It was one of the weirdest circumstances I had ever been in for a first time jamming with a band. It was the evening of Wednesday June 26th, 1996. I was running through songs with some guys in a crummy old place called The Crowland Hotel in Welland, Ontario. The singer, Dave, was remodeling the hotel and it was closed and undergoing renovations.
His vision was to have it set up and open in a few months. He wanted a house band to play in the lounge on the ground floor two-three nights a week. Sometimes, he said he was going to bring in a featured act. I had been practicing songs from their set list all that morning and afternoon in my garage at home. Now my drums were set up on a stage in this nearly dilapidated hotel.
Dave had assembled some heavy hitters to see his vision through. Jerry played bass, was a good singer and was great at backup vocals. He had been in so many bands in the Niagara Region he had lost count. When I had first met him in the late eighties he was playing in a band called Flash. I was talking to him about recording my band Sweet F.A. as we had some originals I wanted to get down.
I watched Flash play in a bar in Port Colborne one night. It wasn’t very long after that when Jerry had called me and wanted me to play drums for Flash. That worked for a little while, but the guitarist Chris was kind of a dick. Jerry and Chris would squabble quite a bit when we were trying to practice. Who needed that? Anyways, I really wanted to make something happen with my own band, the aforementioned Sweet F.A.
Ronnie was a local legend in Welland. He was known as Rockin Ronnie and had played in bands like Triax, who had been finalists in Q97.3’s Rock to Riches contest with their song you are the one in the 80’s. He would later go on to front the band Homemade Jam and they would do well and play blues all over the Niagara Region for a few years. Man could that guy ever wail on the guitar.
There is a folk singer named Joan Baez who wrote a song called diamonds and rust about her relationship with, and her breakup from Bob Dylan. Legend has it that she only allowed two guitar players permission to rerecord the song. One was Glen Tipton of Judas Priest who released a version of it on their 1977 album Sin after Sin. The other guitarist she gave permission to record the song was Ronnie.
Ronnie would sip beer after beer and smoke cigarette after cigarette while he played and the music would just flow out of him. It was almost like he was channeling his solos from somewhere. His stories were hilarious and epic. I couldn’t believe I was jamming with him. I had a drum mentor in high school when I was starting out. I bought my first drum set off of him. (Maybe I should write about him some day) He had played in Triax with Ronnie for a while. Ronnie had some cool stories about my friend. He talked about everyone glowingly and with respect. I never heard him say a bad word about a soul.
Dave was really driving home the fact that he wanted us to play the song Buddy Holly by the band Weezer. Jerry wanted us to play the song name by Goo Goo Dolls, a song which he assured us that the women who came out to watch us would love. We were just about ready to do one last run through of our songs but we didn’t know where Ronnie was.
I thought I’d seen him go into the bathroom so I went into the dingy lavatory. He was standing at the urinal, beer in one hand, his dick in the other, his head resting against the wall asleep. “RONNIE!” I bellowed sharply, “let’s go boss!” He was awake in an instant and ready to play. We worked our way through some of the songs. The rest we figured, we’d make up as we went along.
The next night was Thursday and we played a set of about eight songs at a bar called Stages in Port Colborne, Ontario. The bar used to be a Jumbo Video. (an old video rental store) It didn’t have a bar vibe to it. It was what it was, it had a pretty big stage in it along the back wall, it was cool. I played the drums on a house kit. I hated house kits. We got through it though. I met and talked to a few cool people that night sitting at a table drinking a few beers. I watched a few other bands work through their sets.
The night after that was a Friday. I’d really love to be able to tell you I remembered the name of the bar we played at. It was at 179 King street, in Welland. It is an Indian Bistro now. I remember standing outside on the sidewalk with Jerry on the sidewalk before we played our first set, smoking a cigarette. I scored a small baggie of weed off of a guy who was walking by. I rolled and smoked myself a joint. My friend Rob and a friend of his, and my friends Dave and Chrissy came out to see us play. I had to say “Hello” and thank them for coming out.
The bar was a pretty divey, run down place. I remember Chrissy saying she saw an old man punch another old man in the face. She said the guy didn’t do anything and didn’t deserve to get hit. I walked over to the bar to see if the aggressor would start anything with me. Nope. Before long we got to playing our first set.
One memory I have on this night was during our second set, a rough and haggard looking guy walked almost up to the stage “COCAINE” he said loudly. Then he said it again, “COCAINE.” I swung my boom mic stand around so that the mic was in front of my face and spoke into it “Yeah, sure man, Cream, Eric Clapton, Cocaine, we can play that for you.” No sooner had I finished speaking than the man yelled “NO MAN! DO YOU GOT ANY?” We were definitely in Welland.
After we played our Goo Goo Dolls song Jerry called up a pretty trashy looking, and acting woman that he knew. She was a braless wonder who stuck her chest out proudly and he poured a bottle of water over it. Just like that we had our own impromptu wet T-shirt contest going on. None of the other women in the bar wanted to come up to have their turn though, so we got back to playing music.
I went outside to smoke a joint and have a cigarette after we were done playing for the night. I stood in the parking lot staring up at our name on the marquee on the side of the bar, Zig Zag. Two kids that were passing by tried to bum a cigarette off of me and I gave them a handful of smokes but said they were going to earn them. I said they had to help me load my drums into Dave’s van. These obviously underaged kids looked thrilled to get to go inside of an actual bar.
That’s when I noticed that Rob was gone. So was something else. I guess Rob was looking out for me. I had left my black denim jacket on a cymbal stand when I went outside. I guess he didn’t think that was very safe. He would tell me later he thought someone might steal it. So, he picked it up. He took it to his car with him and he drove home with it. All I knew was that my jacket, my weed, my car keys - were gone.
Later that night, after we got back to the hotel, I’d unloaded my drums from the van. Dave and I got into a loud argument with me demanding he cough up the money he’d promised to pay me. I slept on the floor of the crappy Crowland Hotel. It didn’t even have a phone.
The next morning I found a phone in a nearby store they let me use and called collect and arranged to have a friend pick up my spare set of keys from my house and bring them up to me in Welland. I had to give my friend gas money and money for the phone call. Then I got my drums packed up into my car and headed home. I made it back to Fort Erie just in time to get to work.
Sometime the next week I had to have minor surgery on the index finger on my left hand. I’d needed to have it done for a while. Every time I hit the snare drum I had pain shooting through my finger, in my hand and up my wrist and arm. When they were done fixing me up I had stitches in my finger and I wasn’t supposed to play the drums for a few weeks.
There was a music store up the street a block or two from my house. The day after I had my procedure done, my five and a half year old son and I went to the music store and bought harmonicas. We spent the day trying to learn how to play them. I had to go back later that day and buy another one as I had blown the reeds out of mine.
I took about two weeks off of drumming and came to find out that Ronnie and Jerry had moved on to other things. Part of their reasoning was that they found it too difficult to get Dave to pay them what he had promised to pay them. I decided to move on too. I would never play with Ronnie again, but counted myself as fortunate for having the opportunity to have gotten to. Sadly, Ronnie passed away in June, 2023.
