GOOD-BYE, DRUMMER

Drummers are timekeepers. More often than not, in life as well as music, they are the glue that holds things together. Therefore, as a guitarist, when you find a good one you grab them with both hands and don’t let go.

I found my drummer in January of 1991. As the first shots of conflict were fired by coalition troops in Kuwait and Iraq, a group called "Students Against the War in the Middle East" came to be on the UGA campus. It was through this group that I would meet a chubby kid named Robert Brese. I thought he was a nosy little brat - a know-it-all asshole with a big mouth and a pea-sized brain, but he liked The Smiths so I let him hang around.

Over the course of the next few months, my opinion of him changed as he and I found that we had many things in common: comics, movies, food, a healthy distrust of government - and most of all - music. I remember the night he told me he was a drummer. There was a huge party going on at my apartment and I was drunk enough to demand we stage an impromptu performance in the living room. He played a plastic five-gallon bucket, and I played an Ibanez Strat-copy - in the nude. We covered everything from The Alarm to ZZ Top and back. We didn’t do it particularly well I’m certain, but we had fun until Athens-Clarke County’s finest showed up to put a stop to it.

In June of that year, he talked me into taking a Greyhound bus to San Jose, California. Three days after my arrival, we walked to a freeway on ramp, stuck out our thumbs, and headed north. We each had a backpack that bore a single change of clothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a canteen full of drinking water and two pairs of socks. Between us, we had $50 or so in cash and four or five packs of smokes. We also had a sense of freedom that can only come from leaving everything behind and stepping into the unknown.

For the next two months, we hitchhiked by day and slept by the road at night. We camped for a couple of weeks at Cougar Dam just outside Eugene, Oregon, and spent a night or two in Berkeley and Fort Bragg, California. We met many interesting people, including a hobo angel who gave us $20 for listening to his stories for a few hours. We met a group of punk rockers that introduced us to the "Rainbow Family," a weird bunch of hippies that claim to live off the land but for the most part just live off society. We camped with them for a few days near Mount Shasta in California. Incidentally, we met the aliens during that weekend, but that’s a story I’ll never tell. We sat on rocky outcroppings on the sides of mountains, watched spectacular sunsets and planned our escape from the coming apocalypse. We played scissors, paper and stone to determine who had to carry the goddamned 10-pound tent on their pack and on most days, we ate French bread and string cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner because it was the cheapest thing we could find.

From the over-50 miles we walked in the July and August heat, to sharing our sleeping bags with rabbits and ants, along with the rides from an FBI agent, two college girls and a psychotic woman delivering dolls and a door in a Volkswagen Vanagon, through a haze of beer, tequila, homemade chokecherry wine and recreational pharmaceuticals, we persevered and formed what became an unbreakable bond.

In January of 1992 we found ourselves back in Athens at a dilapidated rental house on Ruth Street where we hooked up with a guy named George Holton, and Uncle Messy was born. It wasn’t pretty - I played a blue, glitter-encrusted pawnshop hollow-body guitar with a warped neck through an amplifier that Rob and George built and covered in fake brown "Wookie fur." Rob played a set of drumswith a lower snare head made out of plastic Kroger bags and spray glue. The sound was awful, but we did a good cover of Fang’s cover of "Puff the Magic Dragon" and R.E.M.’s "Gardening at Night," and we had fun - which was the point.

We played in Athens many times, mostly at Club Fred, and on the road a few times with Vomit Thrower. Thanks to George, we also ended up running a roving punk rock party and beer fest that started at the "Ant Farm," a warehouse and Uncle Messy’s first practice space. It eventually moved to "The Shirley Hemphill International Ballroom," the old Rockfish Palace and another Messy practice space, and after an incident involving what the Athens Banner-Herald called "a knife wielding assailant," ended up at the infamous "Hoyt Street North."

It was around this time that Uncle Messy split up and Baby Fishmouth was hatched. Rob played drums, I played guitar and Blake Tanner, from the New Jersey transplants Something Blue, sang. A stroke of luck allowed us to meet Mike Fulmer, who played bass with what a Flagpole reviewer of the time called "winsome aplomb," whatever that means, and with that, Rob and I began another journey together, this time accompanied by two others.

As opposed to Uncle Messy, we all considered Baby Fishmouth to be a serious endeavor and we threw every bit of blood and guts we had into it. Unfortunately, three years of daily practice, long and un-air conditioned van rides, smelly feet, Cheetos and root beer, and crooked and/or doped up club owners composed a road that was both longer and harder than we expected. In the end, none of us wanted it quite badly enough, so we called it quits and went our separate ways.

Years later, all of us wound up in some part of the computer industry in and around Atlanta and Athens and we stayed in touch, although not as much as we should have I will freely admit. We got together and played a few times in private, and always vowed we would get back together to play at least one last show. Unfortunately, on May the 27th at 11:07 in the morning, following a long battle with injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident, Rob stepped from this world into whatever follows. I had visited with him the day before, and I’ll never forget the last things I said to him. His physical therapist was there and he kept falling asleep during his exercises, so I punched him in the arm, told him I loved him, asked him to stay strong and told him to stop causing the nurses so much trouble. He smiled in reply and arched his eyebrows, using his expression to tell me that everything was okay. I have to believe that now, for him, everything is okay… it’s just okay somewhere else.

As I said before, drummers are timekeepers, sometimes in life as well as music. Rob was the best drummer I’ve ever known and the only one I’ve ever played with. He was by far the best person I’ve ever known and the best friend I ever had. A little part of me died the day that Baby Fishmouth fell apart, but a bigger part of me died on May the 27th. He always said he didn’t want anyone to mourn him if he went ahead of the rest of us. He wanted us to throw a party with beer and tequila for everyone. I believe his exact instructions were, "Everyone needs to be locked in a room with their own personal bottle of Pepe Lopez, and they aren’t allowed to leave until the bottle is empty." Out of respect for his wishes, I’ll do that. I’ll drink in celebration of his life. However, he’ll have to put up with me for being just a little sad: I can’t help it, I’ve lost my drummer.

Tim Sanchez