Modern Drummer
Up and Coming
by Robyn Flans


Wallflowers drummer Mario Calire always wanted to be a musician, like his dad. The Calires moved to California from Buffalo, New York when Mario was a youngster so his keyboardist father Jimmy could join the popular group America. Interested in the drums, Mario began on a practice pad at the age of six. He graduated to a drum kit at eight. By the time he was thirteen, he was taking lessons from Jim Christie (who now plays drums with Dwight Yoakam), as well as playing in the school jazz and concert bands. But Mario's greatest learning ground was provided by his father, who began to hire Mario for his casuals by the time his son was in junior high school. "I was playing with excellent musicians and struggling to keep up with them," Mario remembers. "That's how I got better faster. It was a great education."

"My very first gig was hysterical," Mario recalls. "I haven't had as weird a gig since. We were playing background music for a miniature horse auction! Since then I've done everything from all-nighters in smoky blues clubs to putting on a tux and playing at a wedding.

"My dad raised me with the attitude that you should be as versatile as you can in order to work. You can learn form every kind of music. It's all valid. My father was more of a blues, R&B, jazz, rock, funk, boogie woogie guy. I was raised on equal doses of that stuff, and I liked it all." After high school, Mario chose to go to Cal Arts, a progressive arts college in Valencia, California. Mario was only sixteen when he auditioned for the school (having earlier skipped a grade), and now he realizes he was probably too young to have been handed the kind of freedom the school offered. "It wasn't really structured or very rigid, so I might have slept in a little too much," he admits. "I think I could have gotten more out of it had I applied myself more."

The focus of playing was most constructive for Mario, though. "I got to play a lot," he says. "Many of the ensembles were led by teachers, most of whom are excellent players. There was also the opportunity to play other kinds of music after hours. There was a lot of jamming going on."

The school also assigned mentors. During his first year at the school, Mario's mentor was Albert "Tootie" Heath. "Tootie comes from the bebop school," says Mario. "A lesson with him wasn't about getting analytical, it was hanging out with him, listening to music, and playing drums with him. It was more soaking up his experience, his feel, and his concept of how to play jazz. He turned me on to a lot of stuff."

"Tootie would send substitute teachers every now and then when he was on the road," Mario adds. "But he wouldn't tell us who he was sending. One day I showed up for my lesson and Billy Higgins was there. 'Are you Mario? I'm your teacher today.' The next thing I know, I'm jamming with Billy in my room. He's playing my funky drumset and I'm playing my roommate's, and I'm hanging out for an hour with him. Every substitute was just as awesome as he was, in a totally different way."

Efrain Toro was Mario's mentor for his second year. "Efrain is a master of the Latin style on everything, including hand percussion and applying it to the drumset," says Mario. "We mostly concentrated on playing in that style and understanding the concept of clave, which was a whole other world for me. That year, I played drums in a twenty-piece salsa band. I got to learn a lot of different feels--none of which I can remember now," he laughs. "I didn't get into hand percussion very much. I always felt like the drumset was my main instrument, and I had enough to work on with that. I didn't want to spread myself too thin. I saw a lot of people try to do a little bit of everything and then not be able to do any one thing well."

After two years at Cal Arts, Mario was informed that he would receive no further financial aid. Rather than go deeply into debt, he reluctantly decided to leave the school. His last day of school was a Friday, and by the following Monday he had inherited an entire roster of students at the local drum store. To this day he is not sure how the job came his way. "Probably God," he says with a shrug of his shoulders.

"I had to teach myself how to teach," Mario explains. "I had to figure out where all these kids were at and how to make sure they made progress every week. The first couple of weeks were very hard, because some of them were advanced and they were all in different books. I had to teach myself all the books just so I could read what they were reading."

From 3:00 to 6:00, four days a week, Mario taught eight- to eighteen-year-olds, and then he would drive from Ventura to Los Angeles to play a gig. It was during that time that the Wallflowers' management saw him playing (in a four-piece band called 2-Piece) at a club called the Mint. But he didn't hear from them for another six months. In the interim, he rehearsed with Martha Davis, formerly of the Motels. "We rehearsed a lot," Mario recalls. "And I played a different style than I would have normally chosen to play. It was more the straight rock thing. It was really keeping my chops up, though, because just teaching gets old after a while. When you're a player, you want to play."

In July of '95, Mario got a call form the manager of the Wallflowers, who explained that the band had just finished an album and needed a drummer. "I had no idea what the music was," says Mario. "But the next day I received a tape with rough mixes of the album Bringing Down the Horse, plus a couple of cuts that didn't make it. I threw it on, and it blew me away, song after song. It was different from anything I had heard. I'm not a songwriter, but I know a good song when I hear it--and they were all good. That was the first thing that struck me. The second thing was how well it was recorded, how good everything sounded, and how good the rhythm section's playing was. Matt Chamberlain's drumming was awesome. He really served the music. He didn't play too much, and all the sounds were great. He had a different snare sounds on almost every tune, and they were all interesting and all fit. The bass playing was excellent, too. I listened to the tape over and over, and then I called the manager and said, 'This is awesome. I want to do this.' Then it was just a matter of setting up an audition, which got moved around a few times because of everybody's different schedules."

Mario's teaching experience was instrumental in the preparation of his audition. "Besides teaching out of books, I would write out a lot of things for my students. Also, I would invite students to bring in tapes of any particular style they wanted to learn, and we would transcribe it.

"For the audition, the one thing the manager said that made me a little nervous was 'Can you play it exactly like that?' Of course I said that I could, not knowing for sure how I was going to pull it off. But because I had been writing so much as a teacher, I was able to transcribe a couple of tunes from top to bottom--every fill, every open hi-hat. Then I would cue up the tape to the song I was learning, set the chart out and play along or listened. Some of the parts were deceptively tricky. Every drummer has different instincts, so what Matt would do wasn't necessarily what I would do. I had to learn his moves. By the time I auditioned, I knew the stuff really well.

"The bass player [Greg Richling] and I hit it off right away. We immediately started grooving, like the rhythm section. We played '6th Avenue Heartache,' 'One Headlight,' 'God Don't Make Lonely Girls,' and maybe something else." What probably landed the gig for Mario was his hard-hitting approach. "[Wallflowers leader] Jakob Dylan mainly wants a drummer who hits hard," he says. "He obviously wants a drummer who plays well, but he really wants to feel it on stage. Apparently they had played with people who might have been great, but just didn't hit hard enough. It's not a heavy metal band, but he wants someone to dig in. I'm not sure if I knew that going in, but I laid into it and I got the gig."

Shortly after Mario landed the gig, the Wallflowers opened a tour for Chris Isaak. In retrospect, Mario sees that it took some time for him to make the album's material his own. "I didn't have a real handle on this style of music," he admits. "I was never into straight rock 'n' roll, so it was an education for me. Besides, I knew that what Matt played worked, so there was no need to reinvent it. From a rhythm section standpoint, what we're doing is just supporting the song and making it move. It isn't like Primus or some kind of funk band where what we're playing is the cool thing. To this day I stick pretty closely to what Matt played, although I don't play every fill the way he played it, and I probably don't play every feel the way he played it either. If I hear something in the music that calls for a different drum part from what Matt played, I'll play it differently. I've gradually made it my own. It was a matter of being comfortable playing with these guys and gelling as a band. We've been a band for two years now, and part of our growth has been getting confident in who we are and that we sound good together. What we do live is not necessarily the same thing as what's on the album, and that's fine. It's been a process."

One of Mario's comfort zones is provided by Greg Richling. "Probably the most important element to me in joining a band is whether or not I get along with the bass player musically," he says. "I usually end up being really tight with the bass player on a personal level, too, because of that. We're a team. And Greg is a great bass player to work with. I get the same thing from him every night; he really define consistency. He plays in time every night, and he's got a great feel, so if we don't sound good as a rhythm section, it's probably by fault. His time and feel and pocket are just there. And he plays the song; he doesn't do anything to show his licks. We try to get that out of our system at sound check," he laughs.

Although Mario loves the Wallflowers' entire repertoire, some of his favorite material to play is the ballads like "Invisible City" and "I Wish I Felt Nothing." "We play a lot of straight-8th-note, backbeat stuff, and those are a little different. It's nice to tone it down a little. I like playing the song 'The Difference' a lot, too, which is one of our rockers. It has a very pounding floor tom rhythm for the chorus. It's kinda primal," he laughs.

When a band is playing five or six nights a week on tour, the objective is to keep the first burning on stage. To help him accomplish this, Mario looks for "motivators."

"Every day I look for any motivation I can find. One terrific motivator is when you're out on the road with another band, and they're great. That makes you want to be great. We were out with Sheryl Crow's band for about a month, and we had to go out and really rock because we knew that they were going to come out and play an incredible show. All her musicians are excellent. Another great motivator is when someone you respect comes to see you. A lot of times you're playing in front of nothing but strangers. The challenge there is to concentrate on the music. It may be the hundredth show you've played, but it's the first time those people have seen you. They're playing good money to see you play, so you owe it to them to do a good job."

It's important to Mario to be in the right frame of mind before a show. "I don't like the feeling of hanging out, doing this and that, and then all of a sudden being thrust on stage in front of a lot of people," he says. "That can be disorienting sometimes. If I feel like I need to settle down, I'll go off by myself for a while and focus on what I'm about to do."

Mario is also conscientious about keeping in shape on the road. "To get mentally ready for the gig, I have to take care of myself physically," he says. "I try to eat as well as I can, and I'm not excessive with anything. I don't really drink or smoke, so I'm not out there partying. I would fall apart if I did. Also, I exercise and stretch a lot. Luckily, most of the time we get to stay in nice hotels that have little gyms in them. I do some kind of work-out when I can. I don't lift a lot of weights, but I'll ride an exercise bike or something. Unfortunately my posture isn't great; I think that's part of why my back will sometimes hurt.

"I also had problems with my wrist on the last tour," Mario continues. "It's the same thing anybody gets from overuse and doing one repetitive motion, so lately I've really been trying to focus on playing through the set as long as I can with the lowest amount of energy spent. I don't want to sound wimpy; what I mean is that I'm trying to conserve. We play an hour-and-a-half show, and my focus has been on not reducing what I put into the music, but getting more out of energy that I do expend, by letting the sticks do more of the work than my arm, and using more wrist and fingers.

"If I can get through the first half of the set and not be sweating, then I've succeeded. My problem is in the past would have been to overexert in the beginning. Many drummers will relate to this: If you're playing a set and by the second or third song you're sweating really hard, you can hardly hold onto your sticks, and you've pretty much lost all your finesse, then you've put too much into it. At that point, it doesn't matter how much harder you hit, you're not going to get any more sound out of the drums. You're just taking away from your body. Besides, trying to be dynamic within the set and within each song is really important to me. It's part of trying to be a musical drummer.

"I've been gradually sitting up higher, too," Mario continues. "I used to sit as low as I could, which is really hard on your back. I didn't really feel like I was digging in until I was sitting down real low. I feel better about sitting up higher now, although it's still pretty low. I'm trying to work out a more ideal setup for my body, which is an ongoing process."

Mario loves his new Slingerland drums. "I can't tell you how stoked I am!" he enthuses. "This is really my first endorsement. The drums have very thin maple shells with no reinforcing hoops, and die-cast rims, so they really sing. They practically play themselves. The bass drum is the best-sounding bass drum I've ever owned. And the finishes, which are done by Pat Foley, are awesome. I have a four-piece kit: a 12" rack tom, a 16" floor tom, a 22" bass drum, and a 6 1/2x14 snare. I feel real comfortable on the kit. I haven't played a five-piece in so long, I don't think I would know what to do. I'm sure eventually I'll move into some more toms, but I think you can get the job done on a four-piece." Mario's equipment also includes Vater sticks.

Calire is hoping he'll have the opportunity to be the drummer on the next Wallflowers record. "I don't worry about it, though," he says, frankly. "I just do the best job I can every day. I love being on the road; I'm young and unattached, and I'm seeing the world. But it can also be brutal. People's biggest misconception is that this life is really glamorous. They don't see you getting off the bus at 5:00 in the morning and stumbling into the hotel, feeling like hell. That's the reality of it. But I have nothing to complain about. I feel very blessed to be doing what I'm doing, and I don't take any of it for granted. This is my dream, and I'm living it. I always wanted to go out on the road and play music and do like my dad did."



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