how everyone needs to get along. Chris told Zach how difficult it was to approach him. Zach remained silent, until Keith asked him directly to speak.
Zach: "I feel like I can't say anything, since this is about me, and I don't want to get into any kind of quid pro quo."
I told him that was laudable, but unless he could address these problems, we were at stalemate. So he told me that the problems were all on me, since I was difficult to work with.
I said that even when we disagreed, I was respectful, and that the same couldn't be said for him. That I wouldn't ever tell someone their ideas were "fucking stupid." That I know better than that. And that everyone we know has told him, at one point or another, he has the capacity to be rude, to be cruel, to fly off the handle - I'd seen it over ten years of running in the same circles as him - at what point did he start paying attention?
Nope, it was my problem.
I turned to Keith for some backup, for the support he'd pledged a week earlier. "I've talked to Keith about this, and Andy, and they agree that they way you act toward me is unacceptable."
Keith, with resentment: "I don't see why I need to be brought into this."
Andy didn't look up from his ipod, which he'd been fiddling with while we talked.
So I was on my own again - no support. And again had Zach saying the equivalent of "I'm not unproductive, YOU'RE unproductive!" I went to get some water. When I came back, Zach said:
"I feel like you're just looking to dominate this band."
"No, I just want you to stop treating me like an asshole."
I stood up and grabbed my bag, and gave my closing speech.
"I'd planned on leaving if all this was received the way I'd feared it would be. To give you guys a chance to talk. I've spoken to Andy, Keith and Chris about this, and now it's time for you guys to decide what to do. I think you know the score. The conversation isn't over - just my part of it. Let me know what you decide." And I left.
My hope was that without me present, Keith or Andy or Chris would finally own up to what they'd told me privately, time and again, over a period of years: that Zach was an awful brat, and his behavior was completely out of line. It was a long shot, but my last chance at remaining in the band. I wasn't going to work my ass off and get shat on in return. I could always find another band.
I didn't hear from anyone. The next day, around midday, I sent Keith an email, asking what they'd decided. They hadn't decided anything - they'd talked for a short while and come up with nothing. They wanted to know what I wanted.
"I thought it was pretty clear," I wrote. "I want Zach to stop treating me like an asshole, or I'm leaving the band. I'm fine with you guys continuing as Flaming Tusk, so long as you don't play my songs."
They conferred. Keith emailed me a couple hours later.
"Zach feels like any effort he makes won't be enough for you."
He hadn't made any effort at all, though. None. What was going on here? Was he that unaware of himself? Was he that incapable of admitting that he needed to do something differently? I knew he was arrogant, but seriously, that completely and obliviously arrogant?
So I made my exit. I then emailed Chris and Andy to say no hard feelings, and I'd gladly work with them in the future.
The next day I went to drop off some stickers and pick up my guitar. I talked to Keith.
"Zach said again that he thought you wanted to dominate the band."
"But that's horseshit!"
"Yeah, I told him as much. Since first of all, how could you have more control?"
"I just wanted him to treat me with respect. And this idea that it was some quid pro quo - you know that's not true. I have never treated anyone in this band the way Zach treated me."
"I know, I know."
Once again Keith agreed with me. Too bad he hadn't been able to do so the day before, in front of Zach, when it mattered.
As I walked home, I began to understand. Zach hadn't seen Flaming Tusk as a cooperative effort. He'd seen it as a power struggle. I'd been completely blind to that.
And suddenly, I realized why he couldn't make the slightest concession, not even a "sorry, I'll try to be a little nicer." He didn't want me to stay in the band. He couldn't stand that someone else was writing all the songs, that someone else had an idea of how metal should sound, and that it might be more than he was contributing. He wanted me out.
Then a darker thought: he'd already selected my replacement. If he hadn't actually talked to anyone, he'd certainly decided who he'd reach out to once he'd driven me out of the band.
A week later, Flaming Tusk made their public announcement: my slot would be filled by Zach's good friend Bernard, who he'd known since their private school days, who just so happened to already be in a hugely well-connected band called Liturgy, and who had major connections in the metal press.
I'm proud of the music I made with Flaming Tusk: all the songs I wrote, all the recording, all the arrangements and long hours spent hammering out the best shit I could. I'm proud of the response, the praise for the songwriting, the praise for my solos, the praise for my songwriting sense.
But above all, I'm proud that I'm not the kind of asshole who uses people and treats them like shit I'm proud not to be a person to stand idle when it happens. I'm proud that everything I have is something I earned myself. I'm proud that I went to public school, that my parents don't have several homes and country estates, and that they taught me to be decent, to work hard, to be honest.
In short, I'm proud that I made Flaming Tusk, and I'm proud that I left.
