DISPATCHES

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Day Two: Meeting the Band

I was taking my first sips of coffee when I initially heard Bob talk. It was 9:30 a.m. on Monday, and my band was meeting for the first time. We were in Gibson studio #6, temporarily renamed the Iron Maiden studio. Bob was a simple man: jeans and T-shirt, long hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, losing just a little up front. Because he was painfully shy, Bob had "never gone in for performing much," and his guitar-playing experience was limited to the privacy of his garage at his home in the small blue-collar town of Keyser, West Virginia. He rarely displayed a hint of emotion; one of my bandmates would later fondly describe Bob as "a cigar-store Indian."
    Bob's son-in-law had sent him to rock camp, a gift for his upcoming fiftieth birthday, even though normally, Bob said, "I don't take vacations." But every once in a while, Bob allows himself one day off from his collision-repair shop in Keyser, and gets on his bike and rides. Last year, he took a whole week off and rode to the Mississippi Delta. "I wanted to see the crossroads," he explained, a nearly imperceptible grin creeping into his wooden expression as he described the birthplace of the blues.
    "You rock where your roots are," our celebrity counselor Mark Slaughter told us, and then listened patiently to us blather about our musical preferences and performance backgrounds. Our line-up: Mark, Bob, Larry and Tim (the opera singer) on guitars, Bill on keyboards, me on bass and Howie from Teaneck on drums. We plugged in, and Slaughter directed us to jam.
    Bill, our thirty-nine-year-old keyboardist and angel-voiced aviation-parts dealer from New Jersey, quickly demonstrated his skills as a bandleader. Bill had been in bands all his life. He took a serious go at music at some point, but then got tied up in his family's business and had a family of his own. His wife sent him to rock camp as Father's Day gift. Bill set the mood on the organ, and everybody put what they had on the table, contributing to a competent blues progression.

Above, counselor Mark Slaughter leads SBABACO toward victory. Below, the writer on bass.

    Larry quickly emerged as a star. A media negotiator and hotshot guitarist from Tribeca, he started playing at fifteen and never looked back. He's in a band called Men With Big Hips, made up entirely of media-industry players. This was his second time at rock camp. "There's nothing I'd rather do for five days," he later told me.
    Slaughter was sussing us out. He had just played a set for a few thousand people in Milwaukee two days before, but today, he treated us like lifelong bandmates. "A lot of the guys are all about winning," Mark said to us, referring to the upcoming Battle of the Bands, "but let's just have some fun with it." We set to work on writing our original song.
    "Anyone who's got a riff, just lay it down and we'll build on it," Mark said. I jumped in to show off a bass line I had never done anything with, and just as quickly face-planted in a sea of humiliation. It had been a while. But somewhere across the room, somebody picked up the slack. Larry played a funky guitar riff, and gradually everybody joined in. Suddenly, a room full of middle-aged white guys was sounding like a real funk band.
    By 1 p.m., we had written our song's chord progression and melody, and settled on a band name: SBABACO, an acronym for "Stop Being A Bitch And Come On." This is what happens in a room full of middle-aged white guys having fun.


Day Three: Practice, practice, practice

Turns out Mark Slaughter is one of the coolest people I've ever met. He's a talented musician, willing and able to pick up any instrument to fill out a band's sound. He lives in Nashville with his beautiful wife Rebecca and their two kids. In addition to touring, he was in the studio last year, producing a record for the band

"The guys who come here [as counselors] are humbled guys," said Mark Slaughter.

Stereo Fuse. He recently started a new career in voiceover work, and when he speaks, he occasionally lapses into Cartman, Jerry Lewis or Sammy Davis, Jr. When I asked him if people think he's a has-been, Slaughter was as gracious as could be.
    "You become known, and people know you for that one thing," he said. "Then they want you to be that one thing forever." This was Mark's second time as a counselor at rock camp, and I asked him if other musicians thought working at the camp was cheesy. "The guys who come here [as counselors] are humbled guys. They all work and do really great stuff. We're here because we want to do this. This is as much fun for me as it is for you guys."
    He acknowledged that there are people who would disparage rock camp, but dismissed that point of view as useless. "It doesn't matter if something is good or bad. It's all how you look at it. I come here and have a good time. A fantasy to me is playing with people I've never played with."
    SBABACO'S arsenal had four members trading leads and harmonies, including Tim, the opera singer. The poets of SBABACO joined forces to put the finishing touches on the second verse of "You're My Woman."

    Fire and ice never mix so good
    You burn up my soul like no other could
    Don't throw me a lifeline when I'm going down
    Your love is an ocean, and I wanna drown

    That night, I attended a late-night "master class" led by frontman/bassist Kip Winger. He set up a simple test: Play along with the metronome and see if you can keep the exact tempo. Winger sort of destroyed me. As I played on what I thought was the beat, he'd yell "Late! . . . Late! . . . Early! . . . Late!" like a

We found that it was thrilling to see anyone succeed. There was no swagger, no fear of emasculation.

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