You don’t know me, but if you’re of a certain age, it is very likely that there is a connection between us — a way in which I am a part of you. I want to tell the story of how that came to be, how some amateurs messing around in the backroom of a low-rent novelty store ended up producing a brief national sensation. This is the story of a band from the Detroit suburbs called 24 Radiant Green Umbrellas. This is the story of their accidental hit song — “Strike Anywhere” — which crept onto the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1989. And most of all, this is the story of a drum fill that occurs at precisely two minutes and thirty-five seconds into the song.

24RGU’s single hit rarely gets airplay anymore. But I will bet that if you were older than a toddler in 1989, you have more than a trace of “Strike Anywhere” buried somewhere in your memory. I bet you’ll even be able to mumble through some of the lyrics. And when it gets to the fill in question, I bet you’ll experience a moment of recognition. It’s a distinctive piece of drumming and was more than a little responsible for making the song a minor hit that summer — just as Bush One was visiting a newly democratic Poland and Voyager 2 approached Neptune, sending back shocking images of a giant blue world.

 

When COVID struck, I was making a living in the most unlikely of ways — working in a boutique sound studio in Detroit, a shop that had resurrected all the old tools. Most sound guys these days only know the digital side of things. But I can still cut reel-to-reel the old-fashioned way — with a razor blade and splicing tape. I can talk to you all day about phantom power, plate reverb, or why you might choose an ElectroVoice RE20 instead of a Shure M58 to mic a kick drum. At Warm Notes Studio, I was able to put that old-school knowledge to good use.

Warm Notes was a pet project of Thomas Sharp, a lawyer from one of the big firms headquartered in the skyscrapers that overlook the Detroit River. Wanting to support Detroit’s so-called “resurgence,” Thomas had sought an alternative to establishing a new bar, gallery, or urban farm. His father, Eddie, had been a session musician for a time in the sixties. When Thomas learned that a former studio on Detroit’s West Side was being auctioned after a tax foreclosure, he purchased the whole works — the building and everything in it. The place had been dormant for decades, and there was considerable water damage from a burst pipe — a horror film of black mold and spongey drywall. But the equipment had somehow been spared the worst of the wreckage, and the sound booth boasted a vintage Helios mixing console that would likely fetch a small fortune on eBay.

Thomas envisioned something that blurred the lines between a museum and a small operational studio. He invested a pretty sum in the building’s restoration and hired me to run things. We were only in our second year when COVID hit, and we’d just started to build some momentum. We recorded high school jazz bands, church choirs, local rappers. Our last big project was a group of middle schoolers reading their poetry. An ElectroVoice mic running through the Helios board gave these kids’ voices a kind of instant archival quality as if they were broadcasting from the middle of the previous century.

Warm Notes Studio closed at the first sign of the pandemic. We were about as far from an “essential” business as you could get, and singing indoors was deadly, a sure way to project the virus into the air. I applied for unemployment and looked for ways to keep myself busy during the quarantine.

COVID changed my sensibilities in subtle ways that I’m just now beginning to understand. I invested long hours on Facebook, crawling through the feeds of friends, enemies, half-remembered kids I had gone to band camp with forty years ago. I found myself reaching out to long-lost acquaintances with random texts and FB messages: Just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing in these strange times. Immersed in this weird solitary confinement, where the past seemed more real than the present, where almost all human contact was mediated through devices, I became ever more preoccupied with that track I had recorded for 24RGU in 1989.

 

How did it happen? How did a nineteen-year-old kid from a milk-toast Detroit suburb help an unknown local band record a hit song?

Beginning in late elementary school, I was in one band after another — random combos resulting from whoever happened to be around. In high school I started playing with a guitarist and bass player who were pretty talented. We called ourselves Roilohk (a riff on Royal Oak, the northern suburb of Detroit where I lived) and had grand visions of becoming the next U2. We were serious enough that we pooled our allowances and purchased a used home multitrack recorder. It was a limited piece of equipment, but it let you “overdub” — meaning you could record drums (for instance) and then lay other parts on top, adding guitars, vocals, etc.

More than anyone else in the band, I developed a fascination for that multitrack recorder. I patched in my home stereo and recorded myself playing to whatever came over the local top-forty station. I began collecting noises — traffic sounds, crickets, a door being unlocked. One time I filled our bathtub and spent hours recording the sound of droplets from a turkey baster hitting the surface of the water. There was something magical about that noise echoing in the tiled bathroom: a fairy popping a bubble of delicate glass.

My mom’s much younger brother owned a shop called Georgie’s Garage in a strip mall. To this day, I don’t fully understand what kind of place it was. My uncle’s name was Kent, and much of his merchandise fell into the “obscure miracle gadgets” category — attachments for turning your garden hose into a fountain, a device that would shape a hardboiled egg into a cube — that kind of thing. I’m pretty sure he intermittently sold illegal fireworks.

Georgie’s Garage had an inexplicably large storage area in the back, with its own door that exited to the alley behind the building. My uncle let Roilohk practice there. I’d read somewhere that you could soundproof a room by lining the walls with egg cartons. You mount them to the wall bottoms out, and the egg-shaped nodules approximate the texture of acoustic foam. In truth, this method is not very effective, but we didn't know that. We enlisted friends and relatives to save their egg cartons and slowly covered the walls of the storage area, attaching them to the drywall with thumbtacks. Then we spray-painted the whole affair black. It looked like the inside of a spaceship.

When we graduated from high school in 1988, my bandmates went away to college, but much of our equipment had been purchased collectively, so it stayed there in the soundproofed storage room. We’d scoured garage sales and the classified ads for used equipment, eventually assembling a decent collection of amps, mics, cords, and stands. Friends started contacting me to help with various recording projects, often slipping me a couple twenties afterward as a kind of gratuity.

Seeing an opportunity for a source of income that didn’t depend on flipping burgers, I decided to spend all of my graduation money on a better multitrack recorder — something called a Vesta Fire. This was still in the home-recording market, nothing close to professional grade. A real studio would have recorded on two-inch reel-to-reel tape, whereas my little Vesta Fire recorded on a standard cassette. But in a way, that was an advantage because it meant people left recording sessions with something they could immediately pop into their home stereo. And the Vesta Fire had some slick features. You could mix three tracks down to a fourth one — a process called “ping-ponging” because you were bouncing the recorded content from one location on the tape to another.

Believe it or not, a steady stream of business found its way to my makeshift studio. Most of my customers were local bands who wanted demo tapes — young kids with no money and stars in their eyes. They could pop into my studio for an afternoon and walk away with something to impress their friends and family.

24RGU was one of those bands — although they stuck out in several ways. They were older, richer, more professional. I’d certainly worked with more talented musicians, but the members of 24RGU had a business-like sensibility that set them apart.

We recorded three songs over several weeknights. They would meet at the studio around six, usually clutching white paper bags containing Big Macs and fries. Stan was the frontman, responsible for vocals and guitar. The Catroni brothers — Gus (bass) and Joe (drums) — formed the rhythm section. Stan’s girlfriend Evelyn was on keyboards, sporting an expensive Roland synthesizer.

Ironically, Stan was the least skillful musician of the bunch. In fact, he was barely a musician at all. But he wrote the songs, such as they were, and strummed a guitar — a gorgeous Les Paul — covering his lack of skill with a tangle of expensive effects boxes that made his simple chords sound more interesting. He was one of those people whose love of music is so fierce that they come to think of themselves as musicians by sheer force of will. When they coax a basic chord from their guitar, they instantly imagine that it’s coming from center stage at Madison Square Garden.

The best song of the three was called “Strike Anywhere.” It was a stutter song — think “K-K-K Katie” or Bob Seger’s “Katmandu.” The melody, if you could call it that, is very simple, and at times the song is more chant than music. But that became its strength:

About two-thirds of the way through the song, Stan screams, You know you have to strike! — and the band cuts out. Joe Catroni dampens his cymbal with two hands, creating a sudden, instantaneous silence. (I remember this vividly because Joe was very skinny and had delicate hands. Every time he grabbed the sharp edge of the cymbal, I thought he was going to injure himself.) The bass is the first to come back in — a funky riff that sounded great on Gus’ Rickenbacker. After a few bars, there’s a distinctive drum fill, and the rest of the band joins in, with Stan repeatedly imploring the world to St-t-t-t-strike!

Musically speaking, there wasn’t much to the song, but Stan saw it as a crowd-pleaser from the start. It was about surprise, drama, humor — more vaudeville entertainment than pop music.

Stan insisted that the song needed to begin with the sound of a match striking and had brought a box of Diamond kitchen matches for this purpose. But he imagined a really long strike — a decisive scraping that spanned several beats, ending with the telltale hiss of the match igniting. This proved difficult. Ironically, the matches Stan brought were strike-on-box safety matches, so they only worked on the strip of sandpaper glued to the side of the box.

With limited equipment, I had to be clever. In the end, I struck the match in front of an SM58 to get a clear recording. I rewound the tape to the moment just before the match lit up, then recorded another strike, then another. It took six strikes to get the required duration, and you could tell they were stitched together. At first this seemed like a failure: we wanted a smooth, continuous scrape. But then we realized it was a stutter, just like the lyrics. In the end, it was an accidental stroke of brilliance.

We recorded the song in one grueling session on a Friday night.  Stan struggled to generate passable sounds on his guitar. At the same time, he wasn’t satisfied with the performance of his bandmates, especially Evelyn, who left the room in tears at one point. But at around one in the morning, we had a version that we all liked. Operating on coffee, adrenaline, and blind stubbornness, we overcame limitations of equipment and skill to produce a track that we all felt was special. We listened to the final mixdown with silly grins on our faces.  Evelyn even gave me a kiss on the cheek to celebrate.

 

“Strike Anywhere” was never destined to become a classic, but it did limp its way onto the charts in the summer of 1989. At that time, Metro Detroit was the fifth largest market in the nation, with over four million people. Motown had left for L.A. in the previous decade, but many smaller labels were still active, and a crowded radio dial included a number of stations that focused on the new, the obscure, and the weird. Stan gave a copy of our demo tape to a friend who DJed for a student-run station at a local junior college, and soon “Strike Anywhere” was getting dropped into his nightly mix.

One of the late-night listeners who heard the song was Astawan Vincente, who owned a small label — Polypodiopsida Records — based in Ferndale, a suburb adjacent to Detroit. (Polypodiopsida is the scientific name for fern.) As it happens, Vincente was putting together a compilation album intended for radio stations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hearing something catchy in “Strike Anywhere,” Vincente called the radio station and got Stan’s phone number. At that time, CDs were still considered nonstandard, and Vincente actually paid for one thousand copies of the compilation to be issued in vinyl by Dot Pressing Plant, located in the Downriver suburb of Wyandotte.

If you know anything about the music recording industry, you know that all of this was wrong. You don’t release a song recorded on a Vesta Fire. 24RGU should have re-recorded the song in a real studio. But Vincente had the rest of the material for the compilation album ready to go. He’d already booked time at Dot Pressing. Somewhere along the line, someone listened to the recording I made and said, “Good enough.” So that’s what got transferred to vinyl, and that’s what got played on the radio.

 

“Strike Anywhere” succeeded on luck and a series of gags — the match strike, the stuttering, the chantable fight-song lyrics. But there was one additional element that sealed the deal — a distinctive fill that occurs at precisely 2:35, after the band cuts out and Gus Catroni comes back in with the bassline. There’s a secret about that fill that almost no one knows: Joe Catroni, 24RGU’s drummer, did not play it. I did.

Joe was a competent enough drummer — not particularly creative, but steady and smooth. As a drummer myself, I kept thinking about how I would approach “Strike Anywhere,” especially the part where the band comes back in after that dramatic pause. I started to imagine a particular way the drums could re-enter the song. Imagine isn’t even the right word. I could feel it in my arms and legs — the perfect fill. After 24RGU left that night, I sat down at the kit and played with the song, trying out my idea. By that time it was about two a.m., and I was still really pumped up from the success of the recording session and the gallons of coffee that we’d fetched from an all-night diner down the road. My ears were humming. My arms were vibrating. I decided to go for it.

My fill was connected to the idea of striking and stuttering. In drums, we have something called a “ghost note” — a quieter note, like an echo. The fill I had in mind — or that seemed to possess my arms and legs — used the idea of ghost notes on the snare to indicate a kind of stutter, like the repeated t-sounds in Stan’s St-t-t-t-strike! It’s hard to describe, but when you hear it, it sounds natural, like a match being struck over and over until it explodes. It wasn’t super difficult from a technical perspective. But there is a distinctive feel to it, and it fits the song.

I didn’t tell 24RGU about my strategic modification to their track. I was pretty sure Joe would simply assume he’d played it. It was not an ethical thing to do, but I was a kid, and my moral code was not very refined. Honestly, I think my nineteen-year-old self assumed he had done 24RGU a favor by gifting them this fill. And, in a way, he had.

 

In 1989 I only knew a few of the details about how “Strike Anywhere” made its splash. My part in the process was done when I handed Stan the ten cassettes he’d paid for. I couldn’t tell anyone about my fill, and almost no one knew or cared that the song had been recorded in my makeshift studio. What I didn’t learn until later was the role the dance scene in Metro Detroit — and later in Chicago and other cities — played in making the song a hit.

At that time, dance was a thriving subculture in Detroit. An eclectic mix of sounds from all over the world was flowing into area clubs: the mechanical repetitions of Kraftwerk, Donna Summer’s collaborations with Giorgio Moroder, George Clinton’s funk (which had its roots at Detroit’s own Westbound Records). Three high school friends from the nearby suburb of Belleville — Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Juan Atkins — were busy inventing a new form of music called techno: a fusion of disco, funk, and electronica that would eventually become an international sensation.

I was oblivious to all this at the time. Part of the reason for that is a little shameful, I’m afraid. A straight white kid from the suburbs, I was groomed to dislike dance music on principle. At that time, a local rock station was handing out D.R.E.A.D. cards — gold-colored business cards that read Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco. I never owned one, but I was caught up in a white suburban culture whose defining characteristic would now, in 2021, be labeled as “toxic masculinity.” I associated manhood with loud drums and distorted guitars. Early school dances were all about the angry screams of AC/DC and Ozzy Osborne.

But late that summer, after “Strike Anywhere” dropped, I did have one notable encounter with the song in a dance club. A friend and I were driving around Detroit aimlessly, looking for something to do on a Friday night. On a whim, we decided to take the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, Canada, just across the Detroit River. In that pre-911 era, a simple driver’s license and an honest face would get you across the border. We had no idea what to do once we got off the bridge, so we parked and walked around. Eventually, we heard music coming from a place called Groove and wandered in.

Groove was a small dance club with spinning lights. That night, the DJ happened to be a Black woman named Tanya Cobalt. This scene was foreign to me, and I couldn’t appreciate Cobalt’s skill at the time. From the hours I’ve since invested in researching the subject, I can tell you that Cobalt was considered a virtuoso — which is consistent with what I’m able to reconstruct from the fragmented memories I have of the night. Cobalt ran three turntables simultaneously, stitching together sonic material from a staggering range of sources. A few bars of Pet Shop Boys would somehow morph into Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and then into an advertisement for Diet Pepsi.

We’d been there for about twenty minutes, trying to blend in with the other dancers, when Cobalt spun “Strike Anywhere.” Rather than start the song at the beginning, Cobalt cued it up at the beat before the band cuts out. Picture a torrent of multilayered sound fueling a crowded floor of ecstatic dancers. Then imagine Joe Catroni’s choked cymbal crash, followed by four beats of complete silence. It was a highly theatrical moment. Apparently, this was a ritual familiar to the crowd. Everyone around me erupted with screams and whoops. Then Gus’s bassline kicked in, followed by my very own fill — the clandestinely recorded stuttering ghost notes that I had overdubbed in Roilohk Studios only a few months before. To my amazement, the crowd performed a choreographed routine to my drumming. They stopped dancing, raised their hands above their heads, and pantomimed the act of striking a match. Then they were back to full-body dancing, shouting with Stan: St-t-t-t-strike!

I was dumbfounded at what I experienced at Groove. I’d done something here. I had contributed to a cultural trend, a ritual shared by a crowd of people I’d never met. I felt that I deserved some kind of credit, though I couldn’t say what form that acknowledgment should take. At the same time, I felt like a liar of sorts. I had recorded that fill without telling anyone, and now everybody was performing a choreographed dance to it.

What I didn’t know then was that Tanya Cobalt wasn’t the only one dropping “Strike Anywhere” into nightly DJ sets. Clubbers were pantomiming match strikes in New York, Chicago, and other big cities across the country. But dance trends tend to be short-lived, and this one faded away in a matter of months. “Strike Anywhere” received less and less radio play. Within a year, everyone had forgotten about the song and the dance.

 

When COVID hit Detroit, I was living in a small apartment on the top floor of a rundown three-story house in Midtown. Over the previous decade, Detroit had seen a lot of energy. The city declared bankruptcy in 2010 but had escaped the worst-case scenarios. Historic skyscrapers were being renovated. Upscale brands were showing their wares in the massive glass displays of downtown storefronts.

Winter always makes things difficult in Michigan, but by the end of March, after the mercury touches fifty once or twice, we allow ourselves to hope for warm weather and a return to the outdoors. COVID hit like a second winter just as we were about to venture out again. Warm Notes closed immediately. My favorite coffee joints closed. I found myself facing long hours in my snug apartment, and I turned to the Internet with newfound desperation.

At some point, I typed Joseph Catroni into an online people search, returning dozens of entries. I figured it was unlikely I would be able to cull through this thicket of Catroni’s to find the one I had known. But it just so happened that I stumbled on a listing for a Joseph Catroni living in Marquette, a city located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, seven hours away from Detroit. It was a long shot, but I clicked the VIEW DETAILS button and scanned the listings — phone numbers, current and past addresses, the names of family members and known associates. I was just about to move on when a name jumped out at me: Augustus Catroni. Gus!

Convinced that I had the right listing, my heart started to race. The cell number of 24RGU’s drummer was right there on my computer screen. It was as if a portal to 1989 had suddenly opened up in my little one-bedroom apartment.

Eager to ride the energy of the moment, I grabbed my iPhone and typed out a hasty, almost frantic message: This is Rusty Clemson. I helped you record three tracks with 24RGU back in 1989. Thought I would reach out and say hello. I hit the send arrow quickly, almost as if I were playing a joke on myself. Then, as a PS: I hope I have the right person. Then: I was working at Roilohk Studios at the time.

Joe’s reply came through a few hours later: 24RGU. That was a long time ago. Hope you’re doing well.

I was excited by the response, but also disappointed in what seemed like its finality. I wrote back: Been thinking a lot about that summer of 1989. “Strike Anywhere” took the world by storm.

Yes. Those were fun times.

I wasn't sure where I wanted this conversation to go. But I wanted it to go somewhere.

Listen, I’m starting a new blog about the Detroit music scene, past and present. Would love to chat with you briefly. It was technically a lie, but as I typed it, it sounded like a good idea.

Ok

7:00 this evening?

Can we do it tomorrow?

Perfect.

 

I called the next evening as planned. I offered a quick reintroduction, letting Joe know that I was still recording music. “People don’t realize how vibrant Detroit was in the late eighties,” I told Joe. “Someone needs to document that.”

“Interesting,” he said. I recognized Joe’s voice. There was a certain deadpan quality to it, a lack of emotion that I remembered from our brief interactions all those years ago.

“Am I right that some opportunities opened up for you after ‘Strike Anywhere’ dropped?”

“You’re taking me back,” Joe said, and then made a sound that seemed halfway between a groan and a sigh — as if my invitation to revisit 1989 was giving him a headache. After a pause, he resumed. “We opened for this band a few times in some midsize cities. Places like Dayton. Fort Wayne. I can’t even remember the name of that band now.”

“Test Footage?” I suggested.

“Right. Test Footage. I was never a fan, but they were a real band.”

“It must have been exciting to play in front of those crowds.”

“Yes and no.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, of course it was kind of a thrill ride at first. Stan was ecstatic. But those crowds were there to see Test Footage. They didn’t come to see us. And we weren’t ready for that scale. We went from playing in Stan’s basement to playing in front of hundreds of people.”

Joe provided a few additional details — how one of Polypodiopsida’s producers had tried to coax more songs out of the band. But in the end, nothing worked.

“We just weren’t any good,” Joe said. “Stan could never play. Our so-called frontman — he didn't know his instrument. The only talented one was Gus. ‘Strike Anywhere’ was a fluke.”

Talking to Joe was like walking against the current of a sluggish river: possible but tiring. And the truth of the matter was that I didn’t really know what kind of information I was after. I think the whole conversation lasted ten minutes. It was surreal to talk to him after all those years, but I wanted something more.

 

April came, and leaves budded in the trees along Woodward Avenue, heedless of the global pandemic raging around them. But the social energy of the city was severely tempered. Most people were still working from home, and cafes opened at half capacity, if at all. There was no plan to reopen the studio, but I continued to go there to play the drum kit and mess with the other toys. Somehow, we’d accumulated an old Korg M-1 synthesizer (think Madonna’s “Vogue”). I spent hours plunking out noises on that unit. My prowess on the keyboard pretty much maxes out with “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but the sounds the Korg produced on Warm Note’s tube amps were otherworldly and massive, making me feel like a kind of wizard.

If you’ve spent any time in recording studios, you know they follow a drunken geometry. Normal rectangular rooms create unwanted reverberations, so studios purposely adopt an anti-Euclidian floorplan — some walls are long, some inexplicably short, and everything meets at random angles. It can be disorienting. Warm Notes felt like a kind of secret oasis in the city — a weird funhouse whose foam-covered walls have sponged up the notes of countless musicians, many of whom were very talented.

I continued to fantasize about what it would be like to sit down and talk with Joe Catroni face to face, and I began casually surfing Airbnb to see what kind of accommodations I might find close to Marquette. COVID slowed a bit with the warmer weather, and without thinking about it too much, I reserved a $69/night room in an old Victorian house located a few blocks from the Big Lake.

I tried to convince myself that I was taking this trip as a getaway. The U.P. is a popular vacation spot, with gorgeous beaches and rocky cliffs. If I saw Joe, it would be a bonus. I packed my own food to keep costs down: peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a case of Old Milwaukee. Before backing out of my driveway on the morning of the trip, I texted Joe: Spending a few days in the U.P. Interested in grabbing a beer?

***

I won’t lie: I wasn’t crazy about the idea of meeting with Rusty Clemson. He seemed to want something from me, but I didn’t know what. Rusty had proposed beer, I countered with coffee, suggesting a café on Front Street with lots of outdoor seating. When he arrived, I extended my hand — better a handshake than a hug. While he shook my hand, I was treated to that familiar facial transformation — the blinking, the slackening of the jaw — that happens when someone belatedly discovers I’m a girl. In this case, I suspect that it was the feel of my hand itself that triggered the recognition. I have slender, graceful hands with smooth skin.

I’m five ten, skinny, athletic, and have an angular face. I’ve worn my brown hair short since I was about eleven, and people have occasionally mistaken me for a boy since before puberty. My default speaking voice is a slightly husky baritone that some people describe as lacking in emotion — “robotic,” as my brother Gus likes to tease. The monotone quality signals to some people a sense of disengagement or cynicism that I don’t always feel. I was the strongest swimmer on my swim team all through high school. My junior year I won the 500 freestyle event at districts. My favorite color is charcoal. My favorite outfit is a charcoal T-shirt and jeans.

I might as well answer the usual questions right here at the beginning. I’m not gay. My pronouns are she/her/hers. The name my mother gave me at birth is Josephine, but everyone has always called me Jo, which is precisely the name I would give myself were I offered the opportunity today. I’ve never been married, and I’ve never had a hard time getting a man when I wanted one. Lots of men find me attractive, and I’m smart enough to avoid the ones who are channeling creepy fantasies. Because of the way I look, some people (usually, but not always, men) feel like they can ask me questions that would otherwise be considered inappropriate. I’m just curious . . . Do you like flowers? Do you own any dresses? Do you ever wear makeup? Do you ever wear a bra? Do you prefer to be on top? Do you like to be spanked? In more than one instance, a man has touched me inappropriately under the guise that he considers himself to be touching another man in an asexual way. I’ve learned to keep a certain distance when I’m around men who have been drinking.

Rusty had contacted me out of the blue several weeks earlier. We’d interacted briefly when I still lived in the Detroit area, years ago. My brother Gus had recruited me to play the drums in this goofy band called 24 Radiant Green Umbrellas, and Rusty had recorded us in a makeshift studio that he had set up in his uncle’s garage.

I loved the drums in high school: orchestra, jazz band, and, most of all, marching band. I loved the crisp sound of the marching snare, arguably the most precise sound in all of music. When the drumline plays in perfect unison, there’s nothing like it. I had a jazz kit at home and could play it well enough. But it didn’t thrill me like my marching snare. It felt loose, ostentatious; my marching snare felt tight, exact.

My older brother Gus is a brilliant bass guitarist and continues to do session work. He never had the kind of commercial success he deserves. He was easily the best player in 24RGU — the only real musician. I knew right from the start that he was too good for that group, and I told him so. But his buddy Stan — the band’s so-called frontman — had him convinced 24RGU was going to be the next Tears for Fears or some shit. When they (we) had a surprise hit song in the summer of 1989, Gus felt momentarily vindicated. I could see it in his eyes when we would be driving to the grocery store or McDonald’s and our song “Strike Anywhere” would come on the shitty radio of the ‘76 Delta 88 my father had bought us for a hundred dollars. Gus would look at me and smile — that knowing, slightly patronizing smile that a brother will sometimes flash his kid sister, as if to say, See, I told you so. Unfortunately for Gus, I was ultimately right about 24RGU. The hit was a fluke, and the group imploded within a year.

In the months leading up to the 24RGU fiasco, I’d been drifting, having temporarily dropped out of college. My high school English teachers always told me, “You’re a good writer,” so when I got accepted to the University of Michigan and was asked to declare a major, I chose English. But I could never get interested in discovering the hidden meanings of ancient poems or talking about Shakespeare’s obsession with roses or skulls or blood. Ann Arbor is a snobby town and, if you ask me, English majors are some of the biggest snobs of all.

I told my parents I was “taking time off” after completing my freshman year, but I never went back to Ann Arbor. That was about when Gus started hanging out with Stan. Stan was a salesman. It was a kind of vocation for him. He started with one of those outfits where you sell kitchen knives. Then he sold cable TV door to door. Then he joined Amway and started getting expensive salon haircuts and wearing fake Rolexes.

Stan loved attention and was sometimes so obvious in his efforts to get it that people found him obnoxious. I don’t know why it took Gus such a long time to see that. It was the whole reason Stan started 24RGU to begin with. He wanted to be on stage in front of thousands of people and, for reasons only he himself understood, felt that the world owed him that opportunity. He’d purchased an expensive guitar and about ten different effects boxes that allowed him to make all kinds of crazy sounds — sounds that called up exotic sea creatures or bubbles forming in honey. He would strum a weird chord and then look at you like he had just performed a brilliant magic trick. I think my brother was suckered in because Stan was everything he wasn’t. Gus was talented but underconfident, ambitious but quiet, a hard worker but risk averse. Stan was cocky, loud, and ready to bet the farm at any moment. Gus developed a bad man crush on him until finally he grew to hate Stan with a cold rage that I find mildly frightening even now.

 

Rusty somehow tracked down my cell number and texted me a few months ago, dredging up the 24RGU stuff — a period in my life that feels alien to me, as if it had happened to a different person. Back in 1989, Rusty had operated a ragtag recording studio out of his uncle’s garage. He’d nailed egg cartons to the walls and then spray-painted them black. It had the vibe of a ten-year-old’s tree fort.

Rusty was a drummer, which caused problems for me. In addition to the usual stage directions that he had for the rest of my bandmates, he had a lot of drumming advice. He was continually coaching me about keeping my hi-hat loose and shit like that. Lots of people thought that drums were for boys. At the time, I suspected Rusty couldn’t get over his own maleness. Now I’m not sure. Had Rusty thought I was a boy back then in 1989 or had his brain transformed me into one gradually over the ensuing decades?

I rarely think about 24RGU these days. After the group broke up, I started working at a summer camp in northern Oakland County. Gus and I grew up in a Detroit suburb called Clawson — an enclave of middle-class starter homes. But if you drove straight north for about fifteen miles, you would find yourself on dirt roads, surrounded by trees and farms. There was a kind of compound up there that had been the estate of one of the people who had gotten rich in the auto boom of the 1920s. During the summer months, it hosted a day camp for kids. We killed mornings with “crafts” (wood carving, candle making, decoupage) and occupied afternoons with “activities” (fishing, hiking, bug collecting). At the end of camp, there was an overnight stay, which always came with one or two mild catastrophes. One year Jenny — the camp’s pet goat — peed on some poor kid’s sleeping bag.

I loved that camp — loved being outdoors, loved the closeness that developed among the counselors, loved the way the kids looked up to me. The boys often developed crushes on me, and the girls saw me as a role model. So when I learned that Northern Michigan University, located way up in Marquette, offered a program called Outdoor Recreation Leadership and Management, what I heard was that I could major in being a camp counselor. I wasn’t 100% wrong about that, either. The program had more health and business stuff than I expected, but as an ORLM major, I took courses entitled “Adventure Program Planning.” I got college credit for planning adventures.

 I’d spent a lot of time in Marquette growing up because my dad’s dad, Joseph Catroni, lived in a small cottage up there. Most people think that the U.P. is all Norwegians and Finns, but my ancestors were founding members of the Italian Mutual Aid Society. After pasties and smoked Lake Superior whitefish, our most distinctive local cuisine is cudighi sausage, which the Catroni’s helped to import from the old country at the dawn of the last century.

Grandpa Joe agreed to let me live with him while I was in school, an arrangement that worked out well for both of us. He’d been living alone for years, and things were starting to slip. The roof leaked. His ancient Kenmore dryer was a lint-filled fire hazard. He survived almost exclusively on microwaved burritos. I brought love and order to that cottage, and I like to think that I made Gramp’s last few years on this earth more bearable — perhaps even happy. When he died, my dad inherited his place, but I worked out a deal to purchase it for well below market value.

I finished my degree in three years, having transferred my credits from U of M. One of my “field placements” was at a new summer camp called Northern Experience, which is like my old summer camp on steroids. No candle dipping there. NE offers teens a two-week immersive experience with an emphasis on ecology and fitness. We stay in semi-permanent tents — big canvas affairs that cover simple plywood platforms. Each one holds a dozen metal cots topped with thin, plastic-covered mattresses. I loved sleeping in those tents as an intern — loved the musty smell of the canvas, the thin membrane it provided between me and the nighttime woods. Not to mention that the land NE occupies is spellbinding — pine-covered hills, sparkling streams, and about three hundred yards of rocky frontage on the Big Lake. I started at NE as an unpaid intern but was helping to run the camp by the time I finished my degree. I’ve been director for over a decade.

When Rusty’s text about 24RGU penetrated this bubble, it was a little disorienting — like when your wicked stepmother interrupts a flying dream to wake you for school. I tried to respond politely but unencouragingly to his inquiries. Nevertheless, Rusty’s probing escalated from texts to phone calls to an in-the-flesh visit. I considered begging off but worried that an outright refusal would provoke some more aggressive response — like showing up on my doorstep. I decided that meeting him in town was the best option, and I was fully prepared to be explicit about wanting this to be the last of our interactions. I had him meet me at a coffee shop on Front Street and made a pretty obvious performance of introducing him to my friend Tony, who owns the shop and is built like a football center. I figured that sent a message to Rusty that he had been seen with me, that he knew I had friends who cared about my whereabouts. I even flirted with Tony a bit, asking when he was going to drop by for a Mickey’s Wide Mouth (a running joke between us). I wanted Rusty to see that even were he to find himself alone with me at home somehow, a spontaneous guest might show up at any time.

But I learned pretty quickly that Rusty was not interested in me per se. He was obsessed with his own past and his role in recording “Strike Anywhere,” which became an unlikely hit song the summer of 1989. Stan — being the snake-oil salesman he was — had somehow talked our demo tape up to the right people, and somehow our song got airplay not just in Detroit but also in New York and Chicago. For a brief moment, the four of us thought we might literally become rock stars. We opened for a more established band in midsized towns like Fort Wayne and Grand Rapids.

Rusty wasn’t a part of that — our contact with him ended after the recording sessions. But a minute or so into our conversation, I could tell that Rusty was smitten by the whole experience, that he seemed to consider himself 24RGU’s version of the fifth Beatle.

It was a truly gorgeous day, and we sat at a table that overlooked the Lake, in the shadow of the Ore Dock. If you haven’t been to Marquette before, the Ore Dock is the terminal point where railcars filled to the brim with iron ore pellets would unload onto Great Lakes freighters. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was carrying ore when it went down in Lake Superior. These floating football fields would chug their way to Gary or Detroit, where their ore would be turned into the steel that made America. Cars, tanks, airplanes. Iron ore is very heavy, and the Ore Dock looks like it was designed to weather a nuclear attack — massive concrete pillars support a vast network of wooden beams. I’ve always thought of it as a kind of cathedral. Both Grandpa Joe and his own father, Giuseppe Catroni, devoted most of their lives to the mines and had personally been responsible for scraping untold tons of ore from the earth.

Rusty presented himself as a tourist who was in town for a couple days to take in the sun. He looked the part, wearing a light-blue button-down and khaki shorts. Since those days in his uncle’s garage, Rusty had acquired a puffiness — round face, a beer belly, thinning hair. He had a lot of energy, but looking at his pale skin and watery eyes, I couldn’t help wondering if he had chronic health problems.

After a bit of chitchat, he looked at me earnestly and confessed that he had always thought I was a boy. That’s a familiar ritual too: people always want to confess. I tried not to let my annoyance show and told Rusty he wasn’t the first person to make that mistake. He was doubly confused because he had sussed out my presence in the U.P. by tracking down Joseph Catroni.

“Joseph was my grandfather. He lived up here until his death a few years back,” I explained.

Having dispensed with that ordeal, Rusty launched into his real topic: 24RGU.

“Did you know ‘Strike Anywhere’ started a kind of dance craze?” he asked. And then, right there at our table, he stood up, held his hands above his head, and pantomimed the gesture of someone striking a kitchen match. A half-dozen latte-sippers turned to stare. Rusty claimed that thousands of dancers had performed this routine in clubs from Detroit to L.A. He pumped me for information about Gus, Evelyn, and Stan. He tried to get me to describe what it was like to play in real concert halls for hundreds of cheering fans. He wanted me to conjure scenes of deafening applause and swaying Bic lighters.

After a while, he seemed to exhaust himself, and I thought the conversation was over. I stood up and deposited my empty coffee cup into a nearby trashcan, and when I got back to the table, I remained standing.

“Nice to see you again,” I said. I was already celebrating the fact that the conversation was over, ready to get back in my Land Rover and head home. But Rusty remained in his seat and looked at me with those sad, watery, pale-blue eyes.

“Do you have just a couple more minutes,” he asked. “There’s one more thing I want to tell you.” He was so earnest in this request that, for a moment, I thought he was about to cry. I sat back down in my chair. I may have accidentally rolled my eyes.

“Do you remember that fill about two-thirds of the way through ‘Strike Anywhere’?” He was staring openly at me now, looking for something in my face.

“The filling?”

“The fill. The drum fill.” He donned a pair of air drumsticks and pantomimed a drummer pounding a set of toms.

“Right,” I said. “No. I don’t remember very much about that song, Rusty. I’m sorry. That was a long time ago. And I haven’t picked up a pair of drumsticks in over a decade.” Rusty registered a look of shock at this news. He sat back in his chair, and his eyes opened wide as if I had just told him I eat nothing but live snakes.

“Well,” he said, recovering himself. “There’s a fill near the end of the song. It’s quite distinctive because it sort of echoes the sound of a match striking multiple times. It uses ghost notes.” That description triggered it for me. I knew what he was talking about, and a flood of other memories washed over me — the way a concert hall looks from behind a drum kit, the way you can just barely make out the details of a crowd when all the lights are pointed at you. I remembered feeling nauseous before shows while the sound guys were performing mic checks. Driving to Cleveland in Stan’s rusty van. Begging to stop at rest areas on I-80 to relieve the intestinal distress brought on by a steady diet of Chicken McNuggets and strawberry shakes. Gus and I would sometimes share a bed in the shitty motels we stayed at, and sometimes Stan and Evelyn would fuck in the bed next to us, thinking we were asleep or maybe just not caring.

And I did remember the fill Rusty was talking about. There’s a part of the song where everyone cuts out. And then Gus comes in with a funky bassline. And then I would come in after a few bars, getting the song going again with some fancy tap-dancing on the snare.

“I do remember that part of the song,” I said. “Yes.”

“I have to tell you something,” Rusty said. “On the recording, I’m the one who played that fill.”

“Pardon?” I said. I was distracted by this torrent of memories and wasn’t fully processing Rusty’s words.

“I’m the one who played the fill on the recording we made of ‘Strike Anywhere.’”

“What do you mean?”

Rusty had apparently recorded his own fill over my original part. Upon delivering this news, he looked at me as if he had just confessed to pissing in my coffee. He wore the expression of someone who expects to be slapped in the face — an anticipatory wince.

The funny thing is that Stan had gotten frustrated with me about that part of the song. He would claim that I wasn’t playing it right, and I would always respond that I was in charge of my own part. Who was he to tell me how to drum? He could barely even play his own instrument. But then the guy from that third-rate record label started saying the same thing. He’d pop in Rusty’s recording of “Strike Anywhere” and make me listen to (what I thought was) my own fill. “You hear that? It’s very distinctive,” he would say.

To please everyone, I’d practiced that fill for hours at a time, playing along with a cassette in my Sony Walkman. I would rewind the tape over and over, trying to mimic that stupid fill — to match it stroke for stroke. As I remembered this, I could feel the fingers on my hands curl into the grip used for holding drumsticks.

Rusty launched into a highly technical description of how he had recorded his part over mine. He kept referring to his Vesta Fire — the name for his fancy tape deck. The Vesta Fire had some feature called “ping-pong.” He told me that he “felt the fill in his arms and legs” and that he had been “compelled” to record it.

I was a little surprised at the anger that was starting to germinate inside my stomach. First, Rusty contacts me out of the blue. Then he escalates to near-stalking behavior. Then he confesses some weird musical crime. Now he was staring at me again — that needy look. What did he want? Forgiveness? Approval? Love?

“I remember some of this now,” I told him, returning his gaze directly and speaking deliberately. “You actually caused quite a bit of trouble for me. The record label could never understand why I had such a hard time repeating my own fill. That dude . . . Vinney?”

“Vincente.”

“Vincente insisted I play the part exactly as it had been recorded. I spent hours on end learning that fill, wondering why it was so hard to play. And then those live shows . . . .” My voice cracked just perceptibly, and I could feel the blood rush to my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” Rusty said. “I was just a kid. I didn’t fully realize what I was doing. I certainly never meant to cause problems for you. I really am sorry.”

 

When I got back to Grandpa Joe’s cottage that evening, I sat down at the ancient desktop computer that I use to check email and keep the books for Northern Experience. I Googled “Strike Anywhere,” which immediately turned up several YouTube videos. It suddenly struck me as odd that I hadn’t thought about searching for it before. Of course it was out there waiting for me in the infinite morass of the Web, like every song ever performed on this earth since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. The visuals for the YouTube video consisted solely of the artwork — a single kitchen match with a red tip — that accompanied “Strike Anywhere” when it was released as a forty-five. But the audio of the song was intact, starting with that ostentatious match strike. I remember watching Stan and Rusty figure out how to record that strike in Rusty’s garage all those years ago, how animated they became, as if they were inventing a new form of interplanetary travel.

Everything about the song felt dated and cheesy — young kids having fun as the decade came to a close. The maniacal energy that Stan brings to the song is out of proportion to his near-meaningless lyrics. Evelyn’s synth line sounds like something from a low-budget sci-fi film. And then there’s the bombastic silence about two-thirds of the way through the song. I dreaded that part at our live shows. Sometimes my hands would shake as I readied myself to attempt, yet again, what I now know to be Rusty’s fill, with its annoying sequence of “ghost notes.” In the early performances, I frequently messed it up. But eventually I got it, and there was one show in Detroit where the crowd went wild after that fill. It was one of the last shows we played — a small venue in our hometown. It might have been a high school auditorium — probably not more than two hundred people in attendance. We weren’t opening for anyone, so the place was full of fans who actually came to hear us for once. We ended the show with “Strike Anywhere,” and when the song reached that dramatic pause, you could feel the house holding its collective breath. And then Gus came in. And then I nailed that fill — owned it. And then the crowd lit up.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit how much satisfaction I’d gotten from the crowd’s reaction that night. I’d bought into Stan’s pipedream like everyone else. I remember that Gus had been thrilled for me. When the crowd cheered, he turned to face me and grinned, thumping his Rickenbacker with renewed zeal. The two of us played together, feeding off each other’s energy, while Stan screamed into the mic even more obnoxiously than usual.

As the Internet pumped the summer of 1989 into my cottage, I looked up from the computer to stare out the window. A black-backed woodpecker darted into view and attached itself to one of the larger white pines. I have a particular affection for that bird because its existence was pointed out to me by a girl named Lucia, who was a camper at Northern Experience while I was still an intern. She was very quiet and very serious, and has since gone on to get a Ph.D. in ornithology from Cornell. I’m friends with Lucia on Facebook, and I had the mad thought at that moment of sending her the link to “Strike Anywhere” with some faux-casual message like, “Did I ever tell you that I used to be a rock star?”

The song ended, and the bird flew away. I went to the kitchen and fetched two wooden spoons. When I returned to the computer, YouTube had already moved on to a new video — a Wayne’s World sketch from Saturday Night Live. I hit the back button and pressed play on “Strike Anywhere,” whose telltale opening sequence had already re-established itself in my life, like an unwanted guest who barges into your front door and plops themselves down on your sofa: the striking of the match, Stan’s crazy chanting, Gus’ baseline. I slid the computer keyboard out of the way, and when Rusty’s fill came in, I played along using the handles of the wooden spoons against the top of my grandfather’s ancient mahogany desk. The muscles and tendons in my arms still knew the strokes. I matched Rusty’s stowaway fill . . . ghost note for ghost note.