By Robyn Flans / photos by Morrison and Wulffraat

This interview was excerpted from our August '98 issue.

Life and music have changed considerably for Gregg Bissonette since his last interview with Modern Drummer, seven years ago.At the time Bissonette was still working with David Lee Roth, and anyone who had caught one of his shows would have assumed Gregg was solely a rock/heavy metal drummer. They probably never would have realized Gregg had worked extensively with jazz great Maynard Ferguson. The more musically savvy, however, would have picked up on the nuances and shadings Gregg had honed earlier at North Texas State while playing in the famed One O'Clock Band.

Gregg's new, self-titled CD showcases his incredible versatility as a drummer. It's an obvious combination of the extensive training and finesse he received and the whole-hearted fun he had as a kid who loved the Beatles, pounding away in his basement to records. This new record also mixes in the experiences the drummer has had since leaving Roth, including performing on countless sessions and clinic tours, as well as playing with Joe Satriani, Andy Summers, Toto, Steve Vai, and the Mustard Seeds, the democratic band he formed with his bass-playing brother Matt.

And along with his musical maturation, Gregg's changing personal life--his marriage to Sadhna and the birth of their son Noah Budd--has also contributed to Gregg's growth as a man and a musician.

With a career that never seems to slow--we got together for this interview just as he was beginning rehearsals for the upcoming Stevie Nicks tour--it's clear that Gregg Bissonette's maturing musical talents are in hot demand.

RF: What do you like about your new solo record?

GB: I like that it's a collaboration between me and my brother Matt. I wanted to put his name on the album too, but he's involved with the Mustard Seeds and his own thing, so he said, "Why don't you just make it your own solo album?" But he wrote all of the songs, except the remakes. He's not only my favorite bass player, but my favorite writer too. I just said, "Matt, I want you to write an album's worth of stuff for me that really features the drums. I want to use just bass and drums, and pick ten different guitar players that I really like and have them each play a tune that's sort of in their style."

Years ago Matt and I had actually done a CD that was never released in the stores called Siblings. We combined five of those songs with six new ones. I wanted to do something sort of "Policey" with Andy Summers, so I said, "Matt, do you have a tune for Andy?" He said, "Yeah. The intro is gonna start with kind of a 'Message In A Bottle' thing. It won't be overly Policey, so Andy won't feel like we're trying to rip him off, but it'll be in that vibe.' That's all I needed to hear. The next day, we went in and put the drums and bass down and I played a drum solo at the end. Then Andy came in. The song is called "Wildwood," which is the elementary school that Matt, my sister Kathy, and I went to when we were kids.

That basic process was the same with every guitar player. On the song we did with Ty Tabor from King's X, "Dr. Toulak," Matt said, "I got this idea: I want to do a 'Penny Lane' kind of thing at the end of the song." I said, "Okay! You're the writer, you're the producer. Produce me!" He said, "The first eight bars of the tune are gonna be like when Ringo put the tea towels on his toms and deadened them up. I want you to just play a track of toms going around first, and we'll do a bed of that muted tom thing. Then we'll put the real drum track over that. Because of this process we'll need forty-eight tracks." So we booked some time at Mad Hatter, Chick Corea's studio, where they had a forty-eight-track room. I also had this clay pot drum that I wanted to play to get a tabla-like effect.

One of the really interesting things, too, is that Matt and I got a chance to do a song with Steve Vai. The three of us had played together on David Lee Roth's Skyscraper tour together. Matt wrote this really cool tune called "Common Road," which was the street right behind 1920 Shady Drive, which is the street we lived on. The song is kind of a mix of buggaloo, pop, and alternative. At the end of the tune I said to Steve, "You know how with Zappa the guitar and the drums would play unison things together? How about if when I do my drum solo you just cop one of the licks on guitar as I'm playing a tom thing?" He said, "Yeah, okay. Better than that, I'll put seven different tracks on this song--one with acoustic, one with a sitar, one with an electric. How about if I use all seven different guitars and play different licks with you?"

Steve went in and orchestrated it, just by hearing the licks over and over again, so whenever I played a certain lick, he'd let the lick go by and then he'd play the same lick on guitar. It sounds like we wrote the whole thing together, but he's just such a great musician. Getting to work with guitarist Scott Henderson was great, too. I've always loved his playing. He's one of the first guitarists I worked with when I moved to LA, and he always hit me as having a Jimi Hendrix meets Allan Holdsworth kind of sensibility.

George Bernhardt and Doug Bossi, the guitarists with the Mustard Seeds, and I used to do a version of "Frankenstein" at club gigs. The whole song is keyboard-oriented, so George said, "What if I just learn the whole keyboard solo on guitar?" It's amazing. Also, on the club gigs that we used to do, I would play a drum intro to like "Manic Depression," and the whole band would go into "Manic Depression," or I'd play "Come Together," and the whole band would come in on "Come Together." Then I'd stop and do "Wipeout" and they'd play "Wipeout." It got to be a "Name That Tune" kind of a deal, so I thought I'd record it that way to show that the drummer is a musician too. You can actually tell what songs these are by listening to the drum beats.

I started with the "Frankenstein" thing, then I did Joey Kramer's "Walk This Way," Charlie Watts' "Honky Tonk Women," with the cowbell in the groove, Ringo's "The End" from Abbey Road, Don Brewer's intro to "American Band," with the cowbell and toms, Ringo's "Tomorrow Never Knows," Alex Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher," John Bonham's "Rock And Roll," Ron Wilson of the Safaris' version of "Wipeout," Mitch Mitchell's "Manic Depression," Jeff Porcaro's "Rosanna," Ringo's "Come Together," ending up with "Frankenstein." It was just really fun to get to do that.

"Tribute To Tony" is another song on the CD inspired by my studying with him. I'd say, "Hey Tony, what was that lick you did on 'Four And More'?" He'd say, "You mean this one?" and he'd just play it. He was just so open about it. I wanted to thank him for having shown me how he did stuff. Nobody can ever sound like Tony Williams. But I wanted to use black-dot heads and do sort of a salute to him with that song.

Michael Thompson did "1920 Shady Drive," which is a song actually displaced by an 8th note. It starts on the "&" of 4, so when you hear the bass come in, the bass is actually starting on the "&" of 4. The drum beat does the same thing, so instead of starting on 1, the whole verse is moved back an 8th note. When it comes to the B section and the chorus, it's back to 1.

What's neat about the album is that it has a drum solo in almost every song, but it's not a drum solo coming out of nowhere, where everyone stops for the drummer to solo. Drummers play on so many different songs that have guitar and sax solos in the middle, so who's to say that the band can't hold the groove down for a drummer to play a solo, so long as it's something people can tap their feet to and get into. The songs keep going and the bass and guitar hold down the groove for the drums to solo. There are guitar solos on every song, too.

RF: I'm curious as to what you think are your strengths and weaknesses. What needs improvement?

GB: With David Lee Roth, and even with Maynard, I played double bass and people would say, "This guy is a double bass player, he doesn't need to work on double bass anymore." But I'm not at all where I want to be with double bass. I don't have the speed that I want. I listen to players like Doane Perry, Myron Grombacher, Virgil Donati, or Terry Bozzio, and go, "How did they pull that off with their feet?" I've recently watched how Myron and Doane play with a lot of power, and they play with their heels down. I think Bozzio mainly plays up on his toes, and he plays amazingly fast. But since I can't seem to get it using my whole leg, I'm starting to work on the power while playing back on my heels.

There's a Tony Williams lick that goes between the right hand and the bass drum--back and forth, right hand, right foot, right hand, right foot--and he could get it whipping around the drumset. The only way I could ever do that lick was by playing it with my heel down. One day it just hit me like a ton of bricks, "Why don't I switch my technique and play with my heel down?"

RF: What about strengths?

GB: Well, I guess just trying to learn as much as I can about other styles of music. I love playing Latin music, pop/rock, bebop, reggae, brushes, double bass stuff. I think the more that I can learn about different styles of music, the more that that's going to help every other style. A lot of people don't realize how much a jazz shuffle, or swinging triplets, is related to a rock shuffle. Fast bebop tunes are closely related to the Billy Cobham "Quadrant 4' double bass shuffle. So I'm really just working on trying to learn as much as I can about different styles all of the time.

My favorite kind of music, though, is just playing the Mustard Seeds kind of stuff, or even songs like "No Matter What" by Badfinger. To me there's nothing more important than picking the right kind of groove for a song. The older I get, the more I realize that there's no law that says you've got to play a fill every eight bars or even in an entire song. As we've talked about before, in "Tomorrow Never Knows" Ringo never played a fill. That is so cool. Who says you gotta play fills? If you can just make the song feel right, that's all that matters.