kyle woodring, RIP

By Robbie on September 14, 2009

If you saw me play with a band in 2000, or watched my appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien that year, you might have seen Kyle Woodring on the drum kit. He was a short, skinny, blond-haired, good-looking guy who was five years younger than me and looked younger yet. No one I've traveled with has been more level-headed, focused, patient, observant, and just easy to be around; no one more gracefully adept at floating the three balls of family, work, and pleasure that musicians and other artists often have trouble keeping in the air. So I was shocked to hear of his death by suicide last week, at the age of 42. (The coroner's investigation is ongoing, so for now the suicide is officially as well as overwhelmingly "apparent.")

After moving to Chicago from Michigan in 1987, Kyle's main gigs were with Survivor, Deana Carter, and Dennis DeYoung. He also did a short stint with John Mellencamp and a longer one with "Jersey Boys." From that list you can see that our musical worlds were artistically and economically unlike. What I offer to musicians like this, who are accustomed to per diems and tour buses, is by comparison physically taxing and frill-free, and most of these journeymen that I've employed through the years, understandably, have found some subtle way to vent their discontent. But Kyle never did. When it was time to jump in the rickety van and race to Canada to play for a tiny crowd of drunks, he was upbeat and ready to help drive (which he did fast and well). When we pulled off the Ohio turnpike to sleep for three hours with the morning sun glaring and a swarm of angry horseflies doing a Ravel overture near the windshield, he was uncomplaining. When, after the Conan taping, the band had to forego watching their performance and ended up stuck for many hours on the Long Island Expressway and then in a rodent-infested motel in Islip, Kyle once again trudged off to the van to doze in the driver 's seat with nary a whine. When we found ourselves in rural Pennsylvania as a drum-guitar duo, at the unforgettable house party of a nice lawyer fellow who didn't invite anyone else to the party, we concentrated on playing well, spent some quality time with the lawyer's family, and headed laughingly back to Chicago on another all-night drive, which was manned mostly by Kyle. I wanted to spend the night and sleep, but he wanted to get more time in with his sons, Nick and Tabor.

Kyle's dedication to being a good father was fundamental to his character, and this is one of the many things that puzzles and disturbs me in light of the hostile and inconsiderate manner of his exit. Not long after he stopped playing with me I heard that he had suffered a divorce. We chatted on the phone a year or two later. He was in a lean work season and was, if I remember right, driving a truck for a bakery to help meet his obligations. I guess that he mentioned he was available for gigging and would be grateful for some dates, and that maybe that was the point of the call; but his tone certainly didn't register anything like desperation, and the truckdriving job didn't sound any tougher than travelling around with me. As always, he seemed to be handling whatever happened with calmness a nd good humor.  

From the anecdotal and banal scraps above you can correctly infer that a life in professional music is fuller of absurd degradations and nickel-and-dime hardships than the average job. Or maybe it's truer to say that these downsides equal the downsides of many other jobs -- garbage collector, schoolteacher, salesman -- but are felt as a crueler contrast against the glamour of performance and publicity. In any event the job is not for the depressive or suicidal, and some instinct for sheer survival may account for the aloofness and egocentricity that many career musicians exhibit. I've noticed a particular tendency in drummers who are good and long-lived toward temperamental steadiness and a cool, analytical cast of mind. I wonder whether this is an inborn temperament that suits drummers to their foundational, low-margin-for-error work, or whether it emerges as an adaptive adjustment to the work -- its muscularity, responsibility, noise, and nearness to chaos.

Talking about Kyle's death with a friend a day after the news came, we agreed that if he could go off the rails, anyone could. Almost anyone I've worked with, as well as I myself, would seem a likelier candidate for suicide. Thus his act revises everything that seemed evident about him, and invites a couple observations that I hope you won't find too Hallmarky. We don't know anyone completely. Life, personal and professional, hurls enormous obstacles and crushing disappointments at us, continually, and not everyone -- maybe no one -- has the natural fortitude to skirmish with them. Our biological drive to survive needs augmentation: social strengthening, willful blindness, philosophy, faith, medication.

If you want to remember Kyle, I'd humbly suggest that you can do worse than to pop my song "The Banks of the Marianne" (from Couples in Trouble) into your CD player. His drumming on that tune (forget that it's about an unhappy husband who drowns himself) is light and nimble and freighted with controlled emotion. As for my memorial, it will always consist of a handful of offhand remarks of Kyle's. For instance, on his very first outing with us, on the way out of Chicago, one of us in the van, I forget who, brought up some slice of musical wisdom, I forget what, from an unnamed source, I forget which. All right, this is not a very promising set-up. Let's say that I said: "Hey, I just read that analog tape is making a comeback, because engineers are having all sorts of trouble with the new version of ProTools, and anyway, digital resolution is about to hit a ceiling!"

At this news, Kyle's ears pricked up from the back seat. "That's interesting. Who said that?"

"Snuffy McFarland, of Omaha."

"Who is Snuffy McFarland?"

"He's a guitar player who played with the Blankity-Blanks."

"Who are the Blankity-Blanks?"

At which I thought, Oh man, this guy is really out of it. I mean -- Survivor! "The Blankity-Blanks, well...I guess they're nothing you would have heard of unless you follow the scene a little. They're a cool band. Out of Omaha."

Kyle nodded. "You know," he said, "when someone makes a statement, before I accept it, I like to ask myself: Has this person accomplished something in the field in which he is claiming knowledge?"

Isn't that a nice amendment to that rhetorical standard, the generic fallacy (the confusion of an argument with its source)? The intelligent skepticism and the "I like to ask myself" were pure Woodring, as I knew him -- which, it turns out, was not well.