My favorite drummer in the world

 I have been writing this victory blog for about six months now. For those new to blogland, when you agree to blog on Blogger, they give you "stats", that is, I can tell how many "pageviews" there are daily, as well as information such as referring websites, country of origin and the search words lurkers (those who read the blog but don't comment or identify themselves, which in my case is 100%) use to stumble upon my musings.

About 25 people a day read the posts. Unless I gave you a card with the blogsite address, or you already know me, you probably stumbled upon it in some type of Google search. Besides the U.S., as of yet unknown people from nine countries read about Chef Ted's wanderings and ponderings. The largest percentage of foreigners are from Russia, referred to me by one of two Eastern European porn sites. Uh....how does Google achieve that?

Considering that fact, I am going to continue to write about the shit that interests me and formed me. Me being different from everyone else in the world. My knowledge is the result of my experiences-what I have done and seen and heard, where I've been, who I’ve known and what I have learned from them. No one else has experienced my life and experienced all the same things. Your ways of interpreting what you see are also unique. What you consider to be logical, or common sense will vary in some way from my logic and common sense. As a result, you see and interpret and react to what goes on around you differently from anyone else. So, with the knowledge that there are people in Russia who are reacting and interpreting things in their own unique way, and may have never heard of say, the band NRBQ, I present to them Tony Ardolino (RIP) my favorite drummer in the world, almost falling off the fucking stool laying down that propulsive and mighty back beat.

The ineffable NRBQ...where to begin? The critically loved and commercially under-appreciated band that was one of  my life's sound tracks for decades. They were "commercially under- appreciated" because they could really suck. I probably saw them live a dozen or so times, four of those times left me slack jawed at their genius. One time I sat behind Tom and noticed that he had a couple of tambourines on top of his high hat. He got that huge sound from almost a kid's starter drum set and a couple of tambourines..other drummers did less with all kinds of bells and whistles. People, when they were on, it was something to behold. Other times, in my case, ~66% of the time, they would be in the middle of "Honey Hush", and the whole darn thing would fall apart and they would just shrug and disappear, as if to say, "folks, we tried, but it just aien't working tonight". Sorry about the cover charge.

Alas, they were four extremely talented, farcical and nutty musicians, who would do novelty things as in the above clip, that belied some serious musicianship on the part of all of them. The desire to play what they wanted, when they wanted and how they wanted, saddled with their live concert unreliability, almost guarrenteed that there would be no commercial success. The greatest bar band in the world, worked for me though.

To learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx4BeSZDQOU

and part two:

► 6:06► 6:06

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_c-aqC1TU4

and finally near the end, RIP Tom!

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPTuci-jNUU


Shout out to Harry Brown (RIP) for the *different from everyone* spiel.