9. Grinder
“Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar”
—“Rockstar”
Nickelback
When I was playing hockey for the Detroit Red Wings while at the same time performing in my rock band Grinder, I felt like I was living every man’s double-career fantasy.
How many males in North America would love to be living a life where they can claim to be both a professional athlete and a rock ’n’ roller? Those days when scoring goals was my day job and writing tunes was my side job certainly were among the best times of my life.
In 2005, Grinder played for 12,000 people at the Arts, Beats, and Eats Festival in Pontiac, Michigan, and I remember looking out over the crowd and feeling the same rush of emotion that I experienced in a playoff hockey game.
You hear frequently of athletes wanting to take the stage as musicians, and I think it’s because they know they can find the same adrenaline surge they enjoyed in their sporting endeavors.
Former Detroit Red Wings player Boyd Devereaux is an accomplished guitarist, and he contacted me after my retirement about putting together a band of former athletes, which I think is an idea that could work. I think fans want to see athletes in a different environment, and I think there are plenty of athletes who would love to find a new place to grab the spotlight.
As a hockey player, I had to maintain a steady flow of pure energy for the length of a 45-second shift. As a band member, you have to maintain a high level of focus and emotion for a much longer duration. It feels like you are on a never-ending shift because you know you have to keep the crowd entertained. I love that feeling.
The first time I witnessed people in an audience singing the words to a song that I wrote, I thought it was the coolest feeling I’d ever known.
We formed the band Grinder in 1997 to do the song “Step Outside” to help raise money for Sergei Mnatsakanov and Vladimir Konstantinov after they were injured severely in the 1997 limousine accident.
Grinder included guitarists Billy Reedy and Eli Ruhf, bassist James Anders, and drummer Eric Miller. The group performed under the name Novadriver when I was not around.
The guys in the band jokingly called me “Mac Jagger.”
The “Step Outside” cut appeared on the tribute album Believing in Detroit: A Tribute to Vladdy and Sergei. After it was recorded, we were all very proud of it. Today, I think it is lame. I have learned so much more about music since then, mostly through my friendship with bandmate, James Anders.
He was the heart, soul, and musical inspiration of Grinder. We would sit around for hours talking about what makes good music. He schooled me on the importance of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Jim Morrison and the Doors and lots of others.
Grinder was alive, in various forms, from 1997 to about 2006, and we made two albums. I’d estimate we performed live approximately 120 times.
“Our music is stripped down rock ’n’ roll with a little bit of punk,” I told Sports Illustrated in 2005.
There was a Nirvana influence as well, and certainly some MC5 influence.
The Detroit Red Wings never truly understood how important the band was to me. They viewed it as a distraction to my hockey career, and it probably was. I was very serious about my efforts to make Grinder a successful band. I believed I could do both jobs well. Every time I stepped on the ice, I gave it all that I had. But when I was off the ice, I wanted to think about music, not hockey.
The band certainly received our share of attention. The media liked the story of an NHL enforcer being involved in a rock band. MTV even did a story on us. I liked the business of rock ’n’ roll.
I never had any delusions about my ability as a musician. I was not a natural. I would never be a candidate to win American Idol or sing opera. I knew a couple of chords on the guitar. But what I had was an intense desire to improve, and I did improve. I received some voice coaching, and I worked at my new craft. I listened to how others did it, and by the end of Grinder’s run I could get the job done as a vocalist. I could hold an audience.
“I can hold a tune and not butcher it,” is how I phrased it during a 2003 interview with MTV.
I’ve always felt I had some ability to use words to express my feelings. I could write poetry when I was young. I found that I liked songwriting. I feel as if I have some talent in that area.
Grinder enjoyed some incredible moments, such as the time that famed Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton came on stage and played with us at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has since passed away.
We also had the privilege of having MC5 bassist Michael Smith perform with us on stage. He also has died since then.
As a rock ’n’ roll fan my entire life, I was like a kid living in a fantasy world. The first time I met Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, I had a man-crush on him. I was almost speechless. He had been with Nirvana before the Foo Fighters and I considered myself a huge fan of his work.
Mike Mouyianis was Grinder’s manager, and he and I were escorted backstage at Cobo Hall just 45 minutes before Grohl took the stage.
It was almost uncomfortable for me to be there because they were all getting ready to perform. Not surprising, they were listening to music.
When you are in that situation, your greatest fear is that your idol will not be the person who you think he is. You don’t want your bubble burst. But Grohl turned out to be even more gracious than I had hoped he would be.
He asked me to pick a song for the guys to hear before they went on stage. “What kind of music do you like?” he asked.
It was an amazing moment for me to have with someone I admired.
After my stepfather Craig died in 1999, we used some of our appearances in the early years of Grinder to help raise money for the McCarty Foundation, a charity founded to honor my stepfather’s fight against multiple myeloma.
The band lost some momentum after 2000, but I was re-energized by singing on stage with Kid Rock at the Jefferson Beach Marina after the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 2002. I have a great photo of Devereaux and I on stage with the Kid.
I remember telling Jim Anders, “We should put the band back together.”
It was like the Eagles reuniting; I jumped back in with both feet. I rented out space in an industrial park in Warren, Michigan, and turned it into our sound-proof rehearsal hall.
It was really like our Bat Cave. I bought a pool table, and we had a bedroom and a bar. I’m not going to lie to you—it was a party house, and I stayed there too many nights.
This is when we made the transformation from bar band to concert band. I bought a 40-foot tricked-out recreational vehicle. It was a sweet ride.
My estimate is that I spent around $400,000 to set up the band for what I believed was an attempt to take it to another level.
Grinder had some incredibly fun times.
Grinder’s most important man behind the scenes was Tim Drummond. He runs his own sound company out of Bay City, Michigan, called Hyperman. We stuck him with the nickname “Hyperdude.”
He did our sound for a gig in Bay City and I was so impressed that I asked him to work exclusively for us.
He soon became the most important member of our band because he handled sound, driving, cooking, and security. Don’t be fooled by his long-haired rock look. Drummond is immensely qualified to handle security because he is a former Navy seal.
To kill time on long road trips in the RV, Anders came up with a game called “What can Tim kill you with and how?”
The rules were simple: When it was your turn, you had to come up with an item and Tim would have to say whether it was possible, with his training, to kill you with that item.
Tim had to answer in five to 10 seconds. For example, someone would say: “Paper clip,” and Drummond would say: “Open it and jam it in your artery.”
Someone would say: “Sharpie pen” and Drummond would an
swer: “Jam it up your nose and into your brain.”
We would play this game, on and off, for hours. There would be lulls, times when the bus would go quiet, and then someone would offer up a potential murder weapon for Drummond to review.
It was a fun game. One time, Drummond was on a roll, offering up his clever strategies for murder, when Anders yells that he had a possible stumper.
“Dude, I got a good one,” Anders said. “A bag of potato chips.”
“Empty or full?” Drummond asked instantly in his military tone.
Everyone in the bus laughed uncontrollably for several minutes. We were all laughing so hard that no one heard how he could kill us with a full or empty potato chip bag.
That may have been the night that we all realized that Drummond could kill us all without much trouble.
Drummond remains my friend today, and when we are together he still looks after me. My wife, Sheryl, calls him “Houdini” because whenever crowds become uncomfortable at autograph sessions or appearances he can make us disappear in a hurry.
Our first album, Gotta Keep Movin’, by Red Line Records, came out in 2003. It featured five original songs, plus two covers, “Neat, Neat, Neat” by the Damned and “No Fun” by Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
It was recorded at the Chophouse, the recording studio owned by Kid Rock.
Our stage appearances included shows at the Silverdome in Pontiac and the Masonic Temple in Detroit. Grinder was also featured at the tailgate party as part of the Jim Rome World Tour stop at the Palace at Auburn Hills.
One of my favorite musical moments actually came on a small stage in a Moscow night club when I was with the Detroit players who went over to play in Igor Larionov’s charity game. Kid Rock made the trip with us, and we went up on stage with him and sang Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
The NHL lockout of 2004–05 gave us our first opportunity to expand our horizons. Grinder had an 80-venue tour that included stops in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
We drove our “bus” for 34 consecutive hours to play at the famed Roxy in Los Angeles.
The tour was a critical success because it gained us some notoriety and more of a national following. But it ended up costing me money. I fronted the money for the trip, and I paid the expenses and wages that the tour revenue didn’t cover. At every stop, I was there handing out the meal money and money to bum around. (I had to put everyone on a gambling allowance in Vegas.)
But I would do it all over again because I loved the romance of touring with a rock ’n’ roll band.
Playing music was always therapeutic for me. To be honest, I might be in worse shape today if not for music. Songwriting helped me explore my feelings; it helped me comes to grips with my thoughts about my addiction, my life, and my family.
My favorite Grinder piece is I song I wrote called “Be Me.” It’s about what I was feeling about my life. It’s still true today. Here are the lyrics:
Why can’t I be what I wanna be? with attitude, no apology, without compromise, it’s my life, you can say what you wanna say, put me down if it makes your day, in the end, what you see is what you get.
You look at me and you only see what you wanna see, I’m just a man and I wanna be, just wanna be me.
Don’t want your rules or your social machine, you criticize me for playing the scene but look hard and you’ll see you’re a lot like me, I live my life the American dream, but underneath it’s not always serene, in the end no regrets no mystery.
You look at me and you only see what you wanna see, I’m just a man and I wanna be, just wanna be me. Just wanna be me, just wanna be me, just wanna be me.
Why can’t I be what I wanna be, don’t want your rules or conservative dreams, no politics or conformity, a casualty of society, in the end, what you see is what you get.
You look at me and you only see what you wanna see, I’m just a man and I’m playing the scene, I’m not a machine, you look at me and you only see what you wanna see, I’m just a man, I WANNA BE ME, just wanna be me, just wanna be me, just wanna be me, just wanna be me.
You have to reflect your personal experiences in your music. I also like our song “Shooting Star,” which is about the foolishness of believing your own hype and expecting fame to last forever.
A sample of the lyrics: “You’re a shooting star, living for today, no matter who you are, you always fade away.”
When I was asked recently if I have any regrets about Grinder, my answer was, “Yes, my regret is James Anders died.”
I don’t really regret any aspect of my association with Grinder. I wish the band was still alive today. Yes, I should have been more frugal when it came to funding the band. It was a costly venture for me financially.
How much money did we pour into the gas tank of that RV to get to our tour stops? It was a drain to be sure.
I actually did receive some of my money back for the RV because there was an electrical fire on it while the band was driving back from up North. I was not on that trip, but it burned out while band members were pulling our equipment off it. Insurance provided a settlement, although certainly not what I paid for it.
But the music died for us when James Anders died. He was only 40 years old, and he died suddenly, while he was on the phone with his wife. It was a heart ailment that had gone undetected.
I still miss him today. Conversations with him fueled my passion for music. Every time we talked I understood music more. We wrote songs together. He had music in his soul. He died in May 2005, right after we produced our second album, Out of Our Heads.
We soldiered on because he would have wanted us to continue to play the music. That was the proper way to honor his memory. But it was not the same after he died. The band came to Calgary to perform after I signed with the Flames. But we haven’t performed since 2006.
I’m sure people in the hockey world still believe that my interest in music was a negative for my career. One of the unspoken rules is that athletes are supposed to concentrate solely on their careers to the exclusion of all other endeavors. More than one of my teammates asked me to dial back on my music career because they sensed that the Red Wings were growing weary of my musical escapades.
It may surprise people to know that when the NHL lockout occurred in 2004, I was far more interested in music than I was in hockey.
At that time, if I could have made enough money to support myself in music, I would have gladly given up my NHL career. I was burned out on hockey. At that point, I would have been ready to turn the page.
10. Goodbye, Detroit
“Sometimes goodbye is a second chance”
—“Second Chance”
Shinedown
Imagine the furor I would have created had I signed with the Colorado Avalanche in 2006. That was a possibility after the Red Wings bought out my contract that summer.
I don’t think the Detroit fan base would have ever forgiven me had I chosen that option.
It would be like President Obama saying he was going to join the Republican Party or Ford Motor Company announcing that it was moving its headquarters to Japan.
But after the Red Wings announced that they were buying out Derian Hatcher, Ray Whitney, and me, the Avalanche were the first team to show interest in signing me. The team’s director of player personnel was Brad Smith, an ex–Red Wings player who was nicknamed “Motor City Smitty.” In that era, he scouted many games at Joe Louis Arena and he told me he had an appreciation of what I offered to a team.
Although I had hoped to spend my entire career as a Red Wing, I wasn’t angry with Detroit general manager Ken Holland’s decision to buy out my contract because I knew it was a logical move.
The Red Wings had a payroll of about $77 million in 2003–04, and then owners locked out players because they wanted a salary cap. We lost the 2004–05 season, and then we ended up with a $
39 million salary cap. The Red Wings had to trim their payroll, and they had a six-day window to buy out players without having the buyout count against the cap.
In buying out Hatcher ($4.66 million), Whitney ($2.66 million), and me ($1.7 million), they cut almost $9 million.
If I were the Detroit general manager, I would have made the same decision that Holland made. If I were making less than $1 million, I might have been mad that the Red Wings didn’t work harder to keep me. But by that time in my career, I was making real money.
Plus, I was 33 and I had been injured for a large chunk of the previous season. When you’re that age, you’re always vulnerable.
Even though the moves made perfect sense, it was still difficult for Holland to tell me that I was no longer going to be a Red Wing. He and I had been together in the organization for 11 years. He was my boss, but to me he seemed more like a father figure. Because it’s my personality to do whatever I can to help the team, I tried to make the conversation as easy as possible.
I told him at the meeting that there were no hard feelings, and that I understood that the team was forced into this move by factors that were out of Holland’s control.
As I look back on that situation, I blame myself for putting myself in the position of being one of the cuts when the team needed to trim.
At that point in my career, the Red Wings were not overly pleased with some of my off-ice habits. They knew that I had a drug issue, and that my marriage was breaking up. They probably worried that a divorce would mean even less stability in my life and maybe wilder behavior.
Also, Holland and some of my teammates had asked me to be less involved with my band, Grinder. The argument was that it had become a distraction, and that it had taken my focus away from hockey.
My Last Fight Page 10