so....the audition....i remember a few things:

1. i recall michael wearing a wife-beater and baggy, knee-length shorts. the audition was in south seattle, kind of by what is now the starbucks hq. the practice space was lent to us by hungry crocodiles, a band with michael's brothers in it.

2. we had given him the _advantage_ and _girl harbrr_ tapes as demos. ben koostra is highly adept as a drummer in the technical sense, and he plays a lot. michael commented that the drumming wasn't something he could really do, but we told him not to worry about it.

3. he set up his drums. gigantic white kick drum (not a good drum, just gigantic), old snare, beat up high hat, and i think both a crash and ride. i'm pretty sure he had at least one cymbal. no toms.

4. we knew in advance that he only had the two drums. however, we were already playing competently well with our drum machine, lurch. and being joy division/new order fans, we didn't see why he couldn't play along w/the drum machine, if he wasn't able to fill the bill completely on his own.

5. the song i remember playing was 'st. patrick's day.' we started the song with guitar, and then the drums came in. the song sped up immediately. kind of. it sort of sped up for a couple seconds on the 'DUH duh duh' part of the riff, but then it slowed down on the held note at the end.

i remember how it went (in a technical sense, it went badly) b/c it was one of the most exciting things i had been part of musically up until that point in my life.

his drumming at that audition was incompetent--in addition to bad timekeeping, he missed beats coming out of fills, knocked over his equipment, and hit every drum in a different place each time he hit it, meaning the snare might go THWACK one time and darrrrrrng the next. but he had this big goofy grin on his face, and he played with such complete unselfconsciousness and abandon. and he was so goddamn loud. it was like all the extra stuff that comes along with your average drummer (like skill) was burned off and only the pure desire to rock was left.

btw, michael admitted freely to his early shortcomings, and he often expressed amazement throughout the years that anyone would consider playing with him after that first experience.

6. afterwards, we went to this quite bad diner by the practice space, the name of which escapes me now. the soup was gelatinous. we started talking about music, and the first two things he mentioned were the fall and sonic youth. so we talked about the fall and sonic youth. then we talked about neil young for a while, etc. etc.

it was just real, real obvious that we had about 1,000,000 things in common with michael musically. our impetus for playing music was the same, in addition to all the shared influences etc. and of course he was nice to the point of making one a bit suspicious.

7. michael left. andy, joel, and i were all living in the same place at this time--that was an interesting experiment with many stories of its own. we discussed michael on the way home, and at home. we came to the conclusion that anyone with his enthusiasm and strength can learn to play rock drums well, but no other drummers in our experience had ever had his enthusiasm and strength.

i think we might've slept on it, but within the next day or two, we asked him to join silkworm. we played with the drumbox and michael both for a while, which was not too successful. you actually have to be pretty rigid to play along with a drumbox, and he was just never that kind of drummer.

he was a very fast study, and we probably got rid of the drumbox after a month or so. i still have lurch in my basement.

i think he developed into a marvelous and unique musician. he was as heavy as anyone on the planet back there, and he was a soulful player. this is an old cliche, but he was a musician first and a drummer second. he never could play a double-stroke roll, and his right foot was a little slow sometimes, but when in his element he was the best in the world. i have never heard anyone play drums better than he played on a good night. when i'm feeling sorry for myself, i think 'fuck, i'm never going to hear that shit again.' and then i remember 'fuck, i was two feet away from it for fifteen years! what a lucky guy i am.'

that's about it

thxxxooo
tm