FIFTH ANGEL’S KEN MARY

FIFTH ANGEL’S KEN MARY

Metal Gear

S.L. Duff

When the hard-boiled taskmasters from METAL called me with the assignment to interview Ken Mary—a drummer—I didn’t exactly get worked up enough to do backflips. A drummer? I mean, have you ever talked with one? Worse yet, have you ever had dinner with one? That can be downright frightening. What were we gonna talk about—hitting things, why Gonzo was God, why the Sandy Nelson comeback failed? I dunno, but we upwardly-mobile rock scribes live by one steadfast rule: Money is money and never turn down a paying gig, not even a Sting interview!

Turns out Mary was to call me from his home in Seattle, a city noted primarily for two things; it’s a place where it rains a lot and it’s also the original home of the Mentors, the latter tidbit being enough to put any town on the map. Relieved to know that at least I wouldn’t have to eat with the guy, I started doing my homework on Mr. Mary, and whaddaya know, he’s got a pretty impressive background. Not only that, but it turns out he is the main spokesman for his band, Fifth Angel, so interviews are second nature to him. As a globe-trotting veteran of the concert arena circuit, young Ken is quite the wordly cat, a nice guy, bright, and in fact pretty much debunks the standard drummer stereotype of Neanderthals in Misfit t-shirts.

Now you, the ever-inquisitive METAL reader, might be wondering how Mary’s band, Fifth Angel, got to be vets of the global circuit. Well, the fact is they ain’t, but Mary has worked with some other big names, and that’s where all the touring comes in.

Ken first hit the road with Randy Hansen—a white guy who donned blackface and a white Strat and performed some spellbinding Hendrix tributes—at the tender age of 16. Two years later he became a member of the Seattle band TKO, and 18 months and one album after that, he was back with Hansen. It was at this point that Mary became stadium bound.

“I was playing down at the Whisky AGo-Go with Randy Hansen—this was probably in the summer of ’86—and there were some people who saw me play and they said ‘Wow, you’re really good, why don’t you come down and audition?’ ” The audition in question was for the drum throne in Alice Cooper’s comeback band, and Ken did get the gig. He remembers, “The next thing I knew I was on a live MTV broadcast in front of 20 million people watching, so that was really something that made everybody a little bit nervous. But we knew we were ready for it!”

Mary’s sudden boost to the limelight did numerous things for his career. Besides the subsequent tour of the world, Ken suddenly became an in-demand player, playing on a variety of albums. He recently tackled two LPs for RCA: Bonfire’s Fireworks and the soon-to-bereleased debut from House of Lords, Greg Giuffria’s new band. Producer Michael Wagener, with whom he had worked on Alice’s Raise Your Fist And Yeil, called on Ken to fill the vacated drum slot for Bonfire right at the beginning of the LP sessions. “I’d never even heard any of the stuff, I just went down there and played on the album,” says the modest fast-learner. “It was actually a lot of fun to do.”

Ken has had a longer relationship with prolific guitarist David Chastain. “He’s a great guy, and we’ve played on something like four records together now,” says Ken. “I can’t say enough about him as a person and as a musician. We originally got hooked up by Mike Varney, who did the first Chastain record, and he called me because of my work with Fifth Angel. (Varney’s Shrapnel label originally released a limited pressing of Fifth Angel before Epic picked it up.) Consequently, Dave keeps calling me up every so often and says, ‘Do you wanna do a record?’ So, we rehearse two days, go in the studio and bang out all the drum tracks in two days, so it takes us like four days or something.”

With all of this recording experience, it's no surprise that Ken has a terrific studio drum sound. In fact, that’s something you sonic-minded metalheads will notice immediately upon spinning Fifth Angel. Ken explains just how it’s done. “What we did is we recorded all real drums and then on top of those we also triggered (drum sounds). I have a Roland DDR 30 (a sampled drum sound unit) which we used along with the snare and kick. We sampled a snare and kick from the DDR 30 and then we ran it though an AMS reverb twice. We put a short delay on the snare and then we’d run it through again and put a longer delay on it. They had their own separate tracks for those, so we had four tracks of snare drum! (Real snare, sampled snare, short delay, long delay.) It sounds like one of the best sounding snare drums I’ve heard.”

Those searching to duplicate Ken’s mighty snare thwack had better experiment a bit since he won’t divulge all his secrets. As to those sampled sounds, Ken confesses “they are stock. They have parameters on the Roland that you can adjust, but I don’t know how to tell anybody exactly how to get the tone because I’d have to go back and figure out what parameters were changed. We just played around with the parameters a bit ’til we got a sound we were comfortable with, and then just meshed ’em together with the real snare.”

As well as becoming a master of the studio and the road, Ken now enjoys the rock-star luxury of equipment endorsements. “I use Pearl and Zildjian exclusively. Those (endorsements) came about at the beginning of the Alice tour, and it’s something that I’m definitely gonna stay with, ’cause both of those companies are tremendous. The equipment is tremendous and the way they take care of you is really good as well.”

It may be interesting for drumming upstarts to note that while Ken was playing in rock bands at the tender age of 13, his first gigs were in band class and in the school marching band. Ken feels this was crucial to his development as a skin basher. “In school, that’s where you learn to read music and you learn to listen to other musicians, which is really an important thing. When you get into a rock band, a lot of it has to do with timing, and you’re the anchor, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to anybody else in the band, ’cause you want to fit in with what’s being played. The more you can play, and the more different styles you can play, the better it is for you.”

EQUIPMENT CHECKLIST

Roland DDR 30 with Roland brains for triggering of snare, kick, and some toms. Drums (all Pearl):

Two 24-inch kicks; 6&1/2” X 14” brass snare; 8”, 10”, 12”, 13”, 14”, 15”, 16” power toms, 18” power floor tom. Cymbals (all Zildjian, and all from the shiny “Brilliant” line):

14” Rock hi-hat; 8” & 10” splash; 17” rock crash, two 18” rock crash, 19” &20” rock crash; 18” & 19” China; 22” pang; 22” Earthride; 8” EFX cymbal; additional external 14” hi-hat.

Pearl hardware.

Remo drum heads.

Regal tip 2B sticks.