Nirvana Tour: Aaron Burckhard Whipped Me at Pool

I’ll let this stand alone. I can’t believe it!

…As in, I can’t believe I lost at pool. As I said to Aaron, “I don’t care if you were Nirvana’s first drummer, I still wanna beat you!” And I didn’t. Slim margins but he was a deserved 2-1 victor, he should have beat in the first game too if the black ball hadn’t gone down along with the white. We had driven over to a bar on Fourth Avenue in Olympia and after time spent in the yard enjoying the warm night we moved inside to play a bit longer.

Wish I was feeling more photogenic by the time we took a brief photo, I kid myself I ever look better than that in photos; a whole day trekking round in the car with Mitch had left both of us sun-fried and fuzzy-eyed. An excellent tour.

Anyways, Aaron has just been brought onboard as drummer for Under Sin with the gentleman who had been handling drums for them preferring to move to guitar. The band’s first show with him will be in October and there are a couple of radio sessions coming up — look out for them, link up to them and enjoy. Aaron played a couple of the band’s songs in the car stereo, we’re talking a more metallic edge than Nirvana, a heavier sound built around precise riffage — you’ll like it. Aaron was very clearly delighted to be involved with them, a sea of compliments about the talent of his new band members, incapable of not drumming along on top of his bag while sat in the back of the car, talking about the plans ahead of them…That’s the impression I’ll take with me, a guy who clearly takes drumming seriously, love to be involved with good musicians and wants to make sure his contribution is pin-perfect. It’ll always be a shame there isn’t more on record of his work (and Dave Foster’s work too actually) with Nirvana.

And I’m still not happy I lost; this is a holiday sulk! It’s not often I get competitive, and part of me wants to claim I’d have won if it was British pool not American pool we were playing (yeah, right…!), but…Nah, I’ll stop joking. It was fun just shooting the breeze, downing a few beers, enjoying the good company of Aaron and Mitch and just being real people rather than tourist, former Nirvana drummer and former childhood friend of Kurt and Krist.