21. SEPTEMBER 1997-NOVEMBER 1999: JOSH AND TOMMY JOINS, ROBIN LEAVES, LIVE ERA IS RELEASED

The music business can be a very small community sometimes. I guess my name came up. I thought it was different than a lot of projects I've been involved with. It turned a lot of heads with my friends.

When I got the call to go down and audition for Guns N’ Roses, I was at a rehearsal place in LA doing pre-production for a record, and I had a message on my machine from their manager and thought, “What?!” I called him back, and he asked me if I wanted to audition. But it seemed too big, like a bigger-than-life band. I had a lot of things going on at the time, so I said, “I don’t know, it seems very time-consuming. I’ve got to think about it. I don’t want to waste your time if it isn’t something I really want to do.” He was cool about that, but he was persistent. A couple of days later he said, “Just come down and meet with Axl and the guys.”

I went down and auditioned for them, sick as a dog—I had eaten some bad seafood in London right before that, gotten on a plane, and auditioned that night. I was vomiting all the way to the rehearsal. Axl was totally cool, though, and very open-minded about music. He said, “I heard you played with Devo. I really liked Devo—and when I liked Devo, you got beat up for liking Devo.” I thought, “This guy is really cool.” It became obvious that he really listens to music. He was talking about artists all over the map.

They invited me down a second time, and from the beginning Axl was so nice and we got along and had a good time. He was completely open. So I decided to join.

What happens is they're looking for a drummer. The whole band was falling apart basically, everyone was quitting or getting fired or both, I don't know. [...] Who knows what happened. But they're looking for a drummer. And it was '97 and I'll never forget, a now defunct rehearsal studio, Cole Rehearsal studios, it was in Hollywood, right around the corner from the Dragonfly, like on Cole and Willoughby. Anyways, they were rehearsing and I had a pager, okay, '97, right, a pager. I might have had a cell phone, but I don't know the phone number, you opened it for, like, if you blew a tire, or you're getting carjacked, you would use it for an emergency, you know. So the pager goes off. And I'm like, "What the hell is this weird Orange County number?" and I call it and it's their manager who was in Laguna at the time, south Orange County. "Hey, Guns N' Roses is looking for drummer and they're interested in you auditioning. Would you be into it?" and I was like, "Yeeeeah, uhm." I think I just kind of hurried off the phone and I was like, I kind of, like, mumbled a few things and kind of like tiptoed backwards out of the conversation because it wasn't something that I was really into at the time and I ended up being polite about it, but I end up hanging up and going, "I don't know if I wanna audition for Guns N' Roses." I had this band that was signed to AEM records at the time, that fell apart quickly due to drugs unfortunately, but a band called Slider. It was a very cool band, way too short lived. But this band I was trying to do on AEM called Slider, and I was playing with the Vandals and I was playing with Devo. But both the Vandals and Devo, neither of them were full time jobs. Neither of them were, you know. But I was doing gigs with Devo, I was doing gigs with the Vandals. I was playing on some records, do you know what I mean? I was making a living doing exactly what I wanted to do. And, "I don't know if I wanna join Guns N' Roses." [...] I liked Guns N' Roses. But like, what do you mean, Guns N' Roses? Slash and Izzy and those other dudes weren't in the band anymore. What's going on? I don't know. They called again... and or I told them I'd call him back. That was it, I called them back. When I called them back I'm like, "You know what? I should go down and just meet Axl." At this point he'd been our of the limelight for a while, he'd been out of the spotlight, and there were all these weird rumours about him, "Oh, I hear he is 300 pounds", and, "He is bald". You know what? I should go meet him. I like to form my own opinion about the guy rather than hearing all these rumours about him, right? Is he driving himself there? Is he taking a helicopter? Or a limo? What's he rolling up in these days? So I went down there to do it and he was cool. Actually, the first time I went down there he wasn't there. I auditioned, and, oddly enough, the two guys auditioning me were guys I would later be in two separate bands with. The guy that was playing bass, because they didn't have a bass player at the time, was Guns N' Roses' pro-tools engineer at the time, Billy Howerdel who would later do A Perfect Circle, but he was just the pro-tools guy and he strapped on a bass and I had no idea. Like, "Who's this weird bass roadie? Who's this bald bass roadie that's going to jam with us?" Later, he and I would have A Perfect Circle with. And on guitar was Robin Finck, the guitar player who had just left Nine Inch Nails to do Guns N' Roses, and who would later leave Guns N' Roses to rejoin Nine Inch Nails, and I played with Nine Inch Nails for a bit. Anyways, so we're down at the Complex in West LA or Santa Monica or wherever that is, and I auditioned and it went well and they said "We want you to come back" and "Axl wants to meet you," and I said, "Cool!" So I came back and I met Axl, and I liked him. He seemed like a cool guy. And I had so many people telling me not to do it, and actually - not to bring him up again - but I remember talking to Paul Westerberg, and Westerberg was the only one who said, "You should do it. Go do it! If everyone's telling you not to do it, you should go do it". I went, "Yeah, you're right." "What, am I gonna join some cool alternative rock band?" - this was in like in the late 90s - "What, am I going to be, like, in a grunge band?" And I have friends begging me, that will remain nameless in case any Guns N' Roses people listen to this, there were a couple guys in pretty famous bands that I'm friends with, they were begging me like, "Dude, what are you doing? What are you doing? You can't be in Guns, dude. You're insane to think you're going to be in Guns N' Roses." And I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna give it a shot." So I went and did it and I signed a two-year contract [...]

I got a call from their now-ex-manager in 1997 saying, “Guns N’ Roses is auditioning drummers. They’d like you to audition.” I was busy at the time playing with Devo, and doing lots of Vandals gigs, and working with Paul Westerberg—my hero from the Replacements. I was already really busy not being a rich-and-famous rock star but being cool—being cool, working with people I loved and really stood behind and making a good living. I wasn’t filthy rich, but I wasn’t broke. So, I was like, “I’m good, man.” And I had a conversation with the manager, and he said, “Why don’t you just come down and meet Axl?” I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “Listen, who knows if you’d even get the gig, and if you get the gig, you don’t have to say ‘yes.’ Just come down.” I think, “What have I got to lose?” At that point, no one had seen Axl in five years. You heard rumors, “I heard he’s 350 pounds.” “I heard he lost all of his hair.” You hear all these things. I was like, “I should go down. Does he drive himself or does he take a limo? Does he show up with his sister? Does he show up with the porn stars? Does he take a helicopter? Let me see how this dude rolls.”

I was pretty busy at the time, so I didn't really need the job necessarily. Then I decided that I should go down there because I wanted to meet him. At the time, no one had seen him for a couple of years and there were all these rumors. He had become the Howard Hughes of rock 'n' roll and I wanted to see it. I went down and I liked him. He wasn't the monster that was painted of him.

So, I went down and met him, and I really liked him. He was really nice. He was talking about Devo, and instead of throwing out “Yeah, I used to like ‘Whip It.’” Instead of saying something like that, he started naming other songs. “Dude, ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ is great. ‘Gut Feeling.’” And I’m like, “This guy knows.” He’s not just saying he likes Devo and remembering that one hit from 1983. He knows his shit. He does like Devo. He’s like, “I want someone to come down here and write with me. I don’t want you to just be the drummer.” I was like, “I’m going to check it out,” and I had a lot of friends begging me not to do it. I had people going, “Dude, what are you doing? That’s insane.” I have to say, to Paul Westerberg’s credit, Paul Westerberg’s the one guy who said, “You should do it. Go do it. It sounds totally wrong; go do it. What are you going to do, be in some totally cool alternative band? Are you going to join the Foo Fighters or something obvious? Go play with Guns N’ Roses. Nobody knows what they’re doing. There’s all these weird rumors about him. You should go do that for a minute.”

And there's a lot of rumors. You know. Everyone's like, "Dude, I heard you got paid $1,000,000," you want to put your pinky up like in Austin Powers, "$1,000,000 to join Guns?" Fuck no. Nothing like that. It was good money and it was good money for me at the time being a single guy with no kids and being....Let me think how, how old was I? Probably about 24-25, I guess, 24-25. Yeah, I was getting a decent sized weekly paycheck and I was still being able to, like, because I was doing it in the evenings, I was still... this one record was happening all the freaking time, too, so I'm planning records all day, I'm doing sessions during the day and then going there at night and doing his thing. And oh, not touring a lot but not needing to and not even thinking about, I mean, like I said, going out of town once in a while with the Vandals and once in a while with- [...] I was making a bunch of records during the day with people and then going to work with Axl at night and. But yeah, I did hear rumors about people... There was no, I didn't get a big signing bonus, you know, and I wasn't out shopping for Ferraris the next day or anything. It's like, "Okay, I'm gonna make good money every week. This is great. It's cool. I don't have to worry about rents and..." you know, it was awesome. You know, it was, it was. It was good but it wasn't ridiculous. It wasn't, "Go buy yourself a crazy car and a cool house," none of that shit. But you know, I've heard through the grapevine, "Hey, I heard that," you know, "you got this" or "you got that." It's usually not the case, you know, when people think that kind of shit, you know? But who knows? You know, I don't know. I mean, I read some stories about Robert Trujillo, who I used to play with, who plays bass in Metallica. [...]Well, that happened to Robert but not to yours truly. Like, I got nothing. I got a rock, man, like Charlie Brown on fucking Halloween.

I was infatuated with music and drums at an early age. I come from a pretty musical family. My grandparents on my dad’s side both taught music in school, my mom is a classical pianist, and my dad, who is mainly a tuba player, was conducting the band down at Disney World in Florida when I was born. Thank God he was transferred to the California Disneyland when I was six months old.

There was so much music in my house. My earliest memories are watching my dad conduct the big band and jazz band at Disneyland. I remember getting a trumpet for Christmas when I was six, and I played that for about four months. But my dad had an endorsement with the brass department at Yamaha, and somehow he also had a drumset from them, which was up in our attic. It was a Yamaha Recording series kit, which is a pretty extravagant first kit.

The earliest pictures of me playing were when I was seven or eight, standing, with huge ’70s headphones on, with a snare drum and a cymbal, Stray Cats’ Slim Jim Phantom style. That might have lasted about a month before I got the nerve to ask my parents if we could bring the whole drumset down from the attic.

I remember my dad sat down behind the drumset and played the simplest 4/4 beat, and it sounded like a record to me. He told me to try it, and I was able to do it right away. I started playing to Van Halen, Queen, and Devo records. It’s ironic that I’ve gotten to play with Devo; it’s such a dream come true to play with people I’ve admired since I was in first grade.

I never really noticed that music and drumming was this big serious thing for me. But my mom remembers how I’d get up at 7:00 a.m. to call Zildjian on the East Coast before I went to school. I’d be talking shop with [veteran cymbal expert and then-artist relations manager] Lenny DiMuzio when I was in the fifth grade. I just think I had a lot of determination then [...]

I always say—half-joking but serious, too—that when little boys are day dreaming of cool-sounding jobs “when they grow up,” that being a drummer is right up there alongside of astronaut, baseball player, fireman, etc. My dad conducted the Disneyland band since I was born, and I was around big band music a lot. There was always a bunch of instruments around our house, and I noticed there was a drum set up in our attic. I thought there was no chance in hell my parents would let me take it down and set it up for me, but somehow they went for it. My dad played me the most elementary Rock ‘n’ Roll 101 beat, and I sat down and immediately played it. I fell in love instantly and then spent the next few years playing along to Van Halen, Devo, Police, and Queen records before taking formal lessons.

[Burns] was a great teacher. I’ve tried to teach, and I suck at it. People ask me all the time to give them lessons, and I tell them not to waste their time. Some guys are great teachers and some guys aren’t.

I’d sit behind Vinnie and I’d leave being half-inspired and half-discouraged. He was phenomenal, and then he’d be cool enough the next day when I’d call him at 9:00 a.m. to answer my stupid questions, like, ‘What kind of bass drum beater were you using last night?’ He had probably gotten to bed two hours before, but he was always cool to me.

can pinpoint when I started playing professionally very easily, because in 1985, when I was 12, I got a job playing in a Top 40 band out at Disneyland. I had to join the musician’s union. I started getting paid to play the drums and having to pay taxes on that money. So I’ve paid taxes every year since I was 12 from drumming income. Other than a paper route I had for about six weeks when I was 10, this is the only job I’ve ever had.

Imagine five dumb young white kids in Orange County California, Star Search Champions in Disneyland. Hence the horrible name Polo. I was about twelve or thirteen, and didn't know any better. I don't want anyone to think that I was an adult, playing Huey Lewis and the News covers at Disneyland.

I grew up a huge Devo fan, but by the time I was eleven or twelve, I had read many articles in Modern Drummer with Terry Bozzio, Vinnie Colaiuta, and Chad Wackerman, where they were saying, ‘Playing with Frank Zappa was so challenging... playing with Frank was so this... playing with Frank was so that....’ So I started going out and buying Zappa records, and I became infatuated with that music at a pretty young and impressionable age.

Scott started me on the road of appreciating simple, soulful music and taught me that it doesn’t have to be tricky—it doesn’t have to be a circus act—to have validity. He taught me about the beauty of The Ramones and how important they are to popular music. I was thinking, “Really? The Ramones? How could this guy who can sightread all this crazy music tell me how important Dee Dee Ramone is as a bass player?” To this day, I carry that thought with me.

I would rather see someone play a Ramones’ song spot-on, with heart and soul, than play some lick they learned out of a book, with all the chops in the world. Chops can be fantastic to watch, but they don’t make the whole world tap their foot, cry, or get excited. Chops can make your jaw drop and your eyes widen for a few seconds, but the feeling in the heart is different.

Scott taught me the importance of everyone from Midnight Oil and The Butthole Surfers to The Sex Pistols. I had automatically discredited them in my mind because I was listening to jazz and fusion. But going through phases is part of the fun of being a teenager. One day you decide, “That band sucks, this is where it’s at.” And the next you decide, “That’s not where it’s at, this is.” All the phases bring you finally to a point where you’re not afraid to admit that you really liked this particular Tom Petty record. At nineteen or twenty, I wouldn’t have told my punk-rock friends that. But Tom Petty, and people like Jim Keltner, Jeff Porcaro, Charlie Drayton, and Steve Jordan, are classic examples of how amazing playing can be without it being a circus act.

Scott Tunis taught me the beauty of a guy playing 4/4, laying it down to the point where nothing else matters. That’s when you shake your head half in disgust because it’s so good and half in awe because you can’t believe you’re getting excited about someone playing a simple midtempo 4/4. That’s not supposed to be hard, but to make it feel that way is hard.

I’ll get a call from a producer who says, ‘Josh, I need you in the studio next week. The band is back wherever they live. We have all the Pro Tools files open—it will be you, me, the computer, and an engineer. You have to redo three or four songs.’ So I’ll go in, knock out the tunes, and a lot of times I don’t even hear the finished record. Sometimes it ends up being a hit without my even realizing it.

I’ve tracked down, become friends with, and gotten to work alongside almost every one of my heroes. A lot of those people don’t make a ton of money, but as a fan, a kid who was always more into the underdog, that’s the music I fell in love with. Before there was alternative music, I was into it. I’ve gotten to work with people who I consider to be true artists, and to me that’s way more rewarding than the big money. I’ve played with some big-money people, too, but that’s never the motivation.

I often get called to play on a track or two of a band where I don’t get credited, or sometimes it might say “additional percussion by Josh Freese,” but I really played on the three singles on the record. Sometimes it’s a band without a drummer, or they’ve fired the drummer in the middle of the record. I’ve been in every situation—the drummer is there and he’s pissed off, or the drummer is there and he’s excited that I’m going to help out, or the drummer isn’t there and the rest of the band is trying to keep him away from the studio.... It’s always some sort of weird political thing, and it’s egos, friendships, and business.

I remember the first time I was replaced in the studio, about ten years ago, and it was done behind my back. I don’t feel bad about it now, because not only have I since replaced guys who I think are great, but at the time I was only twenty. I recorded a track, but the producer didn’t have a check for me and told me to stop back whenever I was in the neighborhood to pick it up. This was someone I worked with all the time. So I pulled up to the studio the next day and heard live drums through the wall and thought, “Oh, he must be producing a band.” I walked in and started chatting with the secretary and suddenly realized I recognized the song— it was the same one I had recorded. I didn’t say anything and didn’t make anyone feel uncomfortable. I left feeling kind of sad, with my ego bruised, but it was probably good for me. I probably thought I was hot stuff at the time, so it was good for me. Now I realize it doesn’t mean that you didn’t do a good job.

I called that producer a couple of days later and said I didn’t want to put him on the spot, but I wanted to know what I did wrong. He explained that the artist felt the drums were tuned way too floppy and he wanted something a little more pop with a higher-pitched snare, and a little lighter approach. I still felt awful, but right around that same time—within a week— there was an article in Modern Drummer called “Getting Replaced In The Studio” with stories from guys like Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner, Denny Fongheiser, and Kenny Aronoff, and it made me feel better.

Devo for me was like playing with Led Zeppelin or the Beatles. The first record I ever got in my life was a Devo record. Their guitarist produced a Vandals record, and when they kinda reformed, jumping on stage at Lollapalooza, they asked me to drum cuz they had a falling out with the original drummer. It was a blast playing the songs I grew up listening to. They're such bizarre, eccentric, intelligent weirdos.

In '93 or '94 I got flown up to Seattle to audition for Pearl Jam. You gotta remember, they were the biggest band in the planet at the time - and they're still amazing. I played with them and it was great. Stone Gossard wanted to pick me, but for whatever reason, it didn't happen. I guess I wasn't meant to be part of their 'family,' you know? But they're really cool guys, and I've stayed friends with Stone ever since. All things for a reason.

The first year I was there [=1998], like, five nights a week. I'd drive from Long Beach up to the Valley, deep in the Valley, like at 9 at night, 10 at night, and work till, like, four or five, six, in the morning, you know, five nights a week for the first year, give or take a week or two if we'd have off.

As soon as I discovered the studio time would conflict with the Vandals tour. I told the other band members [of the Vandals] they should find a replacement. It was a hard decision, but I figured it would be better than canceling the tour altogether.

And what I was more excited about is that I had written three or four songs, I co-wrote three or four songs. When I left there was two lists. There's the master list, like, "Here's the 20 songs we're concentrating on." And there was a B list, "And here's the other 20 songs that if we get to him one day or finish him one day, we'll see what happens." For the 20 songs, I had three or four songs, or for the 16, I had three or four songs that were in the running. And so, like, that's pretty cool [...]

The second year I was down there, '99, it was way looser. [...] It's not that the second year wasn't good, it's just the second year we're kind of running out of things to do. You know what I mean? The record wasn't done-