Ray Luzier: Passion, Determination and Cake For Breakfast
Posted by Auralex on 7th Dec 2020
Note: Following are excerpts from the full interview. The interview was conducted by Kevin Booth, Auralex director of sales and marketing. Robb Wenner, Auralex director of artist relations, produces the podcast and jumps in with questions. To hear the full interview, subscribe to Auralex Creative Spaces on your podcast platform of choice.
Kevin Booth: After growing up on a farm outside of Pittsburgh, you moved to California to go to The Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles.Was that after high school and playing with cover bands a little bit?
Ray Luzier: I knew you could only go so far in Pittsburgh, so my guitar player buddy and I both got in (to The Musician’s Institute), so right after high school, I bought a used church Dodge maxi wagon van, gutted the thing and we loaded up Marshalls and kick drums and everything we had and drove 2600 miles across the country to go to Los Angeles. When I got there, I thought I was Mr. Joe Like-Check-Me-Out! But little did I know that I got my *** handed to me hardcore. I got to the first class, and they’re handing out all this reading, and I’m thinking this is going to suck because I don’t know any of this and the teachers wereSteve Houghton, Joe Porcaro, and Ralph Humphrey, who played with Frank Zappa, I mean it was an incredible staff at that time.I played for one of the instructors, and I was all“check this out,” and I get off the stage, dripping with sweat, and I’ll never forget this, and asked what he thought, and he says,“do you have a metronome?”. I was like, um yeah, I need to get one of those! He said you don’t need to do all those fills and everything, and you need to work on your groove, and we have a lot of work to do, but…hey, good job! I was like, oh man, because I had no prior education, and no one told me that you need a metronome and know timing and learn other styles because I was a rock metal head right off the farm! I still tell people to this day that I go back and open up the curriculum because there's still stuff in there, and it's a lifetime of info.
KB: You’ve ended up working with a big list of people, some that we didn’t mention in the intro; how did you go about getting those gigs?
RL: While I was teaching at The Musician’s Institute, I started auditioning for a ton of people - pop bands - you name it, and I was in the line of cattle calls of 25, maybe sometimes 200 drummers in line to audition. You know it’s getting bad when you start seeing the same guys on all these auditions.
I started getting little gigs, and I auditioned for Jake E. Lee, from Ozzy Osbourne and Badlands in 1993. Jake was having auditions, and they had hundreds of drummers come down, and I'm a huge Ozzie fan, and we had the same three songs to learn, and I hate that because you're playing the same three songs in there just like two guys before you, and those guys are listening to you play, it's just weird. I get in there, and I was the last guy of 50 drummers that day, and Jake is like,“ok, man, let’s just do this,” and I say I’m a big Badlands fan you know? He says, “that's nice,” and I say I love that song “Soul Stealer,” and he's like yeah, let's play the three songs, and I start playing the groove for “Soul Stealer,” and the bass player started playing and the next thing you know they're all standing up and the whole energy in the room changed! We’re rocking out, and he tells the rest of the drummers to go home and asks me what I was doing tomorrow, and I said that I’m coming back here! It got down to five guys and then to two guys, and I got the gig.
KB: How has your work and social life changed due to the Covid-19 virus?
RL: A ton of entertainers got hit hard, you know, because we live off of live music, so that really messed a lot of us up, and so many businesses and people are jobless. I firmly believe that by mid-next year, with the vaccine, we're going to be back, and everything is going to be happening. You can’t take it (sports and live music shows) away from people. It's a form of therapy for people.
I have been doing a ton of stuff from home. I've been working my butt off tracking in my home studio, and it's an amazing thing. I really got my control room together, and I got some great microphone pre-amps, and I had the drum room together with the phenomenal Auralex products. (My set-up) is very simple, and I don't have a ton of gear, but you don't really need that if you’ve got good ears and you know what you're doing. I'm doing a ton of tracks; I just delivered another three to someone in the UK, and I did a track for these up-and-coming 15 and 17-year-old pop kids in Australia and someone in Ohio. I can track and send everything from right here in my house in Tennessee, and it's an awesome thing!
For more info about Ray Luzier, please visit:
https://www.rayluzierdrums.com