Michael Jerome, the Man Who Keeps the Beat
You know his work even if you don’t know his name. Michael Jerome anchors Better than Ezra and hit it for Toadies and Slash. Call him the best drummer Dallas has ever produced.
By Jason Cohen | November 11, 2024|12:21 pm
Michael Jerome is a working musician, one of a very small cadre of North Texas drummers who make a living touring the world. Elizabeth Lavin
he hair-teased fans hadn’t dressed to the scanty leather nines to see the drummer. They’d come out to the Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie on a 105-degree August day to see the guy with the familiar shaggy curls, black top hat, and Les Paul. This was Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival, “a celebration of the blues” headlined by the former Guns N’ Roses guitarist and his nearly 30-year-old band, Slash’s Blues Ball. But when the drummer is Michael Jerome, your eyes can’t help but land on him.
The whippet-thin 53-year-old with a shaved head sits low behind the kit, the sleeves on his black dress shirt pushed up to the elbows, the top three buttons open at the collar. Like Dirk Nowitzki, Jerome has both wingspan and feathery touch. His 6-foot-3 frame is a whirl of arms and wrists and fingers, a blur of quads and feet, all working in powerful rhythm.
Toadies went platinum shortly after Jerome left to return to Pop Poppins, but ultimately he found a meaningful career—and artistic freedom—as a touring artist (shown here at the Furndware recording studio). Elizabeth Lavin
He has been described as the Jimi Hendrix of drums. “Like Jimi, there is no separation between him and his various instruments,” says Matt Piucci, whose band Rain Parade opened for one of Jerome’s bands, The Third Mind, earlier this year. “He is an octopus, consuming them as if his body were a part of the kit.”
Of course, a handful of people in Grand Prairie were actually there to see the drummer. To them, Jerome wasn’t merely Slash’s drummer, or Richard Thompson’s drummer, or Better Than Ezra’s drummer, to name just a few of his nearly 100 recording and performing credits. Rather, he was the guy they went to Boswell High School with in Saginaw, a small suburb north of Fort Worth. He was the guy who played all over Deep Ellum in the early ’90s in a number of North Texas bands: Pop Poppins; Course of Empire; Toadies; and Cottonmouth, Texas.
Since then, Jerome has made it big. Not in the way his old bands dreamt of in the go-go-go alt-rock era of record deals and videos, and certainly not as a rock star in his own right. But as a working musician, serving someone else’s songs and vision while lending his own artistry and craftsmanship to the project.
Slash’s longtime producer Mike Clink only had to look over Jerome’s discography to know that he could probably do the job—or any job. The drummer joined Slash’s Blues Ball on just one day’s notice, having initially failed to return Clink’s call because he didn’t recognize the number. He came to rehearsal after learning five well-known blues and blues-rock songs for what would become the record Orgy of the Damned, which was released in May.
“We got after it,” Jerome remembers of the first song that they played. “And about the second or fourth bar, I looked up and noticed Slash smiling at the bass player. And at the end of the song, Slash just kind of said, ‘Well, that happened.’ So that was encouraging to hear, obviously.”
Next thing Jerome knew, they’d not only made a record but were going on a major summer tour. That meant he had to call up Richard Thompson, whom he considers something of a mentor and with whom he’s played since he was 27, to tell him he might need a temporary drummer until fall. When Thompson learned who he’d be playing with, the guitarist understood that it was an offer Jerome couldn’t refuse, financially or artistically. (His exact response: “What?!” Followed by: “He was born in Hampstead,” the same part of England as Thompson.) Then Jerome had to make the same call to Better Than Ezra. And update his bandmates in The Third Mind. Because everybody wants to give the drummer some when the drummer is Michael Jerome.
Jerome’s first drum set was his mother’s baby grand piano. In an interview he did for Thompson’s website several years ago, Jerome confessed to inflicting “considerable damage” to its ivory keys when he was still a toddler. She got him a kid’s drum set for Christmas, which not only encouraged his expression but protected her more precious instrument. “Definitely, 3 or 4 years old is when that all kicked in,” Jerome says. “It’s crazy to think about. It was clear what I wanted to do—or what I was doing—and my mother just went with it.”
Vivian Moore was a lifelong, classically trained pianist who also led the church choir and made ends meet as a single mom playing at jazz clubs, country clubs, and weddings. Growing up in Wichita, Kansas, Jerome listened to her practice every night as she worked to earn her master’s at Wichita State.
In 1983, when Jerome was a teenager, the family moved to Saginaw. A fellow musician friend had told Jerome’s mom that there was more work to be found in Fort Worth. “That’s what got us down here, just her looking for more opportunity,” Jerome says. “How do you survive if your profession is playing an instrument? You have two choices: become successful playing that instrument or teaching.”
Jerome says that, as a Black woman, his mother had to work twice as hard to get hired as a teacher. She chose Saginaw because it was the best school district she could find for her two kids, but she couldn’t get a job there herself. Instead, she continued to find work at parties and in churches and clubs. Eventually, another Black woman helped her land a position in a school on the south side of Fort Worth. She would ultimately become a music teacher in Fort Worth ISD, taking on the role of training other music teachers, not just in terms of pedagogy and curriculum but also in the challenges of teaching at an urban public school.
To this day, whenever Jerome is back in town, people come up to him and talk about his mom, who died in 2007. “And this is all shades, colors, religions, ethnicities,” he says. “[They] say, ‘You don’t know me, but your mom taught me. I was in your house all the time.’ ”
In addition to piano, Jerome was encouraged by his mother to play guitar, and he also tried his hand at cello and trumpet. But by the time they’d moved to Texas, it was nothing but the skins and cymbals for the teen, which was actually convenient. Now his mom had a drummer, and he had a part-time job. While many of Jerome’s regional peers came out of the UNT College of Music or the Booker T. Washington arts magnet school, he learned at gigs, putting in the hours and getting exposed to different kinds of music.
Jerome’s mother had mixed feelings about his musical curriculum. “I think she was excited that she had a son who was going to go into music as well,” he says. “But she did try to also protect me from what the world does to artists. Because it didn’t pan out for her the way that she had hoped. And she was far more accomplished than I’ve ever become. The opportunities that I got, I know Mom fought really hard to get, and she didn’t actually get half of them that I have. But [she gave me] a hell of a foundation to stand on.”
He flew the nest to test his wings with indie rock, joining the first version of Pop Poppins, then called The Haunted Generation, while several of its members were attending Boswell High School. But when it became clear that his friends and classmates were more interested in rock-and-roll debauchery than greatness or success, he left them to join Toadies. “I just wanted to be in a band that wanted to play, get up and play music,” Jerome says. “The difference with the Toadies is, it was a dictatorship. Not in an oppressive way, because Todd Lewis knew what the hell he was doing.”
He played on the Toadies’ 1990 debut cassette single (“Dig a Hole/I Hope You Die”), but he came to miss having more creative input and his friends, who told him they were ready to be more committed. So he went back to Pop Poppins, and they became a major Dallas band. Mike Graff of Course of Empire, which had formed at SMU, remembers lots of local buzz, countless gigs at various Deep Ellum clubs, and both bands hanging out at Allan Restrepo’s record store, Van Gogh Compact Discs and Tapes. They were two of the first bands on Restrepo’s Carpe Diem label, following Rhett Miller and Leroy Shakespeare and the Ship of Vibes. And they were high on the bill at the second Edgefest, an Earth Day concert at the Starplex Amphitheatre in 1993, joining the likes of Belly, Dinosaur Jr., and Gene Loves Jezebel.
Soon after that, Jerome’s former band would hit it bigger. They released their Interscope Records debut, Rubberneck, in 1994; by the end of 1995, the now-timeless single “Possum Kingdom” was an alt-rock radio hit, and the album wound up going platinum. Even his mother noticed.
“She was like, ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about the Toadies,’ ” Jerome says. “ ‘Do you miss them?’ Oh, here we go. Et tu, Brute?”
Grand Prairie was the last stop on the Slash tour, a bit of kismet for the now Los Angeles-based Jerome in that he could linger in his former hometown for a few days, see friends, work on other projects, and maybe buy a new pair of shoes. After a six-week tour, what had been a brand new pair of Converse Chuck Taylors are blackened and scuffed from pedaling the hi-hat.
Yesterday, he caught a ride to Oak Cliff, where he’s crashing with a friend. Today, he, Graff, and Restrepo are at Hand Drawn Pressing in Addison, working on a deluxe, expanded double-album reissue of the first record by Halls of the Machine, an instrumental project they formed with keyboardist Van Eric Martin after Course of Empire. Carpe Diem Works, as Restrepo’s label is now called, also put out a Pop Poppins compilation in August and is rereleasing Course of Empire’s self-titled debut.
Jerome still remembers hearing Course’s “Coming of the Century” on the radio driving from Fort Worth to Dallas for a Pop Poppins gig and being instantly taken with their droning, tribal, industrial art-metal sound. He thought, Damn, that’s what we gotta compete with? He has also never forgotten the listening party Course of Empire held at the Hickory Street Annex for that record in 1990, which came complete with a vegan dinner and an artistic statement befitting both the band’s film school background and the inspiration for its name, a series of paintings by the British landscape artist Thomas Cole.
One night, sometime after Course co-founder and co-drummer Anthony Headley was no longer in the band, the members of Pop Poppins had a fight onstage at Trees. It was not an unusual occurrence, according to Jerome, but this fight was big enough that it prompted Graff and Course’s other drummer, Chad Lovell, to look at each other and say, “Should we ask Michael to join?”
Their band’s sound was built on having two drummers on a single kit, taking musical inspiration from Japanese Kodo drummers. It was also a self-imposed requirement that the band have five members because Cole’s “The Course of Empire” series included five paintings. By then they also had a major label deal, with the BMG subsidiary Zoo Entertainment (also home to Tool and Matthew Sweet).
For Jerome, it was an even tougher decision than returning to Pop Poppins from Toadies, but he was ready for a new adventure. “In those days, we were all dead certain that we were going to be The Who or The Clash,” Graff says. “We were going to be successful. We were going to be touring for the next 30 years and making records with the same people.” When, instead, Course of Empire went the way of most ’90s bands—sky-high hopes followed by crushing disappointment, with those major-label advances actually constituting a form of debt—Jerome decided to become a primarily touring guy rather than a session guy.
His mother had always told him that he shouldn’t be like her and count only on music, that he should have something to fall back on. His side hustles were never really intended as fallbacks, but, at various times during his years in Dallas, he sold Kirby vacuum cleaners, did data entry, and worked for several years at Crystal Clear Sound, a place that was obviously simpatico with the needs and schedules of touring musicians. He even thought about taking up computer programming. But then the phone would ring, and “tour it was,” he says. “And at some point, a decade goes by, and then another one, and then you realize, uh oh, I have no choice but to make what it is I do work.”
It’s been especially meaningful for Jerome to maintain a working relationship with Graff, whom he not only reveres as a creative partner and “a consummate artist” but also considers part of a band of brothers that bonded through their time in Course. That brotherhood also includes Lovell, whom Jerome cites as one of his biggest drumming influences.
“I didn’t play the way I did before I joined them,” Jerome says. “Chad Lovell showed me the way he played, his style. I wasn’t doing those things in Pop Poppins. I wasn’t doing those things in the Toadies.” In 2019, Lovell suffered a traumatic brain injury in a fall at home, and he now lives in a care facility. Whenever Jerome is back in Dallas, he and Graff visit him. Love for Lovell, an ongoing fundraiser for his medical expenses that began in 2020, held a benefit concert and auction in 2022 headlined by Graff and Toadies.
At the time Jerome became a professional drummer, some people thought the entire job would soon be obsolete. Instead, the drum machines just forced him to play better. “Ultimately, people wanted to continue seeing live performance,” he says. “They want to see a human being do something amazing. Especially in a day and age where music is free, touring is incredibly difficult and expensive. But people will still do whatever they can to be a part of a live experience and pay to see somebody that has affected their lives. That’s really cool to be a part of.”
While this story was being written, Jerome rejoined Slash in England to play an awards show. And by the time you read this, he’ll have completed a fall tour with Thomspon and pivoted back to Better Than Ezra, who play the House of Blues in Dallas on November 23. Then the year will likely finish with The Third Mind, which intends to make another record.
Halls of the Machine also remains a going concern—a new album is in the works—and, for Jerome, remains a true labor of love and an “outlet of sanity.” Within the trio, he’s able to be a composer as well as a player, and he doesn’t have to please anyone but himself.
Graff says his old friend could easily be the kind of drummer who would piss off an insecure, vain lead singer because once you start to watch him, it’s difficult to look away. Luckily, with Slash’s Blues Ball, that is not an issue. For one thing, there’s no lead singer; Andreadis and second guitarist Tash Neal trade off vocals. And nobody’s in danger of attracting more attention than Slash.
But sometimes even Slash can’t help but watch the drummer, who anchors the groove and urges it on. An accelerating whirl of arms and wrists and fingers. He is both the hurricane and the eye of the storm.
This story originally appeared in the November issue of D Magazine with the headline “Kit Cat.” Write to feedback@dmagazine.com.