The musical connection had been there from the very start. At the conclusion of our first jam session, Duff called around the city to find an available recording studio. A new online music store had approached him to contribute a song to their catalog. The rock had gone so well that we went the next day into !Avast! Studio. Plus, I would be leaving on tour two days later for the rest of the month

Almost as soon as we got all our gear loaded in and began the process of "getting tones," Dave Dederer from the Presidents of the United States of America showed up at the studio. He and Duff had been doing a little acoustic project called The Gentlemen. When Duff moved back to Seattle Dave had also been instrumental in getting him into the Seattle University undergrad business program without having to bother with a bunch of silly pre requisites. Instead, he had Duff simply write a few essays regarding his experience running his own little business - that at one time had been the biggest band in the world.  

When I left the studio at the end of the day the bass and drums were finished, and Dave had started helping with some guitar ideas. In the two days we had been hanging out, Duff had filled Nick and I in on what he had working.  He and Mark Lanegan, Ben Shepherd, and Mike Johnson had been trying to put something together. It had borne so little fruit that Mark had finally up and moved to Los Angeles. Now Duff wanted to bang some of his ideas into songs and have Mark sing over them. We told him we were in. It sounded like a great time. He said we would put out a record and be on a bus tour before we knew it. He said the South Americans had been frothing to have him come down for the past few years and that would be a REAL moneymaker.  As a side project to my day job that was the New American Shame, it sounded too good to be true.

Over the next few weeks while I was on tour with NAS, Duff kept me abreast on Mark's availability and motivation level towards our little project. The Screaming Trees were perhaps going to make a last ditch effort to secure some kind of new record deal, and Queens of the Stone Age had been working on their second record and Mark had been putting some of his stink on that as well. It was hit or miss as to whether he would have time to commit to Duff's little thing. Back and forth it went. The day of the last show of my tour, Duff let me know Mark wasn't going to have time to do the thing with us.

I told him if he wanted to get together anyway that I was still game. And that's what we did.

Over the next week, there was a lot of talk of singers we could work with. Duff would say this guy or that guy would TOTALLY be willing to do it. None of the names made me any MORE excited to come down to the practice space and thrash ideas into submission. I really enjoyed playing the way we played - getting the work done. I was enjoying exactly what we were doing and I honestly wasn't in a huge hurry to bring in a singer that I may or may not have enjoyed working with. Duff was turning out to be a pretty amazing guy. As far as meeting your heroes (which can EASILY be like eating your own turd), he really seemed to be a decent person. As for Nick, he seemed to be the nicest guy you could imagine - great fun to be around, funny as hell, and an AMAZING bass player. I was happy.

Nick had been in a band called Bam Bam. My band, Sledge, had played with them the first time we booked a Tuesday night at the Vogue. They were kind of a big deal. He was a monster, monster-bass player. Later in Bam Bam's timeline, they became an instrumental band. They would play sick and twisted riffs that seemed to forever turn in on themselves until you were sure up was down. Then they'd resolve, leaving you washed up on the shore in the exact place you'd started. They were really amazing musicians. In the early to mid-nineties, Nick had gone on to form a band called The Chauffeur with his then wife.  We shared bills at The Colour Box, in any number of bands I would show up in. Nick was the first guy I knew to buy a house. It was in West Seattle and was the beginning of the West Seattle crew as I know it today. Nick and I had always talked about doing something together, but it had never materialized. When Duff asked if I knew any bass players (he wanted to play guitar to get his ideas across) I knew exactly who to call.

Still, Duff was constantly talking about U.S. bus tours and South America and Japan... I loved hearing about it. It wasn't like I was going to mind if those things happened, either. It was just exciting. 

Then one day, a few weeks later as it happened, the on-again off-again Mr. Lanegan fully committed. He was in. Period.

The first night at Duff's house in the hills consisted of Grandpa McKagan turning in to read and crash at the ripe hour of 8:30 p.m. Nick and I took that as our cue to commence making a dent in the half gallon of rum we'd acquired. Nick, Mark and I spent the next four or five hours talking shit, cracking jokes and generally kicking back. The further into the drink Nick and I got the funnier we became. At one point I was up in Marks face pleading with him to sing me '"Dollar Bill." He thought it was hilarious and commented how amazed he was by what fun drunks we were. The night progressed in this fashion until the bottle was empty. It remains one of my all time favorite stretches of hang time.

For the next week, we would wake-up and Duff would already be on his second workout of the day. We'd have coffee and head down to Mates Rehearsal facility. A guy named Bobby owns Mates and told the story on several occasions during the week of how in the early 90's G ‘n' R had basically kept him from going out of business by booking out the largest of his three rooms for months at a time. He would be forever indebted to Duff and the guys, and it's been a very rare occasion over the last ten years that I've had a rehearsal with Duff in Los Angeles that didn't take place at Mates.

We had all sorts of people come by to play with us. We were in the market for another guitar player. A lead player. Yogi, then in Buck Cherry, played with us. Brett Netson, from an Idaho band called Caustic Resin (the main cited influence for the band Built to Spill), and who went on to play in Modest Mouse before ending up where he belonged as a member of Built to Spill, played with us too. Even the guitar player from Junkyard came down.

Every time a new person came in the room, before playing any of our real songs, we would embark on a soaring and seething open jam. We'd just go wherever it took us. Sometimes we'd play for 15 or 20 minutes straight. Thundering volumes down to barely a trickle of presence, and back. We were a swollen river thrashing though a jungle and then suddenly, silent and sighing over a cliff with just the mist of my hi-hat to keep time from dispersing all together. Sometimes at these whispering crescendos, I would start building the rhythm and volume slowly back to a churn. From there I would listen for the slightest variance in one person's accents and pounce on it, fostering a whole new path through the rock forest. Other times, I would just let the mist float away. Evaporate. What had been, suddenly dissolving into a mutual non-verbal recognition of it ceasing to be.

I felt, at times, like I was driving around a fucking 747 that had the response of a 911. Everyone always had their ears on. When I would crank the wheel and stand on the pedal the tires would catch immediately. The musical horsepower was startling, and often I'd be playing for minutes at a time covered in goose bumps.

The playing we did with Yogi was truly impressive. He was a studied rock musician and could perform in the free jam realm like few are able to. But the journeys we took with Brett were simply filthy. There was a grit to his playing. There was nowhere he was afraid to go. He was the perfect balance, tonally enhancing what was going on around him while disregarding its tether to his melodic reshaping of it all. His playing left an imprint on me that remains to this day.

A couple days after Brett had come to play, Mark, Nick and I were doing our evening ritual of making fun of all things on MTV while Nick and I blew off steam with a few adult beverages. The talk came around to Brett. He had been a friend of Mark's for many years, which was how he ended up among us. I asked Mark what Brett thought of the jams we had thrown down. He said, "We were talking about it. He said to me 'I think Geoff is the best drummer I've ever played with'."

Then Mark said to me, "I told him I thought the same thing."

It was the greatest compliment I've had in my professional career.

The trip came to an end. Mark drove us to the airport, this time in Duff's BMW. Again, there were hugs all around. It had been a hilarious good time filled with some great jams and NO singing. We hadn't found a lead guitarist, but we had a band. It was all good.

Until the day after we got home. That's when Duff mysteriously stopped returning Nick's phone calls.