pia was an assembled band at that time with one album out, and they were replac ing their drummer. John had talked to me about it when I was playing the Bette Midler show, Clams On The Half Shell, and we had done a pre-Broadway week in Philadelphia. I went back to my hotel one night and there was a note in my mailbox that said, "Welcome to Utopia." John Siegler had called to say I was going to be in the band. When the Bette Midler show went to New York, it was a very crazy time, but I loved it. I like being really busy, and when I'm not, I go crazy. I was doing the Utopia rehearsals from about 12:00 noon to 6:00 P.M., and the Bette Midler show was at 7:30 or 8:00 until 11:00. Then from 12:30 to 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning I was recording her album, Songs For The New Depression. That went on for about two or three weeks.

RF: When we had talked about that time previously, you said that got you to a point where you didn't even want to look at the drums anymore.

WW: I was just kind of OD'd. I was fried. It's funny, though, when you get fried, some good things happen. There's a fine line there. There's a whole creative mo ment involved in the frying period, which is really good. You're only fried at one point and then you burn to a crisp, which is when you can't function anymore. But during that fried period, there's actually a creative high before you do your final en tering into space and disintegrating.

RF: What do you do in the burn-to-a-crisp period?

WW: You just do things to get away-sit in a corner to think. You just need time. Anything becomes interesting, like taking walks. Any kind of diversion from what you do normally becomes relaxing. The sil liest things can become entertaining and exciting.

RF: What was it like working in Clams On The Half Shell?

WW: It was exciting. It was my first real experience working with a lot of heavy players in a big band. Jerald Jemmott of Aretha Franklin fame was in the band, and that was very exciting because I've always been a real R&B fan. I play some bass al though I'm not an incredible bass player, but at that time, I was really involved with the bass and Jerald Jemmott was one of my heroes. I learned a lot about playing bass from him.

I really love Bette. She's a real sensitive woman. I think some people have found her crazy to work with because she's so ar tistic and demanding in a certain sense, but we always got along really well. It's amaz ing when she sings a ballad because she has so much feeling. When you listen to her, you want to cry because she's crying. She's actually feeling the words. I love that sensi tivity because the music transcends the players playing and the singers singing. You're interpreting, which is the real art.

Then it doesn't matter how complicated or simplistic the execution is of whatever technical thing is happening at the time. The end result is that magic, and that magic can occur whether you're playing a thousand notes a minute or one every min ute. That's the whole essence of what's happening. That's one thing I really liked about that situation. They had horns, a 20- piece band, and we did some Gospelish music in the show, ballads, and rock 'n' roll stuff. Then Lionel Hampton had his portion of the show, and I was the drum mer for his band also.We did "Hampton's Boogie" and all his great stuff, which was wonderful.

My ambition was to be a jazz player. I started playing when I was about 13. Until I was about 21, I did nothing but listen to jazz records and emulate all the jazz drum mers. That was it. The scary part of the story was that, when I got the gig, the mu sical director, who I knew very well, said he knew I could play rock 'n' roll and jazz, but he didn't know if I could play in a big band situation. And I said, "Sure, no problem." Well, the truth was that I had never played in a big band, and this was the second time this had happened to me. The first time was at the Concord Hotel when I was going to the Manhattan School of Mu sic. I was trying to finance my way through school and I wanted to play at the same time. I had heard about this gig through one of the percussionists at school. It was a

show band with about eight horns. I had to read the charts and there were no re hearsals. I had to go out and play cold. So I met the man. I was about 19 and the other musicians were all about 35 or 40 years old. They had been playing in those mountains since they were babies. The guy asked if I had played in shows before and I said, "Sure, no problem." I did the first show and I got the most incredible headache that I had ever gotten. The funniest thing was that, in the first show I played, there were dancers spinning and doing all their moves. The drums started off for the first eight bars and the chart said, "Very fast." Well, I had been practicing to be able to play fast. "Very fast," to me, meant al most as fast as I could play. I was really nervous about the situation, so my "very fast" was faster than I had ever played. I started out the first eight bars and the dancers started dancing. They were trying to dance and at the same time turn around to say it was too fast. When they finished, they were sweating buckets. The dancers said to the bandleader, "What is your drummer trying to do? Kill us? Is he crazy?" It hadn't seemed fast to me, be cause I was so nervous. That was my first experience playing a show. The next situa tion was with Bette Midler, and I had never played in a big band.

RF: It's one thing to read a chart and it's another thing to make a band swing. How does one...