COTTONWOOD – The Drummers’ View
-By Craig Gregersen
WOW! What a Ride! It’s fun to look back at one of the Best and Longest Running periods of my Rock and Roll Drumming Career. I had the privilege of playing with some of the Best Musicians around during the decade of COTTONWOOD. It’s a shame that our music was never laid down in a Professional Recording Studio setting. Most of what we do have today was recorded by a small, cheap Cassette Recorder at LIVE performances. And those cassette taped performances have not stood the test of time very well. They are still listenable, but tend to drop in and out as they didn’t preserve well. The best recordings we have were done in a make-shift studio in our Practice Room on a 4-track Reel to Reel. The Original Reel to Reel tapes are long gone, though I do have a copy on Cassette Tape (of course). Many of those recordings are what is available to download from this site. Lots of deterioration is present, but still fun to reminisce to.
As previously noted on the Home Page, I have seen alot of musicians come and go during the10 year run of COTTONWOOD. You might say that COTTONWOOD was a Rock and Roll Employment Agency of sorts… Each new member brought a little something extra into the band to help shape and hone us in our craft. One of the things we prided ourselves with, was to have good, strong vocals and harmonies to compliment the music we played. We took on songs that alot of other bands wouldn’t dare to even try, because of the difficulty to sing. Songs by groups such as, BOSTON, FOREIGNER, GRAND FUNK RAILROAD, KANSAS, CHICAGO, DEEP PURPLE, QUEEN, JOURNEY, DEF LEPPARD, AEROSMITH and many others, were regularly a part of our ever expanding repertoire.
Being a drummer in such a versatile band is a DRUMMERS’ DREAM! My tastes in groups are all over the map. And I enjoyed the fact that I could present my newest favorite songs at rehearsals, and quite often those songs (regardless of difficulty) ended up as part of our arsenal! I’ve known alot of other guys in different bands who would’ve loved to be able to do that. Not everything we tried worked…There were songs that we attempted that just didn’t fly, and we quickly would abandon them.
One of my all time favorites was an Original Song by Dan. It was written as a spoof on every corny country song ever written. It was titled, “Don’t Drop No Mustard On My Clean White Shirt Baby”. We called it “The Mustard Song” for short. The funny part about it was that when we would play it at a club as a joke, it would pack the floor with all those folks who liked both kinds of music… Country & Western! They just ate it up. Which was further proof in our minds of how corny most of the country music in that era really was! Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find a recording of that one yet, though I believe that one does exist.
The experiences we had on the road were both fun and terrifying. I recall one time at Band Camp (Just Kidding), driving home from Jackson Hole, Wyoming after a gig. It was about 3:30am, and I was pulling a trailer full of equipment behind my van, while the rest of the guys were sleeping in the back of the van. I came around a narrow corner of this mountain pass that had about a 200-300 foot drop, and was confronted with huge rocks all over the road that had fallen from the cliffs above. It’s not easy to stop very fast when you’re pulling that much weight, let alone try to maneuver around a narrow pass covered with huge rocks. I did it…Of course all of the guys sleeping in the back of the van were now piled on top of each other at the front of the van and wanted to kill me! That is, until they looked out the window and saw what the problem was. We all managed to move a few of the rocks enough that we could manage to get the van and trailer through, and called the highway patrol when we got to the nearest town to report it. No cell phones in the 70’s!
Though rare, occasional mis-bookings were also an adventure unto themselves… I recall one particular event that our booking agency scheduled for us in Idaho Falls, ID during the Holiday Season. It was one of those occasions that reminds me of “The Blues Brothers” movie where they played at “Bob’s Country Bunker”, and the stage was enclosed with chicken wire, to keep the band from getting hit with flying beer bottles! The difference here was that we didn’t have the chicken wire to protect us! The company party that we (a ROCK band), had been booked for was a construction company full of Country Music enthusiasts! We knew right away that we were in trouble, so we played every country song we could fake our way through during our first set. The thought was that if they got drunk enough during that first set, then we could start playing our regular ROCK set for round two.
We started off the next set with what we deemed to be a relatively safe song. It was “Jet Airliner” by the Steve Miller Band. Dan was singing the song, and during the chorus, two beer bottles came flying from the audience at us… One hit Dan’s mic stand, broke and splashed beer all over him, and the other just barely missed his head and busted on my Bass-Tom drums and soaked me too. Without even thinking about it, Dan and I stopped playing, jumped off the stage and chased after the culprits. Of course, the cowards jumped into their truck and sped off by the time we got out there. It was then that we realized that there was still an entire room filled with their buddies that were not sympathetic to us either! OOPS! Somehow, nobody else tried to mess with us the rest of the night… though you could cut the tension in the room with a knife!
Then there was the time one morning that we stopped at a truck stop to gas up, and we all went into the men’s room, and were amused by a certain trucker who had comandeered one of the stalls. He very obviously had a severe case of Gastro-Diarrhea, and was carrying on a conversation with anybody who walked into the room, and would give them a play by play verbal update on each bowel movement and how it felt! We laughed for hours after that. What a kook!!!
Like I said, some good times and some scary times, but I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. The guys in the band were all like brothers to me, and we went through alot together. The only thing I regret is that we all eventually moved on with our lives and lost touch for many years. This has been a good forum to reconnect with the core members of COTTONWOOD again, and I would gladly welcome the opportunity to reunite for one more show! What do you say, GUYS?
