(Superchunk/Bob Mould Band)
I have a man-crush confession: Jon Wurster is my favorite drummer. He also has great hair. Wurster submitted this chapter to me about the very surreal night that he backed Katy Perry at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
Written by Jon Wurster
I was walking my dog in Brooklyn one rainy Thursday morning when I received a phone call from a fellow musician. He asked if I’d be interested in joining a small cadre of drummers he was putting together to back Katy Perry at that Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. Though I was fully embedded in the indie rock world and had not watched MTV for at least a decade, I agreed immediately because this was just too bizarre an opportunity to pass up. Also, the only thing I had on tap for that weekend was a solo excursion to a matinee screening of Matt Damon’s new film The Informant!
The next day I reported to a rehearsal studio on Manhattan’s West Side. On hand were three other drummers, our Musical Director (who would be playing a full drum kit), and a young Izzy Stradlin-looking guitarist. The MD informed us that we’d be adding percussive support for Katy as she opened the VMA’s with Queen’s classic 1976 hit “We Will Rock You.” If you know the song, you know that any Neanderthal with a club can pound out its Boom-Boom-Thwack cadence, but apparently they needed professional Neanderthals to do it right, so there we were.
Two timpani and two large bass drums were positioned in front of a little stage in the rehearsal room. I was hoping to play timpani, but the MD put me on bass drum duty. Anyone who’s played percussion in their school band knows the bass drum is the instrument of shame—the equivalent of your Little League coach stationing you in left field. I wasn’t going to let it get me down though. This was going to be a memorable experience, and I was going to whack that bass drum like it owed me at least forty dollars.
As it turned out, Queen was allowing MTV use of the original stomps, claps, and backing vocals straight from their News of the World album master tapes. This made the experience extra special because my brother Lane and I used to scare ourselves silly listening to “We Will Rock You” as we stared at the murderous giant robot that graced News of the World’s cover. Also, Queen’s 1980 concert at the Philadelphia Spectrum was the first big arena show I ever attended. Every time I smell marijuana, I still think of the two shirtless dirtbags who marched around the upper-tier cheap seats yelling “Who wants to fuckin’ get high?”
Katy soon breezed in with a small retinue of assistants and managers. She introduced herself to everybody and then turned to me and said, “You look familiar.” “Oh, I’ve been around,” I replied. It was a weird thing to say, and I don’t blame her for not really speaking to me again. We got down to business and ran through the song a handful of times, the five drummers pounding out rhythm while Katy found her way with the vocal. Young Izzy nailed Brian May’s iconic solo note-for-note and everything felt pretty good by the final run-through.
The next day we assembled at Radio City Music Hall for an onstage rehearsal. I’d played Radio City eleven years earlier, opening for John Fogerty as a member of Ryan Adams’s band Whiskeytown, but this was a whole different animal. This was live, star-studded national television. Rehearsal was running a little late, so I explored the theater, wandering amongst empty seats reserved for the likes of Beyoncé, Pink, and Taylor Swift. I took a selfie in front of a chair set aside for astronaut Buzz Aldrin because that was the weirdest one I could find.
We settled into place behind our drums on the big stage and banged through “We Will Rock You.” It was pretty thrilling to be up there, and the drums, Katy, and Izzy’s guitar solo sounded great. But there was one hitch: MTV wanted a “name” guitarist to play the solo. I really felt for our young gunslinger. He learned the solo perfectly and sounded wonderful playing it. But he was guilty of an unforgivable crime: He wasn’t famous.
The usual suspects were tossed around: Slash, Dave Navarro, etc., but MTV was having difficulty nailing down a star guitarist. It was a lot to ask a well-known, already established guitar hero to come in on almost no notice and risk crashing and burning in front of millions of people on live TV. At some point that Saturday, news came that Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry had accepted the challenge and would fly to New York City the next morning and play the VMAs that night.
So there we were Sunday morning, back at the west side rehearsal studio at the very un-rock ’n’ roll hour of 10:00 a.m. The door to the rehearsal room was closed, and we were told we could not yet enter. Ten or so minutes later, we were given the OK to come in and there he was: Joe Perry, looking as much like Joe Perry as anyone has ever looked like Joe Perry. The first four Aerosmith albums were the soundtrack to my junior high years, so playing with Joe Perry, even if I was just banging on a bass drum, was a very big deal for me.
One of my favorite family trips occurred in the fall of 1978 when my dad booked a room at the south Philadelphia Hilton for us to hang out and spend the night in while Lane saw Aerosmith at the aforementioned Spectrum. Lane returned much earlier than expected due to Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler being hit in the face with shards of a glass bottle someone threw onstage. A similar incident involving a firecracker to the face forced the band to abandon their Spectrum show a year earlier. When my brother came back to our hotel room he excitedly told us that Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer stormed up to Tyler’s mic and bellowed, “You got a real problem, Philadelphia!” Now there’s something I think we can all agree on.
The sound Joe and his tech were getting in the rehearsal room was the polar opposite of the classic, raunchy Joe Perry guitar crunch the world knows and loves. The clean, distortion-less tone coming out of the amp would not have been out of place on a Dead Milkmen album (hey, I’m from Philly, so my references are regional). Joe was working with an unfamiliar amp, and it was ten in the morning, so this was understandable.
Halfway into our first pass at the song it became apparent Joe had never actually played the solo in his life. And why would he have? He’s Joe fucking Perry, author of many of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest riffs and solos. He’s a creator, not a tribute artist. But it threw a little monkey wrench into the proceedings. Joe’s solo was inspired and original, but it wasn’t the “We Will Rock You” solo. Also, it was way too long. This would be a major issue, as we would soon find out.
When the song was over we all shot each other confused glances. At one point a member of Katy’s management team turned to me and nervously asked, “This will be OK, won’t it?” The turn of events was most unexpected, so I couldn’t give him a definitive answer. Unfortunately, there was no time to go over the song again because we were due over at Radio City for a full-production rehearsal. At RCMH we were told we’d be carried up from below the stage on one of the theater’s hydraulic lifts. This was very cool because it would allow me to live out a long-dormant childhood fantasy of taking the stage as KISS did on their 1979 Dynasty tour. I would not be allowed to spit blood at any point, but that was OK.
“We Will Rock You” was the first musical performance of the night and would also serve as the entrance for VMA host Russel Brand. Russell would descend a flight of stairs, make his way out onto the runway, and bask in applause while Joe played his guitar solo. Joe’s solo needed to be over at a specific time in order for the show to remain on schedule. This was crucial.
We ran through the song and everything was on track until the guitar showcase. Joe soloed out onto the runway where he wailed away among a sea of seats that would soon be filled by celebrities and beautiful people. The song ended with Joe still soloing on the runway and Russell looking perplexed about what should happen next. This was not good.
Make no mistake, nobody has ever looked cooler playing a guitar than Joe Perry, and his performance at soundcheck was no exception. But the length of the solo was causing heart attacks among the people running the show. The MD was taken aside by panicked network representatives and told there were hundreds of thousands of dollars of at stake if the song ran long and cut into a commercial. Exhausted and in need of sleep, Joe headed back to his nearby hotel room.
While I explored Radio City Music Hall (at one point sharing an elevator with a masked, stage-blood-spattered Lady Gaga) the MD tried in vain to reach Joe by phone to get with him about the length of the solo. Hours later he eventually connected with Joe and impressed upon him the importance of keeping it to a specific number of bars. The new plan was for the MD to play an elongated drum roll to signal the end of the song. There would now be no mistaking when we all should stop playing.
Few of the VMA’s big stars were on hand for that afternoon’s run-through, so I was absolutely shocked when a familiar face came into my field of vision just as the lights went down at show time. “Holy fuck, that’s Madonna,” I said to myself as she glided by me. The Material Woman gracefully ascended a flight of stairs and took her place at the landing just above me where she waited in the dark for her introduction. It still stands as one of the most surreal moments of my life—hocking spit into my hands to ensure a secure bass drum mallet grip while watching Madonna silently prepare to walk into a spotlight and deliver a tribute to the recently deceased Michael Jackson.
I find that when you play on live TV, you go into a weird kind of shock. My friend and bandmate Bob Mould likens it to running out onstage and boxing somebody for three minutes while holding a guitar. This experience was no different. We rode the hydraulic lift to stage level, the MD counted off the song, and that’s the last thing I remember.
Today, thanks to the Space Age miracle of the internet, I watched our performance for the first time in nine years. I was honestly surprised how good it is. Katy struts the stage confidently, Joe reels off a barrage of cool guitar fills, and we drummers hammer away (without dropping our sticks) as an arena-rock light show swirls around us. There’s no evidence of the uncertainty we were all experiencing regarding the song’s ending—the kind of uncertainty you feel watching a scene in a thriller where someone is tasked with defusing a bomb by cutting one of two wires.
The video, however, reveals a somewhat less dramatic conclusion. Joe sticks close to center stage as he plays a blistering solo. Russell stalks the runway, looking back a couple times to see if Joe is wrapping up his solo. He isn’t, he’s still blazing. But then Joe goes into the main finale riff, and we’re back on track. The big drum roll happens and, somehow, none of us stop at the same time! The song skids and tumbles to a halt that sounds like the ending of every live Rolling Stones song before they got pro on 1989’s Steel Wheels tour.
The drummers immediately returned to our dressing room to recover from those two minutes of glory. Questions abounded: “Did we end it right?” “Could you hear the drum roll?” “Was that Vin Diesel in the second row?” Sadly, while we compared notes, we missed the most infamous event to ever occur at the VMAs: Kanye West’s hijacking of Taylor Swift’s Moonman. It would have been nice to one day tell my grandchildren I witnessed it in person.
We never saw Joe Perry, Katy Perry, or Russell Brand again that night. Russell saw a lot of Katy in the ensuing days, tying the knot with her months later for what would be a tumultuous two-year marriage. Joe Perry continues to be the greatest Joe Perry anybody could possibly be. Our musical director, relieved to have the preceding three days in his rear-view mirror, kindly invited his rhythm partners to the RCMH bar for a post-performance drink. Unfortunately for me, I stopped drinking just a month before. I really could have used it. FYI: I went to see The Informant! on Monday. I liked it.