"Swoop" Da Drumma
Percussive Contrivances
"If it's not Scottish, it's crap."
Raised by the nuns of the St. Charles of Dickens Sacred Sweetbreads Orphanage in the kosher section of Edinborough, Swoop was only thirteen when he gave their porridge and preaching the William Wallace salute and headed south to pursue dreams of exceeding his bag limit of go-go booted "birds" dancing in the clubs of Liverpool, London, Stuttgart and Hamburg. He soon tired of what he called that "pansy-assed" Mersey Sound, as well as the limited number of highways and by-ways offered by the British Isles for riding his Harley, so he packed himself, his hog and twenty-three headcheese sandwiches in a crate and shipped himself to America, where he tore ass out of New Jersey to see the fruited plains and purple mountain's majesty.
Weaving his way through Milwaukee, Sturgis, and Roswell, Swoop ended up in Oakland working security at Altamont for the Rolling Stones' Get Yer Ya-Yas Out Tour when he first caught the ear of opening act blues legend Sonny "Bug Splat" Williams with the driving primal rhythms he pounded out with his pool que on the skull of a surly Deadhead who was eating Santana's guitar chords, believing in his LSD-laced mind that they were licorice. Swoop went down to LA to lay down the rhythm tracks on Bug Splat's landmark comeback album,
Mojo Madness,
and pounded the skins for the Blue Chunx Band during their record thirty-six week engagement at the House of Brues in San Francisco's Chinatown.
When Bug Splat and the boys hit the road for gigs in Denver, Kansas City, Chicago and Memphis, Swoop stayed behind, having heard that his birth mother might be living in Northern California. After
an exhaustive search involving tens of thousands of dollars spent on personals ads, bad dates and penicillin, he was finally reunited with his mom and soon learned she had been a young woman athlete with a promising sports career who was forced by cruel, heartless capitalist promoters to abandon the love child she had with Charlie Watts during a roller derby exhibition tour of Europe. Swoop might have might have been content to live out his life in blissful peace in the bosom of his new-found California family as a drug store truck-driving man, but a fateful call came from Bug Splat to help save the remaining dates on his highly successful "Grits & Gravy" tour after regular drummer Tawny "Two-Toed" Taft choked to death on stale corn bread at a Louisville B-B-Q joint.
When Bug Splat's unscrupulous agent, Snidley Welsh, ran off with the band's take from the last six weeks of the tour, Bug Splat hooked Swoop up with bluesmen Mudcat, Lightnin' and Luther T. to make enough to get his Harley out of hock as da drumma with
The Acme Blues Rockets.
Shortly after their wildly successful debut at Fat Fish Blue in Cleveland, the bloated body of Snidley Welsh floated to the surface in San Francisco Bay. Swoop continues to deny any knowledge of the misfortune that may have befallen the agent or how the words 'Minnesota Fats' came to be impressed repeatedly upon his forehead, even though a rather large shipment of whiskey, pork rinds and Cuban cigars delivered to the Oakland Hell's Angels chapter has been traced by authorities back to his current address in Mudcat Falls.