Karma  (Inside-Out America)

Top two cardinal rules of rock n roll: No Smoke On The Water riffs at the guitar store and drummers, please, no solo albums. But that s not exactly fair. Wayne's World exposed Stairway To Heaven as the shalt not of the guitar shop, and drummers have been surprising us for years with hidden talents we might have otherwise missed had they stayed in the back watching everybody else s shake n bake butts.

And then again, Nick D' Virgilio is no standard drummer. As the pulsing backbeat of America's most vigorously vibrant progressive rock band Spock's Beard, his playfulness, his swooping grooves, his light, shade, texture and hue have gathered an army of fervent watchers the world over. And of course, Nick is also a vocal weapon for the band, providing lots of background work while handling high lead chores as well.

But it don't stop there, explains D' Virgilio. Music pings like a Mexican jumping bean through this man, and has done so since, well, the Osmonds were big (or at least taller than Nick). "I started playing drums when I was three and I did pretty much nothing but play music from that point on, except for some baseball and golf in between there. My brother taught me how to play guitar when I was seven years old, and I kind of just copied records from that point on as I had been doing with my drums. I didn't start playing piano until I was 17 or 18. I always wanted to be a guitar player though. I was always jealous of the guitar player. I always wanted to be out front. I've been singing since I was a little kid. I wanted to be Donny Osmond. My parents took me to Las Vegas to see the Osmonds at the Tropicana when I was four (laughs). I bought my first Kiss records when I was six or seven then my brother turn me on to Zeppelin and Genesis (ed.:later Nick would drum for the band, as well as Peter Gabriel, Eric Burdon, David Baerwald and Sheryl Crow) and that changed everything. But yeah, I was playing guitar and singing all the time, as well as drumming. Drumming was the most serious though, maybe because it just came that much more naturally to me. And my brother played trumpet. I always did everything my brother did. So through grade school and junior high and high school I also played trumpet and bassoon and French horn and stuff because I didn't like what the drummers had to do in school band. It was pretty boring so I wanted to play something else. That's where I got my music reading but I wouldn't dare pick up a trumpet now."

And on Karma - thankfully perhaps - Nick does not play trumpet. But he does handle guitar, keyboards, bass and drum duties on the album, as well as providing an astonishing array of confident vocal directives. But he is not alone. New prog future classics like guitarist Mike Keneally and Bryan Bellar (Steve Vai, Mullmuzzler, Beer For Dolphins) are also on board, as is Spock s Beard keyboardist Ryo Okumoto, turning Karma into a strident collection of songs ranging from the experimental title track to the closest and most intimate of ballads and all pressure prog points in between. 

"Well, it's not as experimental as Spock's Beard", ventures Nick as a summation. "It's more straight-ahead, more singer-songwriter-y, if that's a word, at points. But it has its progressive sections, it has its muso-vibe, it's definitely in that same ballpark. It's kind of Tears For Fears meets Kevin Gilbert, with some kind of pop dude thrown in there somewhere (laughs). There's a little bit of everything. It's definitely organic, guitar-based. There are three acoustic piano tracks but it also has sections that are big. There's only one instrumental; every other song is vocals, all me singing, except for little bits of background help here and there."

"Mike and Bryan took my music and really & it's so cool to see what other players do. They pretty much just heard my demos a few days beforehand. The River Is Wide , Dream In Red , and The Water's Edge are the three songs that Mike and Brian played on. And I just thought that they would do something cool to those tunes. They re pretty straight-ahead tunes compared to what they do, at least compared to Mike's solo stuff, and they just took them to another place; it's really cool. They embellished my parts with their own style and that really made the songs jump out to me."

 An explosion of enigmatic pop criss-crossings indeed springs to mind when listening to the panoramic expanse of Karma. The Beatles, Styx, Julian Cope, Elton John, Dave Matthews, Terence Trent D'Arby, Adrian Belew, Kansas, Phish & evidence and remnants thereof crop up. And one would expect nothing less from this immense, multi-instrumental talent driving the new prog princes that call themselves Spock's Beard.

Perhaps representing the album in microcosm form is its elegant, buoyant and effortlessly hooky opening track The River Is Wide . "It's kind of a progressive piece" explains Nick. "Lyrically it's saying you've got obstacles in front of you; you've got to get to the other side and move on and make better things happen. So it's kind of the intro track to get all the other stuff started, and it fits with the Karma theme. It definitely rocks and it has little fusion-style bits here and there and some really great guitar playing from Mike. In terms of influence, I was thinking more along the lines of King's X with the harmony vocals and the fairly heavy, lick-oriented guitar, bass and drums sound."

Dream In Red pushes to the forefront Nick s fluid funky drumming, his more or less closeted love of R & B and soul. "I hope it's a single because it really gets me that way" notes Nick. "It's hooky, pretty much a pop tune, and again it's got Mike and Brian on the song. It's about this guy who kind of loses it all and every time something goes wrong, all he sees is red flashing lights in front of him and it kind of stops him from doing everything. He's basically walking down the street of this town and all the stoplights are flashing red everywhere and it sets him off thinking about his life."

"I'm much more of a soul guy" answers Nick. I'm not sure whether singer-songwriter or monster drummer for Spock s Beard, more accurately describes his personality. "Yeah, I mean, I love writing. I'm more of a groove player than a prog drummer. I don't know what a prog drummer is. I like just grooving. That's my favorite kind of stuff to do, even though I like the licks and fancy stuff and burning. That's why I have some of that stuff on the record. But I love R & B. There is definitely that influence on the album. I think there is, anyway. Maybe others wouldn't notice it. But definitely there is this funky vibe throughout."

This fluid, almost wandering sense of quirkiness rushes headlong into the title track, which might remind one of David Byrne-style world music. "I used trash can lids on the song Karma. It's just percussion and vocals. But it's me playing like 16 percussion parts. I'm playing floor tom, and I overdubbed myself five times playing the same part. So it's five layers of the floor tom part. It sounds like a percussion ensemble. I kept overdubbing and overdubbing and overdubbing. And we sent the trashcan lids through distortion boxes and filter banks and made it all sound weird. And I think there are 13 vocals on that one, all me: a lead vocal and 12 background guys. It's different, basically percussion and vocals the whole way through. I think it's a very catchy song. The lead vocal is hooky and lick-oriented. It's strange but it definitely is a song. It has verse-chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out. It has a form and everything. There's just no melodic instrumentation behind it."

The album closes with a monster piece of atmospheric futuro-rock called Paying The Price. "The last three songs on the record fit together as one story" begins Nick. "Although I have them demarcated separately. It tells the story of two kids growing up, different families, a boy and a girl, growing up in a dysfunctional household, seeing their parents fight, and it's just not cool. And they end up meeting each other just by pure circumstance. And since they both grew up with the same heartache and stuff, they get together and kind of heal each other, which is the last song called Unknowing; they get to move on with their life. The first song of the three is Dysfunction. This one is cool because the whole section until the live drum and bass guitar come in, it's all programmed. It's very kind of quasi-Euro programming, a Euro dance kind of thing; cool samples, drum and bass kind of grooves over the top of stuff, ethereal keyboards. So it's different, and then right at the end of it one of the themes that goes through the whole three songs comes in and then it's a big rock garage band again (laughs). In between Dysfunction and Paying The Price, if you listen you'll hear the melody of the last song Unknowing, come in for a second there. And when the garage band stuff comes in at the end of Dysfunction, it's playing a certain theme. That theme comes back in the middle of the second song, just to try and tie stuff together."

It is a fitting way to close what is a strong, very mature album, this stacked deck of musical wonder taking one through Dream Theater, 80s-era King Crimson, Rush in the 80s and 90s, even obscure Zeppelin tones in a couple of spots. It is a trilogy that is fired with soaring vocals, an acrobatic percussion crescendo, crafty sequencing of emotional highs and lows, all told, like the opening track, an ingenious roadmap to the albums many moods all within a microcosmic whole.

"The idea of Karma works its way into many of the songs", offers Nick inclosing. And that word describes where I'm at with my life anyway, with my family growing, new house, the band. The hook line in Karma is 'You can't hide when your karma follows you.' Good or bad karma can follow you anywhere (laughs)."

And the good indeed should flow, Nick's particular karmic music banquet stinging like clean cold water, D'Virgilio and a compact army of some of art rock's greatest thinkers turning in a record that seems freshly pressed for the right sunny creative reasons, even if at times, Nick tackles some tough emotional terrain. Karma cooks, it bubbles, it percussively percolates, and in that respect, it is a bouncy companion piece to the recorded works of Spock s Beard, who after hearing this, will have new problems within, namely that of dealing with a sudden embarrassment of creative riches that flow from too many good singers, too many good songs. If only every band had such problems!