Brian Tichy Talks In Detail About His Zeppelin Tribute Shows

By Andrew Bansal

Brian Tichy has been known for his drumming prowess and his contributions to the world of rock drumming through his collaborations with various heavy hitters in the genre, but now is the time Tichy is taking initiative by himself to gather a group of musician friends and do things purely for fun, both for the musicians themselves and for the audiences. His tribute to the late great Led Zeppelin drummer John Henry Bonham through the Bonzo Bash shows has been well received over the past year and unearthed perhaps the largest gathering of rock drummers ever, and as a sequel or spin-off of those events, he’s now taking out his Zeppelin cover band The Moby Dicks to play club shows. Their next show is at the Viper Room this Saturday July 20th. A couple of days ago, I spoke to him over the phone to talk in detail about his Zeppelin-related endeavors. Read below as we both geek out over our mutual favorite band.

In this interview, I’m mainly going to talk to you about the show you have coming up this Saturday at the Viper Room, which will be under the band name ‘The Moby Dicks’ and you’re going to do a recreation of Zeppelin’s ’77 concert at the Day On The Green festival. Firstly, can you tell me how and why you decided on that particular show?

Well, it was their last US show ever, so that’s pretty significant. There were a few dates we were talking about. A buddy of ours Todd who has this website Metal 4 Breakfast, he is the promoter over there and put a couple of shows together for us. He likes what we did, so he said, ‘What do you guys think about coming over here and doing the whole set list from that show?’ We’d never done that before but we knew a lot of the songs. So it seemed cool. We did a show in the recent past one Saturday night and sold out the Viper Room. So that was all there was to it. If we did it that time we can probably do it again and have fun with it. We were talking about various sets and this is the next one that Todd had in mind. And also, the Zeppelin show was July 23rd 1977. So it’s also kind of cool to do it that close to the same date. If this one goes good, down the road it will be cool to see if we can play a bigger place and do some other great sets. So this was more of Todd’s idea. It made sense, but it will be fun to do the Royal Albert Hall, Song Remains The Same or Knebworth sets too. If people catch on to this, I would just love to do a fan requested set. Anybody that puts their vote on a list of songs and we do that with a hundred people, we can pick the most popular ones.

That does sound great. So for this show, are you going to do the exact set list from Day On The Green or are you going to change a couple of things up and do it your way?

We’re going to stick really close to it. If we have a guest musician, we might flip the order of two songs and put them back to back instead of separated. Jimmy Page’s guitar solo is pretty long in the original set, so Brent might shorten that and we might throw in Moby Dick. In that set list there is no Moby Dick but I get really grumpy when I don’t get to do a drum solo (laughs).

Did you get to see any Zeppelin shows back in the day or were you too young?

I was too young. I’m just trying to think about how old I was in ’77. I mean, technically I could have seen the show. I saw KISS at Madison Square Garden on the Dynasty tour. That was the first concert my dad took me to. It was in July of 1979 and I hadn’t even turned 11 yet! To see Zeppelin two years ago would have been great but my parents weren’t into Zeppelin.

So, The Moby Dicks is a four-piece band but previously you’ve done Bonzo Bash events which is more of an all-star jam with a lot of drummers contributing. I guess the two shows are completely different from each other.

Yeah, this is an offshoot of the Bonzo Bash. It’s a result of the Bonzo Bash. Everybody who was involved, we’re all friends. In this band, besides myself there is Brent Woods on guitar. Michael Devin was the original bassist of this band for the Bonzo Bosh shows but he’s out on tour with Whitesnake right now so we have James Lomenzo in the band, who I’ve known for 20 years. We look at each other and go, ‘Dude, 20 years? Really? Come on.’ That’s how long we’ve known each other. James is friends with Stephen LeBlanc who’s friends with Jason Bonham. He also was the original keyboard player in the Moby Dicks. We also have Chas West as the singer, who’s been involved for a long time. So we’ve all known each other and when we learned this stuff for the Bonzo Bash, the idea was, now that we have all these tons of Zeppelin songs that we know, why are we only playing the Bonzo Bash? Why don’t we just play some clubs? What if we play shows as the house band from the Bonzo Bash, that plays with all these drummers? Michael Devin came up with the name The Moby Dicks and it instantly made sense. I don’t think there’s any other Zeppelin tribute band that can say they’ve played with these huge name drummers. We take advantage of that and it’s pretty cool. From Carmine & Vinny Appice to Nicko McBrain, Mike Portnoy, Danny Carrey, Stephen Perkins, James Kottak, Frankie Banali and so many others. Now the east coast shows have around 60 drummers that are part of this! It’s pretty cool, and it forms friendships and relationships through all of us. So we decided to take advantage of it. It’s not like we do this as a job. The only reason this is happening is because we all dig it.

Obviously, a characteristic of Zeppelin shows back then was the fact that they improvised and changed up the versions of their songs. Do you do that as well when you play Zeppelin songs or do you stick to the studio versions?

No, we totally play a combination of both. There are certain things that we keep from the Zeppelin studio versions, the ones we all agree on. It could be a tempo, groove or a drum fill. Are you going to play the Stairway To Heaven verses on the drums straight like Bonzo plays them on Zeppelin IV, or are you going to add little high hat scoops in the verses like Bonzo did for the Song Remains The Same show? If you’re a hardcore Zeppelin fan you probably have bootlegs. You can watch that footage and discover that when he gets to the B section of Kashmir, he does a little double high hat scoop. He doesn’t do it on the record but we do it because it’s fun. The audience doesn’t know all these different little pieces like we might, and I might known them like another hardcore Zep fan. And then there’s this whole thing of when I feel something I’m going to go for it. I might just put in whatever I want to do. So it’s all a combination. We play the stuff correctly but we also include what we like. Even for Brent as a guitar player, if you listen to Page’s intro on ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ live as compared to the studio, it’s a whole different thing. Both of them are killer, it’s just that Page developed it. The songs were developing all the time, even the classic ones. How Page plays Stairway To Heaven or Song Remains The Same, it’s like he was writing amazing stuff, taking all the amazing stuff he already wrote and changing it every time he played it. It’s pretty amazing to think about that.

Photo by Ronnie Lyon

As you mentioned earlier, you get to do the Moby Dick drum solo. That’s the shining Bonzo moment in the Zeppelin catalog, but other than that what other songs do you find most challenging to play on drums?

There are the obvious ones, but the one I always felt that was more than just remembering the parts or trying to learn to play a certain sticking or lick, is a song on Physical Graffiti called ‘Down By The Seaside’. It has the slowest shuffle, and it’s really elusive because it sounds all chill and mellow, but if you play it on the drums it’s really not easy. It’s the most difficult song, and I do remember that one standing out. There are many other songs that have cut-off bits and times they throw at you, little ‘sneak around the beat’ kind of stuff. Then you go to this awesome footwork and high hat stuff on ‘In My Time Of Dying’. It goes on and on. But then you’ve got ‘Down By The Seaside’. Shuffles are really hard to begin with, and the slower the shuffle the harder it is. You’ve got to keep that beat going. Any drummer that may read this, it’s really a challenge to try and play it. It’s not easy. That song is a real test for me. I’ve got to chill out, I’ve got to swing and really have to lock into that groove. I didn’t just play a lot of records. It’s funny because I enjoyed it but I also did it because it was more fun for me to play those records and try and make up my own stuff. But it’s always important to emulate the feel and the sound first. Recently I’ve been giving a bunch of drum lessons and this ties into your question. At at the start of the lessons a lot of drummers may be didn’t do it the way I did, which is to crank my headphones all the way up as loud as they get. The headphones would muffle the drums, so I could clearly hear the music rather than having a pair of earbuds or playing along to speakers in the room because you can never hear the speakers loud enough, or you’ve got to get it so much louder than your drums that it gets too loud. It takes away from a real balance. It would take an exceptional amount of volume to get the speakers in your bedroom over the volume of your drumkit. So a lot of people have asked me, ‘How do you practice? Tell me what you do when you’re on a kit.’ And I tell them, there’s not that many people who play with headphones. It makes you hear the drummer you’re a fan of, right in your face, and every time you hit a symbol, snare drum or a fill, you totally know whether you’re on or off. So you’re not playing to a click track. You’re not practicing to a metronome. You’re playing to a real honest feel of the best drummers in the world, so go play a Rush record, Zeppelin record, Aerosmith or The Who. All those drummers with their sensitivity of the time and how they’re sympathetic to the times of the grooves and the fills, if you try to play that and you’re really conscious of it, it connects to you. Great drummers made these records so popular and that’s why we’re talking about them even today. So that was a pretty cool thing which I didn’t consciously do. I just did it because it was fun but I think it really did help.

The final question I have for you steps away from drumming for a bit. You’ve also done vocals and guitar in the past. Are you doing any kind of project to pursue that, or plan to do any in the future?

Well, I have a band with Sass Jordan called S.U.N. which is an acronym for Something Unto Nothing. I play guitar in the band and the record came out towards the end of last year. I played drums on the record, but live I’m a guitar player. I’m proud of the record, we did it all at my house, it’s all organic, there’s no click track, there’s no fake drums. It was just about sticking mics in front of drums and instruments and recording what we do, with just basic compression and EQ. I really like it. I love playing guitar. It’s a new band on a small label, and with that comes the struggles of being in that situation and trying to get yourself heard and known. So we can’t stop everything we’re doing to go on a S.U.N. tour. We’ve got to work and make things happen. You can’t just lose money every time you go out and play. It’s not that easy. May be you can if you have a ton of money in the bank or something. Anyhow, that’s what I’m doing with it. We recorded with Michael Devin on bass and Tommy Stewart on drums, who’s in Godsmack. But we just took S.U.N. out on tour as a duo with me on acoustic guitar, bass drum and high hat with Sass singing. We changed the songs to make them more like ‘acoustic stops’. We opened up for Geoff Tate’s Queensrÿche this whole past month in the US. I was also filling in for Simon Wright in that band. So it worked out great, they had an opening band and we got some exposure. It was a different thing for people to come see me sitting down with an acoustic guitar while playing the bass drum and high hats. But it’s funny because the whole idea ties into Zeppelin’s ‘Bron-Y-Aur-Stomp’! That’s where the idea came to me. The first time I heard Zeppelin III as a kid, that was the thing I noticed. So even though we didn’t have a whole band, Sass and I decided to start this acoustic thing. It just took on a life of its own, it was really fun and that’s how we did the whole Queensrÿche tour opening for them. For me, it all comes from ‘Bron-Y-Aur-Stomp’.

briantichy.com 

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