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Recently, legendary F5 drummer Jimmy DeGrasso (Alice Cooper, Megadeth and Suicidal Tendencies, to name only a few) was kind enough to take a break from his decidedly hectic schedule to speak with us regarding the forthcoming release of the group’s stunning sophomore effort The Reckoning…
Todd: How did you become involved with F5? Was the process as obvious as we’re all assuming it was?
Jimmy DeGrasso: “…They called me kinda out of the blue last year. I was on vacation and (F5/ex-Megadeth bassist) David (Ellefson) and said ‘Hey, what are you doing next week?’ and I was like ‘Nothing that I know of’ and he was like ‘Great! Can you come down and cut some drum tracks?’ and I was like ‘Okay’ (laughs). …It was pretty short and to the point. There wasn’t a whole lot of forethought put into it because I talk to David every couple of days. We’ve been friends for such a long time…we’re always on the phone. So he just called me out of the blue and was like ‘Hey, we need someone to come cut our tracks’ and I said ‘Yeah, man. No problem’ and went down there. Then the work started, ya know? The songs were only half written…they weren’t arranged. I was like ‘Oh! What did I get myself into?’, ya know?”.
Todd: How does it feel to have the opportunity to work with (former Megadeth bassist/bandmate) David Ellefson?
Jimmy: “…It’s great. I’ve worked with him in multiple settings along with the thing we did a few years ago. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been doing some stuff with (legendary guitarist Ronnie) Montrose and we’ve done a couple of other session things together, so we’re always never too far off of each other’s radar. We’re always doin’ a project here or there, so it’s kina like puttin’ on the same pair of sneakers. …Don’t tell him I said he was a sneaker, though (laughs).”
Todd: What are your current touring plans with F5? Am I correct to assume you’ll be touring as much as humanly possible in support of The Reckoning?
Jimmy: “We’re tryin’ to put something together. We’re tryin’ to do that right now and go out for a couple of weeks, but it’s gettin’ pretty hard because my schedule’s gettin’ kinda filled in. So we’re gonna try to get something together for the end of September and the beginning of October at this point. We’ve already done a few one-offs to kinda test the waters a bit…but we’re definitely tryin’ to get something out there, ya know? If it makes sense, ya know? Right now, it’s hard to get out there with the band being on their second record. Plus, this is a different business than it was five or six years ago, so you really have to have some decent support people out there before you jump into a van or a bus. …It’s just different than when we came up. It’s a whole different environment. We were all on major labels, there was a lot of money and there was MTV and VH1 and so on a so forth. Now, it’s all internet orientated and you just have to go about it in a different way. It’s not to say that it’s better or worse. It’s just different. …But we’d like to be able to do it, for sure.”
Todd: To what do you attribute the longevity of your career? In all fairness, you have been doing this for quite some time now…
Jimmy: “Man, I wonder that myself (laughs). I don’t know, ya know? The phone keeps ringing and ringing. I like what I do. I’ve always loved music, I love playing drums and I’ve always been involved with it, ya know? I started playing drums when I was three years old and I played my first bar when I was five years old, so really not much has changed. I’m really fortunate in that I’m still working on a pretty regular basis. I just got a call about a week ago and now I’m gonna go out on the road with Alice Cooper for a month. So in the middle of this, I’m gonna go out and do that. That’s what I’m talkin’ about with the scheduling getting tight. I’ll be out with Alice from about the middle of August to the middle of September, then I’ve got some drum clinics I’ve got to do and then I’m going over to China in the middle of October for two or three weeks to do some seminars. …So we’re tryin’ to find some windows to do some F5 dates, but the windows are all closing right now…”
Todd: At what point in your life did you realize you wanted to play drums professionally? Was there a particular moment in time where you made a conscious decision?
Jimmy: “Well…there wasn’t ever that much forethought put into it. I’ve just always played music. What happened is that I just kept playing as the years went on. When I was younger, I was always playing in bands and was doing different…casuals when I was in Junior High and stuff like that. When you get to your last year of High School and push comes to shove and they’re like ‘Okay, what are you going to do for a living?’ I was like ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m already making a living’, ya know? So it just sorta happened. I thought ‘Well, I’m playing drums now for a living. I’m just gonna keep tryin’ to do this.’ After High School, I went out on the road with some different bands and found myself in L.A. when I was nineteen or twenty years old doin’ some session work. So it just kinda kept going.”
Todd: Did you find it difficult to make the transition from playing with a Pop-orientated artists like Fiona to a much heavier, Metal based act like Suicidal Tendencies?
Jimmy: “No, not really because it’s just a different genre. Most drumming is based on timekeeping anyway… That’s one of the things that’s kept this whole thing interesting. I’ve gotten to do different things and play with different people and everything’s been slightly different. After Y&T, everyone was like ‘Well, what are you gonna do?’ …I went out and did a couple of one-offs. I did a Lita Ford tour and then I did this tour and then that tour. I ended up doing the Fiona record because I was signed to Geffen (Records) at the time because they had Y&T signed and they asked me if I’d do the Fiona thing. And a couple of people were like ‘Why are you doing that? Now you’re just doing a Pop Rock record’ and I was like ‘Well, it’s just something different to do’. …But after that record, the producer that was doing that record had some friends over at Epic Records. Someone at Epic had called him and said ‘Hey, Suicidal Tendencies has a new record comin’ out and it’s really good, but they need a drummer. Do you know anyone’ and he was like ‘Yeah, this guy that I’m tracking right now for this Fiona record that I’m doing for Geffen’. So he put me touch with (future Black Label Society/Metallica bassist) Robert Trujillo and that’s how I ended up joining Suicidal Tendencies. So to all the naysayers who said ‘Why would you do a Pop record?, look what it turned into (laughs). Every opportunity you get leads to something else. …And that gig was really good because obviously Suicidal was a lot more Alternative Punk/Metal thing. It was so diverse at the time that it wasn’t really even Punk anymore. It was like Punk/Metal/Thrash/Funk, ya know? (laughs) Everything was thrown into the soup at that point. …It was really cool. We toured for two years. We toured with Metallica, we toured one Summer with Guns ‘n’ Roses and a lot of great opportunities came out of that too, ya know?”
Todd: At this point in your career, do you look back on your time as a member of Y&T with a certain level of fondness?
Jimmy: “Y& T was great. There was a lot of learning going on around there because it was my initial experiences with touring and recording. …There was a lot about just learning the business because that was really the heyday of ‘You need to have a single, and you need to have this and this’. It was all very formulated at that time. But that’s what every record coming out in the mid to late ‘80’s was all about, ya know? You had to have your three singles and at least one had to be a Power Ballad (laughs). It just was what it was. You just knew your first single with MTV was going to be the Rock song and then the second one was gonna be the Power Ballad and then the third track to MTV and radio was gonna be the harder song (laughs). That was it. That was what we all did and a lot of money came out of all that. …I can remember thinking that we had so many other better songs to put on certain records. I was like ‘Why don’t we use this song’ and they’d be like ‘Well, the label doesn’t like it. They don’t feel this and they don’t feel that’. That was really the heyday of the label really having that much say. …It was just typical of the time. But it’s not the way the business is ran now. Now, you can basically just do what you want, put it out on the internet and MySpace. There really is no big brother looking over your shoulder telling you what to do creatively, which is great.”
Todd: As a musician, it must have been frustrating to have been so restricted creatively…
Jimmy: “Yeah, it really was. I can remember some decisions that were made that politically were what we had to do that I always questioned because some of those decisions were poor. Sometimes being in a band and having certain sales expectations, you really had to bend to certain rules of the label. And rightly so at times because they were putting out so much money, ya know? It was like ‘Well, we gave you guys a million dollars, so it’d be nice if you’d listen to what we say’ and we’d be like ‘Okay’. And that’s what it was, ya know? I can remember with Suicidal…basically, no one told us to do anything, which was great. We just did what we wanted. It was a whole different thing. That band started out as an underground Punk band, so they just did what they wanted. If the label was able to sell it, then great. That was our whole outlook on the thing. …I used to have a friend who would play Suicidal’s first album (1983’s self-titled debut) when we were driving around and he would always say ‘One of these days, you’re gonna end up playing with these guys’ (laughs). …It’s funny how it all comes full circle, ya know?”
Todd: Looking back, what was the deciding factor behind your time as a member of White Lion being so brief? I can clearly remember thinking that particular line-up was destined for greatness or at least continued success…
Jimmy: “…That was during the Summer of ’91. I had just got done doing all this stuff with Y&T and wrapping that all up. Those guys called me during the Summer and I wasn’t really doing anything at the time. I knew those guys because they used to open for Y&T. They said they needed a drummer and I said ‘Yeah, sure’ because I had always gotten along with them. So we went out and did a tour. I think it was only two or three months long. I don’t even remember anymore. And that was pretty much it. After that, there were things goin’ on in the band between the two original members and then they just didn’t want to carry on anymore. That was obviously their prerogative to do that. …Right after that, I think I was home for a day before I went out and shot the Wayne’s World movie with Alice Cooper for a couple of days. Then I came home for another couple of days and got a call from Lita Ford and then went right back out again. So that was a pretty packed year as far as touring. …It was a fun gig. They were a good band and they had a lot of commercial success. …I thought it was gonna be great. Vito (Bratta) was a great guitar player and they wrote good songs, ya know? I thought they had some staying power and they just didn’t want to go on. …I don’t know why they chose not to continue because they were sellin’ a good amount of records. I guess they had just been together too long or something. I’m not sure to this day, to tell you the truth. …I think maybe they both thought they were gonna have solo careers. I kinda wanted to tell them ‘Be careful, guys. This is a real dangerous period right now musically’. Everyone thought they were gonna be major stars. …And then the whole Grunge movement came out and made it even more difficult for everyone from the Pop Rock and Hard Rock genres to continue. It was a really difficult time to start a new career let alone sustain the one you had. …It was good because it just purged the system as far as I was concerned. There was a lot of crap out there at the time. But a lot of people just got pushed to the wayside and there were a lot of releases sitting in the can that came out to really no fanfare because the whole face of Popular Music had changed all of a sudden. That’s why timing is everything in this business sometimes.”
Todd: How did you become involved with the (Argentina-based ‘…groove Metal…’) group A.N.I.M.A.L.? In all honesty, it seemed like a less than likely pairing…
Jimmy: “…That’s a good question. Where did you pull that one from? …I don’t know how they got my number, but they were down in L.A., they needed someone to do their record and they got my number. They were familiar with my work from the Suicidal stuff. …I remember we did that record up in Malibu Canyon at Indigo Ranch (Studios) where a lot of cool records were done. I think Korn did their first two records there. I went in and they had like thirteen or fourteen songs. We went over the arrangements and slammed the whole thing out in like two or three days. It was really cool, but I don’t know what ever happened to those guys. …About a year and a half later, I was down in Santiago, Chile with Megadeth. I was in my hotel room in the bathroom or something and I had MTV playing in background, right? …And there was this song on that had this really cool groove. The lyrics, of course, weren’t in English, but I was listening to them and I was like ‘Wow, this is kinda cool’. It was really, really heavy with all these drop tunings on the guitars. …I was like ‘Who is this?’. So I came out of the bathroom and was watching the video and at the end they showed who it was and it was A.N.I.M.A.L. (laughs). …I was like ‘That’s a kinda cool drum beat’. Then I was like ‘Oh! That’s me’ (laughs). So obviously those guys did really well. They did pretty good in the South American market. I heard them a few times after I was down there, but I never really stayed in touch with them, ya know? It was just one of those calls that came out of the blue, ya know?”
Todd: Is it just my imagination or do you really land that many gigs on ridiculously short notice?
Jimmy: “Yeah…a similar thing happened with Stone Sour a few years ago. One day I was sittin’ around the house and this guy calls and says ‘Man, I need you to come play with Stone Sour’. It was their manager. He was like ‘You gotta come play with Stone Sour. The drummer broke his arm’. …He explained the situation and was like ‘We need you to leave today’ and I was like ‘I can’t leave today’. I remember we’d just had our daughter and she was like a month old. I was sitting there and I was like ‘Well, I can leave tomorrow’ and they were like ‘No, you can’t leave tomorrow’, so I was like 'Okay’. I literally bought their disc on the way to the airport. I was like ‘Well, I better buy the CD so I can learn the songs since I’m gonna play with them tonight’. I had no idea what this was about, right? All I knew was that it was a couple of the guys from Slipknot. So I went to the record store on the way to the airport to pick up the CD, learned the songs on the plane, landed in Connecticut and went and played. Fortunately, their CD was really good. I was just thinking ‘What if I get on the plane and the CD isn’t any good?’ …Fortunately, their first CD was really, really good and it was easy to learn. That’s the sort of call I get, ya know?”
Todd: In hindsight, how would you describe your time in Megadeth? Overall, was your tenure with the group really as volatile as it seemed?
Jimmy: “…That’s a loaded gun. It was good. It really was. We had a lot of good time. We had some trying times, but we certainly had some good times. Then, one day out of the blue, it just ended (laughs). That was pretty much it. It was to pretty much everyone’s surprise, so that was kinda odd, but other than the way it ended, the whole thing was pretty cool. Like a lot of band situations, there was a lot of good and there were some things we had to work through. I thought we put out some pretty good records, so it was fun.”
Todd: Musically, what are your influences?
Jimmy: “…Everything. I basically grew up as a Jazz drummer and I was really into guys like…Buddy Rich…and Tony Williams and stuff like that. Then I got into The Beatles and after that, it was the whole Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Rush, Cheap Trick thing that if you were a kid in the ‘70’s, you were listening to. Later on, I got into Van Halen and eventually I went out on tour with David Lee Roth, so that paid off. …That was in the end of 2005 and into 2006. And then the Van Halen thing started to get rolling, which we all figured would get going at some point. I thought it was gonna happen ten years ago (laughs). It just took a long time to come around, but it did eventually happen. It’s just like a Zeppelin reunion. It might take twenty five years to happen, but it is gonna happen.”
Todd: What can you tell us about your drum shop? What ultimately prompted you to open a retail establishment?
Jimmy: “…I own a shop here in San Jose called San Jose Pro Drum, shockingly enough (laughs). …That’s another one of those things on the side. What happened was that I had been travelling around so much since 2000 doing all these drum clinics… Besides playing the instrument, I really have a passion for drums and well-made musical instruments. I have quite a lot of gear myself (laughs) and there really were no good drum shops here in the Bay area or in the South Bay, so I decided to open one with a friend of mine. So it’s a little side business that I have going, too. …The only business worse than making music is music retail (laughs). I should have opened a Starbucks. It would have been a much smarter financial move (laughs).”
Todd: What equipment are you currently working with? From a musical novice perspective, do you have a ‘…standard issue…’ set that you use or do you custom tailor what your work with to the particular gig?
Jimmy: “…Obviously the companies I endorse like Pearl drums and Sabian cymbals along with Pro Mark drumsticks and Evans heads. …It always depends. I treat every situation differently. When I go out with Alice later this year, I’ll use one bass drum, two rack, two floors and an assortment of cymbals whereas when I went out with David Lee Roth, I used two bass drums, two racks, two floor toms, some timbales and a gong…ya know? It was a little bit bigger set (laughs). It all depends on what you need sonically. Sometimes around here I’ll just do some Jazz gigs and that’ll literally be a tom, an eighteen inch bass drum, a floor tom, a snare drum and two cymbals, which is kinda nice. …So it just depends on the situation. If I do session work, it’ll be just a five or six piece kit with one bass drum and an assortment of cymbals and snare drums. …It’s funny…when you go do a little Jazz trio gig, it’s of a lot lighter volume, which is easier on my ears, which are pretty beat up. You can literally take like four drums and some cymbals, throw them in your car, play and be out in like five minutes. When you play a smaller gig, it’s really interesting because it makes you focus more on the musicality and on listening better and getting a wider array of sounds with the fewer things that you have. But you’re talking about a very intimate setting, too. You’re not talking about playing for thousands of people where everything’s miked. Your talkin’ about maybe not even being miked and playing for like fifty or a hundred people in a club where people are literally like two feet from you. I kinda like it because it’s a different vibe. It’s funny because sometimes the drums can be too loud even when their unmiked…”
Select Jimmy DeGrasso Discography
The Reckoning (2008) ********
Arsenal Of Megadeth (2006) *******
Rude Awakening (2002) *******
The World Needs A Hero (2001) *******
Capitol Punishment (2000) *******
Risk (1999) *******
Endangered Species (1998) *
Poder Latino (1998)
A Fistful Of Alice (1997) *****
The Craving (1995) ****
Musically Incorrect (1995) *
Suicidal For Life (1994) ***
Squeeze (1992) **
Ten (1990) *
Yesterday & Today Live (1990)*
Contagious (1987) *
* as a member of Y&T
** with Fiona
*** as a member of Suicidal Tendencies
**** as a member of MD.45
***** with Alice Cooper
****** with A.N.I.M.A.L.
******* as a member of Megadeth
******** as a member of F5