The Ned and Daron Report:
The Greatest Musical Gift
Sometimes it’s hard to write the Ned and Daron Report because Daron lives in Connecticut and I live in Salt Lake City in Utah. That kind of sucks for us, but we deal with it as best we can. We just make do. We have to.
Of course, years ago both of us lived in Utah in a beautiful city called Bountiful. Those were great times. Back then a gentle giant once came to my house and picked me up in his warm fuzzy hand. He took me to the top of the mountain known in my neighborhood as Squaw Peak for a mid-morning picnic in the shade of a great cliff where we ate chips and the flesh of deer. I brought some Mountain Dew, which was a treat the giant had never tasted before, and at the end of the meal he slurped down a two liter bottle of that delicious green nectar in a single gulp, and then, satisfied, slumped back against the rocks and took a deep nap. This left me free to go out and wail on some bears for a while, and that sounded pretty hot to me.
So, I stood up, shook the crumbs from my beard and began to walk-skip down the side of the mountain, club in hand, whistling and singing a bear knocking song which I won’t write down here because it has a lot of Ssss-ssss’s in it from all the whistling. From the peak it’s only about a half mile down until you reach where the trees start getting leafy, and then it isn’t too much farther until you get to the creek, which is very close to where the bears live. It was a skip that I thought would take much less than half an hour, so I thought I could go down, kick some bear’s asses, and get back to my friend the giant just as he was waking up so he could take me home in time to watch Control Freak.
When I got to the shady glen where I usually cross the stream there was a hobbyt there roasting fish over an open fire with his friend, an oirk who wore a large bandana tied to his head so that he wouldn’t be harmed by the sun which was filtering through the leafy canopy, probably just enough to give his scalp a nasty burn if it touched him (oirks can die in open sunlight).
 “Ho there,” said I, and stepped from behind a tree and into their view, “I am a very good friend of yours, and do not wish to be made into your noontime meal.”
The oirk wobbled up to me and snorfled out a greeting as best he could considering that oirks’ tongues are purpley blue and their teeth are often not white but a hearty shade of greeyun! “Arfle darfle,” said he, “shnosh tosh dosh blosch”. We laughed aloud together and then joined the little hobbyt at the fire.
“Hello, hobbyt, I am Ned, and I am your friend who does not wish to be killed by you on this day.”
The hobbyt greeted me and told me his name. “I am Swede, an hobbyt of Centerville, of the family of Liborty. Some also call me Lando, for that is my middle name. This oirk is my friend whose name is Mike Ountry Tisofthee. We are both from Centerville.” Then he handed me a fish and I ate it with my hand to let him know that I thought his hands didn’t look too bad, a token of trust and friendship in our land.
Hobbyts are a wee folk, usually less than six feet tall, and their hands are encrusted with something. The backs of their hands are covered with something, and so are their palms, but their fingers are bare like those of a man. So, although I knew of hobbyts, this Swede was a strange and foreign sight to me. Later on, it came up in conversation that he and Mike the oirk were both really good drummers and vocalists so I called my friend the giant on my cell phone. For a second he was kind of mad at me for waking him up, but then I told him I’d solved all his problems, because that giant (whose name was Aaron Brad) had a really good punk band going that only needed some drummers and singers before they would have the look and sound to make it big.
Aaron came galloping down the hill right away, and the three of them had their first practice right there in the woodland glen, and I was lucky enough to be the first mortal man to witness their music. Later that night all four of us went to Daron’s brother Dior’s birthday party at Pinochio’s Pizza, and the new group, now dubbed The Brads, had their first real performance.
We were so inspired by their hott rock, that we immediately teamed up with our friend Beaner, and decided to form our own band that we called the Gothic Rock Lords. We literally spent days, and weeks designing what he hoped would be the ultimate band logo. The end result was mind-blowingly brutal, and summed up, with total and complete clarity, exactly what our music was going to sound like. It was perfection.
Sadly, its perfection was also a lot of the cause of the Gothic Rock Lords’ demise. With such a flawless balance of beauty and brutality, we knew that there was really no way that we could ever hope to live up to society’s expected expectation upon viewing the radiance and power of our logo. Also, we were always pretty busy helping our friend Isaac Formiller pick out another new pirate shirt to really commit to getting together to ever actually play.
After the disbanding of the Gothic Rock Lords, Ned and I decided to focus our time and logo designing skills on the only other local band that we knew, The Brads. The Brads had something that even GRL could have never had: the look and the sound to make it big. And with our logo ideas, we knew they could make it to the top.
With the Brads intense all-rhythm section line up, we were confident that no matter how powerfully vicious or supremely pro our logo design was, their music could exceed it. The idea of working with such spectacular and dynamic artists, so fresh and full of life was so liberating, so exhilarating. We immediately went to work planning and laying out our ideas. I had one about a spider that wrote “the brads” with its webs, and Ned had one with a crab playing drums. After a few hours, we finished and rushed off to try and find Mike, Swede and Brad out at Sephryn’s Lair. It was THE place to be if you were a hobbyt, oirk, giant, or of dragon kind.
When we walked into Sephryn’s Lair, Daron had the logo mockups in a large 36”x24” portfolio tucked carefully under his arm, and I was carrying the tape recorder (we wanted to document The Brads’ reactions to our work so that we could potentially use their comments in a pamphlet for our freelance logo design company) in my pants. The place wasn’t quite the way I’d pictured it. Popular lore in those parts told that Sephryn’s was the worst of the worst, a perilous and violent hell on earth, and that one could be disqualified from one’s health insurance plan just for going in to ask for directions to AmeriGas (which was nearby but kind of hard to see). I told Daron to be ready for danger. I was very worried that our logo might be incidentally sliced to ribbons by a passing band of fighting berserkers or that my tape recorder might be smashed by a berserker or trashed out by a punker. That would be woeful indeed, because Daron had spent, I would not crap you, seriously, hours drawing the logo with a pen, and then I spent another hour coloring it in with a crayon and then in a stroke of genius I hotted it up with some hot soss. After that I ate some tacos and then the hot soss was gone, so if the logo got thrashed, forget about it, we weren’t going to be able to forge it anew.
 But it turned out that Sephryn’s Lair wasn’t what we needed to fear the most. Most of the people were just there to have a good time without doing any harm to anyone. There were a few troublemakers and one or two rangers but they didn’t mess with you if you didn’t mess with them. We made our way across the entire main room without getting our logo slashed up at all, and then we found Aaron and Swede and Mike from The Brads sitting in a booth on the far wall. I could see how relieved Daron was when he finally put down the portfolio and opened it up so the lads could see our work -- I felt good too. It was as if at that moment I could see my future unfolding itself along with those logo plans, and it was a huge and important future where Daron and I were pretty much in charge of all the logos of all the bands of all the music/song styles of all the countries of all the world. But just as Daron spread out the big piece of paper, Swede’s A-hole friend Dragon, who’d been drinking a bottle of mead he snuck in under his coat, spilled a big jar of jelly on the table and then sat on it and totally rubbed the jelly into our logo plan by accident. We were very bummed, and a little bit mad -- quite justifiably I’d say. Dragon’s clumsy incompetence pretty much put an end to the lives we’d been dreaming of. Daron and I weren’t able to convince The Brads to adopt our official logo, so we were never able to get our logo design company off the ground, and consequently we’re now stuck being pro journalists, which is not exactly a laugh and a half of fun. But we decided to make the best of a bad situation. We still had the tape recorder and we were able to get a pretty good interview with the band. This is how it went:
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fakejazz: How did you guys first learn to play the drums and sing, and Aaron, how did you first learn to play the bass guitar?
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Mike T.: I was good at playing drums for a long time ago, and then when it turned out I was also a good at singing then I was a little bit older, about 22 or 23 or maybe younger. But most drummers when they start out are mostly interested in only playing lead drums to start out with. That was me to a tee, man. But once I joined The Brads I found out rhythm drums were also important in the song, and I wanted to do that almost more than playing lead. It took me about a year to change styles from just a lead drummer to be a good rhythm drummer too.
Swede L.: Um…unlike Mike, and some other drummers I know, I hadn’t gotten much opportunity in playing lead drums. When I first started drumming I was part of a mostly academic drum performance group who already had 3 more lead drummers than they needed. Since I was the newest, I basically started my drum career as solely a rhythm drummer. I never even actually played lead drums up until when I met up with Mike and we started playing together in the Brads.
Aaron B.: I just sort of saw Les Claypool one time, he was playing guitar with Sausage on that tour they did with Rollins. I thought that it looked pretty easy, so I started playing keyboards. Then, later on I decided to start playing bass.
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Fakejazz: Why are you guys so powerful when you play live?
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Aaron: I would say it’s because there are just nothing but the powerful instruments of bass guitar and the drums. Many bands have another instrument as well, and usually that instrument plays a decorative role, only doing cute details like a piece of lace. We have only the sounds that are strong and rocking and we have 1.5 times as many of them as most bands. We will never dilute that.
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Fakejazz: Is it awesome to be with two girls at once?
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Swede: Yeah.
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Fakejazz: Why do you make out with girls on stage?
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Mike: Ladies think drummers are sexy and they usually want to. If they don’t want to we encourage them to come up anyway though, and if they still don’t come up then we will play a very strong song with big emotions, but not a love song. Something like an epic that recounts a struggle of man against authority, or the tale of a battle against those who would make rocking and rolling illegal. Then they see our passion, but it doesn’t look like we’re faking passion just to get them to come make out. If we played a love song they would see through that.
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Fakejazz: Swede, you’re a hobbyt, also called a little folk. How do you reach your drums, and do you have to have a custom made set? If not, then why don’t you play a custom made set?
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Swede: Well, my dexterity is really high, I’ve got like 17 dexterity, and it even goes up to 18 when I use my +1 Neal Peart drum sticks…haha. No, but seriously, basically I just lower all the drums closer to the ground, so that I can reach everything a little better.
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Fakejazz: Mike, you’re an oirk. Did you ever catch a rodent and eat it alive?
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Mike T: No.
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YO. Check this shit out!
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