The decor of Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theater reflects a city historically known as "the gateway to the Orient". We rubbed Buddha's belly for good luck as we enter the lobby and immediately felt the positive fortune of luck in the air. We were here to interview the driving force of Weird Al's band, Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz. After enjoying an incredible Weird Al show our newly acquired luck lead us to an aftershow gathering and offered us the opportunity to sit down with Bermuda to talk drums...

SD: How long have you played the drums and how did you get interested in drums?
Bermuda: I started when I was 9, so I've been playing for 20 years, (laughter)… No, I started when I was 9 and I'm 43 now, so that's 34 years I guess. Oddly enough I started playing the accordion. Of course in the 60's that was one of the instruments your parents sent you off to learn. You either learned to play clarinet or the piano, and my parents sent me off to learn accordion. At the time, my brother was learning to play drums. So, he got disinterested in the drums, I got disinterested in the accordion, and the kit just moved over to my room. It was a great old late 50's Ludwig 3 piece mahogany with maple counterhoops. The snare was originally given to my father by Bill Ludwig Jr. who my dad had done some advertising for in Chicago. So, that was actually a gift from Bill Ludwig Jr., you know, the old brown macintosh cover (long gone), a 10" red vinyl record of Haskell Harr doing the 13 or 26 rudiments, a book, old brushes... it was a regular kind of student kit. And then they added on a couple more drums. I wish I had that kit. They were great, blue and silver lacquer, typical and really nice. The lugs were the Ludwig tower lugs (with the lug in the middle.) The snare was very odd, no lugs at all. It was never drilled. There were six (eventually five) rods that just went down to the hooks on the bottom. I think they actually probably had a nut on the bottom. It was an un-drilled drum; you just hoped you spaced them right cause there were no holes. You put them in the right place and both heads wound up the same tension. I wish I had that drum, too.

SD: There's a Seattle drummer, Don Bennett, which has a lot of vintage kits that are in really good condition.
Bermuda: Yeah, I've played Impact Drums for the last 15 years. I had them make just a standard kit, kind of a Hal Blaine small kit; 14x22, 8x12, 14x14... a really nice Beatles sounding pop rock kit. Not that I wouldn't mind just having an old Ludwig super classic, I had one of those too, but let that go - ran out of room. Staccato kit, Ludwig super classic kit, and a North kit also went at the same time... several great things I let go. So anyway, I started playing when I was 9...

SD: So did you start in Chicago?
Bermuda: I wasn't playing yet in Chicago. We had moved to Phoenix and I had been living there for a few years before I started taking lessons. It was, literally, first just the snare. Then it's like "okay, now we are going to get you on cymbal." And so I got to use two things! And then they didn't really have a hi-hat so they told me to tap my foot. They really didn't have a drum set even though I had one at home. But basically, I learned rudiments and how to read music, which was a good thing. And my parents had albums from whenever. There was some Gene Krupa and some Latin stuff, and, uh, not Drums Of Passion, but that kind of stuff; you know, Afro-Cuban stuff. And I also was listening to pop radio and started getting into the Beatles. So here I am listening to Krupa and Ringo at the same time, along with some other stuff in the 60's. I'm also hearing Hal Blaine play on Paul Revere and The Raiders and with the Mama's & The Papa's... the Beach Boys was also Hal. And it turned out that whole time I was emulating Hal! I eventually met and sort of became chummy with him later on. Hal's a great guy, a real sweetheart. He has a thousand stories... he's been there and done it all. Just get him started you know, the Byrds this, Brian Wilson that, and all the producers, like Phil Spector... Hal's is one of my heroes in the music business, along with Keltner, Ringo, & Bozzio. I'd be happy to do 1/10th of what Hal has done. I would also have been very happy to be in the Beatles for only six years you know, and I've been doing this for 19 1/2 years!

SD: So you have been with Weird Al since the beginning?
Bermuda: Well, it depends on what you call the beginning. Prior to MTV (and I joined Al September 14th 1980) he'd already had a single out on Capitol, called "My Bologna". He got on Capitol Records in December 1979. His exposure came via the Dr. Demento show which, at the time, was on quite a few stations. Dr. Demento was very instrumental in Al's exposure. The way I met Al was through Dr. Demento. I had sent stuff to Demento in the 70's; I'd been a fan of his since the early 70's wihtout even knowing who Al was. I got interviewed in 1980 about being one of the original guys to send in homemade music and get it played on the show. By 1980, it was pretty common, so this was sort of a nostalgia thing. You know, let's go back 5 or 6 years talk to some of the guys who were in on this since the beginning... Al and I were some of those guys, and we were both there that night. It was a live show out of L.A. We both met at the station KMET FM on Sunday night September 14th, 1980. Al was introducing a new song, live on the air - "Another one Rides the Bus." Al knew I was a drummer; I had just done an interview with Demento live on the air, and talked about me being a drummer and how things were back "then", what I was doing now (in 1980)... So Al asked if I would beat on his accordion case for the song he was going to play on the air, sort of getting everyone involved... and that was it. So after we're done, I said "that was pretty fun, you should have a band and I'll be your drummer." And that's where it all started. I guess that's sort of the "beginning" because that was the song that made it into "morning drive" radio. Radio stations would always go to the Dr.Demento show that had aired that weekend - the jocks on Monday morning doing their Zoo or whatever - and they would find funny stuff from the show and play it. So they picked "Another One Rides The Bus" off the Demento show and all of a sudden it's getting played on morning drive and the phones are lighting up! And it went from there. We had no idea this would last this long, you know... it's probably bigger than ever now. We're not way up and not way down. We are in the middle, and that middle seems to get a little bit higher as we go. VH-1 has been tremendous to us last year and this year. We are not playing giant places but this is fine. I would rather sell out a mid size theater than go into a 7,000 seat place and only have it half full. The tours pay for themselves. The label is not funding the tour, and we still do very well.

Now in the studio, preparing for an album is a whole different animal. When we're doing the parodies, we know what the original sounds like; there's not really any production issue. You know, if it's a machine and there are certain sounds, that's what I do - I program it, get certain sounds, create samples, whatever I need to do. If it's a live part, I try to approximate the cymbal sound (I have about 60 or 70 cymbals at home that pretty much can do whatever I need them to do) and I always bring about 5 or 6 snares into the studio... wood, metal, fiberglass (like the Impacts,) thin, deep, and a couple extra heads. Going in, I know what's supposed to be accomplished. I do all the pre-production on my own and write out the parts. If it is something we are playing live, we have to do the stuff 100% like the original. Soundwise, if we can get 99% of the production value, we're doing good. As for playing the parts, something we really can control, it's got to be 100% - 99% isn't good enough. Every grace note has to be there, every dragged beat, every slowdown, every speedup, every sloppy fill, every stick click or rim click... it's got to be in there. And it's very hard to do that... to go in and sort of "backwards engineer" the original songs. The original players go in, and they're not thinking about that... they're just playing a song. If they do another take of the song, it's like a different thing. On the parodies, we don't have the luxury of creating like that. We have to re-create a song exactly. And I don't like... okay, I do like to talk about David Grohl because I've done two of his things now. Regardless of what you think of him as a drummer, his parts are very hard to re-create (I don't know if that's good or bad.) When we did "Smells like Nirvana" back in '92, I went to Al and said "do you want me to play this right, or do you want me to play it like it is on the record?" because it's very loose and it's very sloppy, not just from a timing perspective but from a playing perspective. That kind of sloppy boogaloo sort of thing that he does on that... it's perfect for the song, but it's like, are we really doing it like that, or do we want to, ya know, sterilize it a little bit? Al said "no, I really want it to sound like that." It was very hard to do that. Now, we come back and do "It's All About The Pentiums" (It's All About The Benjamins), our version of which is the "rock" version with Rob Zombie, and David Grohl is playing drums and guitar on top of it as well, with a machine thrown in, on top of the original Puff Daddy track. Grohl's drums were pretty loose against the track. We did the song straight, like it was probably intended to be, and we knocked it out quickly and got some great production on it, too. Sometimes I can knock stuff out in one take, but most of the time I would say I do 5 or so takes on average.

SD: Whom do you rely on for content?
Bermuda: I've always been the archivist of the band. I figured someday, somebody will write a book or something, or I'll write a book, and somebody is going to want this stuff. A lot of it wound up on the web (at weirdal.com) In the meantime we had some other projects where I submitted photos and info. I have thousands and thousands of photos of our career! Al had a book out, sort of a mock biography, in 1985; a lot of my photos are in there. A box set came out in 1994 with a 64-page booklet; a lot of my photos are in that, too. VH-1 comes along in 1999 and says, "Hey we need some archival material," and I was the only one that had clean singles and albums... and of course, photos. There were about 150 of my photos in the Behind The Music special. Anyway, for the web page, I thought that fans would like to see some of this stuff. But I wasn't the first to make an Al page... I was about the 4th. There are now more than 200 such pages!