by Pat Buzby

     There may be a few musicians like this where you live.  On the other hand, there aren't a lot of cities like Chicago, and there are equally few drummers like Paul Wertico.

     Since 1983, Paul has played with the Pat Metheny Group, whose unique blend of jazz and rock has earned lasting international success.  It's been a fun and rewarding gig with an unusual set of musical demands, which we discuss below.

     However, Paul has never abandoned his ties to the local music scene in Chicago.  While you may encounter the Metheny Group's music on VH-1 or the Grammy awards, or even on supermarket music systems or the Weather Channel, you're just as likely to find Paul in a small club around town playing the most radical brands of jazz.

     In the 80's, between Metheny projects, Paul did freelance work, taught drum lessons and worked with Earwax Control, an improvisational trio whose music was as bizarre as Metheny's was engaging.  More recently, as the gaps in Metheny Group activity have grown longer, Paul's personal projects have become increasingly visible.  He has produced and accompanied Kurt Elling, a Chicago singer who has risen to fame, and his piano-based Union Trio recently received an invitation to appear at the Kennedy Center in New York.

     The focus of our interview, though, was the Paul Wertico Trio and its new release, Don't Be Scared Anymore, released on August 15 on Premonition records.  The trio, featuring guitarist John Moulder and bassist Eric Hochberg, got its start with a European tour in 1994 which produced the smoking Live In Warsaw! CD.  Some may be surprised to find that the new CD owes as much to Stevie Ray Vaughan as John McLaughlin - it sounds like what Cream might be doing today if they'd stuck together and stayed true to their adventurous spirit.  But for those who know Paul, who mentioned Keith Jarrett and Ozzy Osbourne with equal enthusiasm during our conversation, it makes sense.

     Paul and I spoke on a summer afternoon at his home in the northern suburbs of Chicago, with the comings and goings of his wife and 4-year old daughter punctuating my visit.  For more information on Paul, visit www.paulwertico.com.

PB : Don't Be Scared Anymore - what is it that you're saying not to be scared about in that title?

PW : That's something my daughter said to me. We were just playing, and I said "Ooh, that's scary!" and she said "Daddy, don't be scared anymore." And I thought that would be a cool title, just because it's so positive and encouraging, and I find that, if you want to extend on that and apply it to the record...to me, a lot of music has been conservative lately. And so, I'm just saying, "Damn the torpedoes, let's play! Let's go for it. " And you can buy this record and not be afraid that it'll be a "drummer" record or anything like that. It's like, "Let's just start all over again and not worry about anything."

PB : If I saw the name "Paul Wertico Trio" before, I might have expected it to be an ECM or free-jazz type of record, but in fact a lot of the record is practically instrumental rock.

PW : Yes, my influences have been rock and jazz since I started listening to music. I didn't differentiate and say, "This is hipper than this." I just liked both musics. And in my drumming, I kind of put the two things together. I would play jazz with a sort of rock solidity and attitude, and then play rock with a jazz-like freedom. I didn't try to segregate the two musics. And so this record is a statement of how I've heard music forever.  It's also the first opportunity I've had to make a record like this, because usually on jazz recordings, you go in and you have a day or two to record, and you get what you get - it basically turns out to be a live record made in the studio. This time, though, I really produced it, even though I didn't have a label at the time. The budget would have been limited if it hadn't been for the fact that Mark Brunner, who is Shure Microphone's head advertising guy and a friend of mine, invited me to use his studio.

PB : Where was it done?

PW : It was a small studio in Skokie, Illinois called Reelsounds. We went in with the idea to just play and have fun, but then it turned out that we had to do everything at night because of Mark's work schedule during the day at Shure, and John and Eric had gigs at night. So I had to figure out what to do. Instead of asking them to get off their gigs, I decided to go in and lay down tracks by myself, and have them come in when they weren't working. I felt confident that this approach would work because we play so well together. So once that was decided, I did all my tracks in one take, and when they came in I was able to mess with their sounds and come up with musical ideas, because I already had my parts out of the way.

PB : That's odd, because I got a promo copy of the CD with no information, so I had no idea about the process. How many tracks were done that way?

PW : Five or six of them. Most of them were done by myself, except "The Visit," "Taliaville," "Justa Little Tuna" and the blowing section of "Testament." The rock part of "Testament" I did by myself.

PB : It does sound more studiofied than the Live In Warsaw! record, but I would never have guessed that it was done that way.

PW : Good, that's great. And because lots of people have been surprised, I don't mind divulging that information. To me, it's cool because it shows that with drumming, you can play the form and set the tempo and do the things that make the foundation of the music, and when you put other guys on top of it, it's like the drums have already played the melody. A lot of people think of the drums as accompaniment, but if you know the music, you can hear the tune without any of the other instruments. Plus, you can do it with a click - play completely "out" and still have a click going. I basically used the click just to have something to play with, and also in case we wanted to edit something later.

PB : The "African Sunset" solo - was that done with a click?

PW : It was, and that was a first take, too. It's funny, because there was distortion on some of the hits, because I was beating the crap out of the drums. Mark was a bit concerned about that, but I said, "No, that's fine." The records that I like, especially some of the older rock records, they were compressed and it sounded like there was a "ceiling" to the sound, like the guys were playing as hard as they possibly could, and I like that. To me, it gives it an emotional quality. If there's too much head room, you never reach that threshold. I liked that I was hitting that cymbal hard enough to get distortion. There was an emotion behind it.

PB : To get back to the rock and jazz question, it seems like that when you came up, in the time of Hendrix and Cream, there wasn't much separation between the two styles.

PW : No, and when you listen to a lot of those records, like Cream, the drums are on one channel, off to the right, just like a lot of jazz recordings. Those guys just went in and played, and though the quality of the recording might not be up to today's level, it still has a charm and sound that I think maybe does more justice to the music overall.

PB : What comes to mind for me is Tony Williams's Emergency! The sound on that really sucks.

PW : (laughs) Yes, that's a perfect example. That sounds like the record's going to melt on the turntable. And if that had been full of reverb and headroom, I think it would have suffered. It wouldn't have been the same.

PB : A funny thing about Live At Warsaw ! is that the painting on the cover, to me, evoked the feeling of a good improvisation in that style. And then I looked in the liner notes and saw that Talia [Paul's daughter] did it.

PW : She's great. She's been around music and art her whole life, so she has an eye for it. I picked that drawing because it had the motion of the drumming and everything. [PMG keyboardist] Lyle [Mays] loved it. Some people thought it was some famous Polish painter.

PB : The time I saw the trio at Schuba's in May of this year, you told me that you hadn't played together in eight months. Have you ever rehearsed extensively with the trio?

PW : No (laughs). I think before the first tour in 1994, we got together once. Maybe we've rehearsed four times in five years, but we do play together in other bands, too. If we start doing major concerts, we'll definitely rehearse, because I have a lot of quirky ideas to make the music have more detail in the center, to go different directions. It would just be fun to have that.

PB : I've heard that in Earwax Control, there was an element of performance art to it.

PW : Oh, totally. That's what we were. We never played a song. Everything was made up on the spot. We would have television sets on stage or dress weird one day. Anything went. I miss that band a lot. [Bassist] Jeff [Czech] moved to Texas, and that put a bit of the kabosh on that, and also when I got with Pat, that definitely put the kabosh on it. But we could never make a living doing that. We got fired from most of the gigs we ever played.

PB : (laughs)

PW : Well, yeah, because we were doing stuff that's happening now. Kurt Elling heard the first record recently and he said we should re-release it, because it sounds like the lounge jazz that's happening now. But back then [in the 70's and 80's], you couldn't get away with it. Club owners would go, "What the heck are you doing?" That was part of the fun of doing it. We were also living in Elgin, Illinois; it wasn't like we were in New York. We were well known in Chicago - musicians used to come out to hear us all the time. But when I got the gig with Pat, I was gone most of the time. Plus, everybody had families. We were together for 25 years, and we probably played 50 gigs that whole time. (laughs)

           I've got one of the funniest videos ever made. Curt Bley, a great bass player here in Chicago, came with his fiance once to see us play, and they hired us for their wedding. And I said "Are you sure?" He said, "Just do exactly what you want to do." So I have a video from the wedding photographer of us playing gastronomic noises and twisted beats that fall apart, with a dance floor full of little kids. By the end of the video though, the entire dance floor is packed with people of all ages and they're all dancing weird dances to this weird music. It's very surreal, but Curt didn't want us to pull any punches.

PB : And so people liked it?

PW : They loved it. I don't do many weddings, obviously, but it is a very important day in people's lives, and you want to be sure they're happy with what they're getting. And I think a lot of musicians make that mistake, like a drummer who'll try to play like Elvin Jones during a polka. That's bad taste. But this time, they wanted totally "out" music, and I still can't get over the fact that it actually worked and that the whole thing was captured on video.

PB : At Schuba's, you told me that you wanted to have the Trio tour behind the new record. I'm curious how possible it is to do that in America.

PW : I might have to eat my words, but we have an agent, and he called up a lot of people around the country to see if anyone would be interested, and he's gotten great responses, so it might be possible. We'll see. And the other thing, which is totally coincidental, is that with Earwax Control, I think we were ahead of our time. With the trio, it seems like the timing is right, because of bands like Galactic and Medeski, Martin and Wood. It seems like college kids are getting back into music that has a passion to it, that's not just fluff. We can play for a jazz or rock or a jamband audience. I think we straddle all that, because it contains all those elements, without trying to do it. None of this was calculated. I just picked out a bunch of tunes I happened to like, and produced it the way I hear it, and it seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people.

PB : I understand that John Scofield's found a new path in his career recently with the jamband audience. It seems like there's a growing amount of interest in people doing adventurous, improvisatory music.

PW : And it seems to make sense, too - not that I believe in that whole millennium business at all, but it's almost like all the elements that were segregated, all the different world musics and jazz and rock and classical, started fusing together at the end of the century. And it seems that there will be newer forms created as they all meld together.

PB : I have a few questions about the Pat Metheny Group. First of all, I'm sure people would like to know what the word's been from him lately, since Imaginary Day.

PW : I don't know - the last time I talked to him, he was going to be writing new music, so that was about it. There's nothing scheduled - we should get back together late this year or early next year. It's always been loose. This is one of the longer times we've ever been off, going on two years now, but everybody's doing fine.

PB : I've read in a few places that when you started with the group, things didn't click right away.

PW : Where did you read that? (chuckles)

PB : I think you said once that you weren't sure about it on the first tour [in the winter of 1983 in Europe].

PW : Oh, right. Well, that was just a weird tour. I had never been to Europe or on a long tour like that, and all of a sudden here we are. The same thing with [vocalist/multi-instrumentalist] Pedro [Aznar], he and I joined at the same time. We rehearsed a little bit, and I wasn't that familiar with the music, to be honest with you. I didn't know what section went with what tune half the time. (laughs) And all of a sudden we're in Oslo, and I'm totally jetlagged, and we played a gig that was three hours and 45 minutes long, and my snare drum fell apart on the second tune. And Pat doesn't like to stop the show, so he said, "Do something!" So I duct-taped the snares to the head, and the snare drum sounded like crap the whole night. But we made it through, and once we got through that gig Pat was happy with it. But those guys are really detail-conscious, so learning the tunes was a small part of the puzzle. You had to learn the details, and every time one detail opened up there'd be ten others. It was like a Pandora's box. And what happened then was that we toured too long. It was supposed to be 11 weeks, and we added another couple weeks, and it was the wintertime and Lyle was sick and everyone was completely fried. It just ended kind of strange, and I think everyone just wanted to go home. But it wasn't a disaster, it was just like, "What happened?"

          Everybody thinks that touring's fun and that you're taken care of, and in some ways it is fun, but at the same time, it's a lot of work. When people are paying that much money, they're expecting to see some serious music, and you don't want to go up there and goof around. And there were funny things - we played some place in Le Mans, France where they didn't bother to turn the heat on because we didn't bring in enough people, and in Bonn the hotel we were in was so small that when one person took a five minute hot shower, there was no more hot water in the entire hotel. By the way, luckily, I was the first to shower that day. Also, the very day the tour was extended, my wristwatch stopped working! A bad sign! At the other end, we played some amazing places that were sold out with famous musicians in the audience. So it was really out there.

PB : Yes, and I read that Pedro had to learn percussion to get the gig.

PW : That's right. He wasn't a percussionist. He didn't really even like percussion; he would have rather been singing or playing bass. But he was a good enough musician to pull it off. There's a bootleg CD of the tour called The Windup that someone sent to me and actually, it's not bad. It's raw; I think the performance on the CD is from the second week of the tour, but I kind of dug it for that fact. We were going for it.

PB : I have a tape of the band in Japan from the fall of that year. It has "First Circle" before it had a title, and I was curious if that tune inspired the double ride cymbal idea.

PW : No, although that's where it took a life of its own, but I'd been doing that for a while. I got turned on to the flat ride cymbal with Now He Sings, Now He Sobs [a Chick Corea trio record with Roy Haynes on drums]. I think that was the first flat ride record, period.

PB : It sounds like you're doing more cross-stick parts on the tape.

PW : Maybe. It's hard to remember. But I remember that trip really well, because I had never been to Japan before. It was so funny. We had played in Long Island the night before, and there was a big storm. So we got back to our hotel, and woke up the next day and the power was out, so there was no water. There was no way to clean up at all. So we drove to Kennedy Airport and flew to Japan. We were so grungy, and poor Pedro was stuck in the smoking section next to two chain-smoking guys who smelled. On the whole trip, he was coming up to us cross-eyed going "Oh, man!" So here we are going to Japan looking completely funky. Then we landed in Japan, and it took hours to get our luggage, go through customs and get downtown to the gig. But I remember digging being in Japan a lot.

PB : I brought up the first tour because in a year you went from that to First Circle, which was a big favorite of a lot of the fans and also of Pat's, I believe.

PW : Me too. We did that recording really quickly, in a few days.

PB : The cut "Yolanda, You Learn" is one of the crazier drum performances I've heard from you on their records.

PW : We were using some sequencers back then. You know, I don't go to American Garage [the online PMG discussion board] that often, but once in a while I'll see stuff, and if people don't think I'm playing as much on the newer records, it has nothing to do with the way I play. It's more the way the music has changed. When [previous drummer] Danny [Gottlieb] was in the band, they were just starting to get into sequencers. When I got in, I forget what percentage, but there wasn't that much of the material that used sequencers, but now a lot of it does. When you have the sequencers, there's a lot of stuff going on, and if you're going to use all that and have it be audible, something's got to give. So my playing, a lot of times, gets buried, or it just kind of melts into the mix. If that's what the job requires, that's fine. I'm just trying to make music the way the composers want it. For the American Garage guys who want me to be bashing and playing odd stuff, that's not what the gig's about. I'd probably get fired, and it wouldn't make any musical sense.

PB : The first PMG record I bought was Still Life (Talking), and what impressed me so much is that it was hard to tell where you were. It takes a sophisticated ear to hear it. I spent time trying to dig up what you were contributing, because I was sure it was good.

PW : It's interesting you should say that, because the first time I played with them - I guess it was an audition for me, but I didn't think of it that way; I thought I was playing for a percussionist's audition - [bassist] Steve [Rodby], Lyle and Pat played a little bit first, and they played with the percussionist. And the way Steve, Lyle and Pat played was so integrated and seamless that I remember thinking "Wow, how am I going to fit into this?" It didn't sound like it needed anything else. And Steve's philosophy, too, is that you should just melt into the music, and not draw attention to yourself.

         If someone wants me to play "Last Train Home" and do sixteenth notes on the snare drum for seven minutes, if that's what the song calls for, that's great. If someone wants me to go crazy and put electronics on my drums, that's great, too. As long as the music works, it doesn't matter to me. And because I get a chance to do all of these things, I'm happy doing all of them. To go back to the wedding thing, if I decide to play one, I'll play a polka, for instance, and have a blast, because I know I can play some "out" burning stuff the next day. I'm very fortunate to have a lot of outlets.

        So Still Life (Talking) is one of my favorites for that reason. It finally sounded seamless.

PB : Yes, it does.

PW : Our music got denser after First Circle. In order for it to work being that dense, everything has to line up, and when it lines up, it can lose its presence because everything melts together.

PB : I've heard some PMG fans say things like, "Paul's drumming was high in the mix in First Circle, and it's a shame it's gone down since then."

PW : Well, sometimes I wish I could hear myself louder, but I'm not going to complain about that. If the music still works, fine. I helped produce Still Life (Talking) and Letter From Home, and I remember bringing myself down in the mix a number of times. I'd hear a snare drum part that could stick out and it probably would have been cool, but to me, in the flow of the music, it stuck out too much. So I would bring it down. First Circle was a bit more raw and bashy, sort of like my new record, where the drums just ring out. Given my druthers, that's how I prefer to sound, but every situation's different.

          My record involved a lot of production, too, though. I like playing in the studio, but I like producing just as much. Once our tracks were done, I could just sit there and sculpt the music after the fact. I could shape it into its own statement because the source material was so good and John and Eric liked what I did and I liked what they did. If you're constantly trying to change the other musicians' playing, you've probably got the wrong guys.

PB : Pat's music always has an optimistic quality. Your trio records might be more complex or aggressive in places, but they have the same feeling to them.

PW : For me and the musicians I know, we're always trying to make a positive statement. The worst thing I can imagine is something like "Helter Skelter," where something gets misused in a negative way. One time I heard "Offramp" [an "out" PMG cut from before Paul joined the band] being used on a televangelist's show as an example of "evil in music," and that was sort of creepy. But, on the other side, I met a guy in Italy who was kidnapped for two years, and the memory of the Metheny group's music was one of the things that got him through the experience. That's a great feeling.

PB : The blowing section of "Testament" seems to have an angry quality to me.

PW : I don't see it that way at all. That experience, of improvising and going for something in the moment, is the most joyful thing to do. I'm not an angry guy. You won't see me yelling at my drum students. (laughs)