LET ME WEAR YOUR COAT EXCERPT | Letmewearyourcoat

Unable to afford drum lessons, Neil was self-taught and it showed. He was an inconsistent time keeper on his snare and hi-hat cymbal and rarely pulled off seamless fills around the kit. Neil learned how to drum by mimicking along to songs he heard on the radio, audiocassettes, and by watching rock bands play on late-night syndicated broadcasts of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.

Fumbling through his and Marc’s stacks of tapes, Neil searched for something with an edge to play along to. Tunes with teeth sharp enough to cut through his adolescent angst.

The Eagles. No. Neil wasn’t in a “take it easy” kind of mood. Chicago. No. “ABBA?!” Neil exclaimed, tossing Molly’s audiotape of the Swedish pop group over his right shoulder while wondering how it got into the pile. “Shit, no!”

Finally, Neil came across his copy of Who’s Next, by the Who. Neil had worshipped the English rock and roll band ever since the seventh grade when he’d seen Tommy on late night TV, the film based on the group’s rock opera album by the same name.

Like his parents’ generation, who could recall where they were the day Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash, Neil’s seminal moment when the music died for him occurred the year before in eighth grade English class, when word spread amongst his classmates that his idol, the Who’s legendary drummer, Keith Moon, had died of an apparent drug overdose.

The band occupied such a large quadrant on Neil’s limited sphere of reference that he was surprised to once read an article in The New York Times that had “WHO” and “drugs” in its headline only to find that it referred to the World Health Organization and not his favorite band.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Neil had been Baptized, received his First Holy Communion and been Confirmed, but the closest he’d ever come to a religious experience was when he listened to Tommy for the first time. Songs like “Sparks,” “Pinball Wizard,” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” with their powerful, yet poignantly arranged music and lyrics, brought him closer to a divine spirit than any bible passage he’d read, prayer he’d recited or homily he’d heard. It was all Neil could do not to drop to one knee, make the sign of the cross to his Gods – The Who’s Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon – and say “amen” every time he heard that album.

Who’s Next, with two of his favorite songs that emphasized furious fills on his snare drum, mounted and floor tom-toms, heavy strikes to crash cymbals and a minimum of tame, polite time keeping, was exactly what Neil had been searching for that afternoon. Neil popped the cassette into his tape player, pressed rewind, plugged in a pair of headphones and settled onto his drum stool. Waiting for the tape to reverse, he impatiently twirled his drumsticks in his hands and got himself mentally ready to play. When the tape stopped, Neil pressed play and cranked the knob on the volume up to eight. Despite the initial blast of sound being louder than Neil expected from the iconic synthesizer opening in the first track, “Baba O’Reilly,” he didn’t turn the music down. The Who wasn’t meant to be experienced at ABBA volume level. When the extended computerized keyboard ended, Neil simultaneously hit both of his crash cymbals hard in synch with the music before launching into his first fill.