Hey, MD readers, I’m Bob Husak of the Blakes. Allow me to provide you with a brief rundown of my musical career: Historically, my relationship with drumming has been consistently strange and at times rocky; I initially picked it up when I was twenty-two years old after having played guitar with my current band mates for a number of years. We had at that point run through a rogue’s gallery of shiftless fools passing themselves off as drummers while we were naively struggling to “make it” in the music business in Los Angeles. I eventually became fed up with our inability to consistently hold on to a drummer, so I switched without having had any previous experience behind a kit. I learned to play passably after a year of marathon rehearsals in a cramped, oppressively hot garage in Atwater Village. During that year, I developed a style that might generously be described by Steely Dan session players as “two club hands and two club feet.” Although my playing may be technically unsound, the total abandon with which I attack my kit has earned me accolades from non-musicians wherever we roam. Call me the anti-drummer’s drummer. That said, my style seems to fit well with the Blakes’ aesthetic, which has roots somewhere in pre-prog, pre-metal garage rock.
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So, anyway, we’ve long since re-relocated to Seattle in ignominious failure, only to find some success after a few more years of wood-shedding, rigorous touring, and recording. In the past year or so, we’ve toured France with the Gossip and the Kills, toured the UK with Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Wombats, and played Lollapalooza, Sasquatch!, Eurokeennes, and countless other festivals. We’ve even gone through periods of thinking we were hot shit.

We’re now poised to release a brand-new album called Souvenir and begin a three-month tour of the States (with a quick jaunt to England to play as a side-project called BEADS…it’s a little complicated). We believe the new album contains our strongest, most original, and most fully realized material to date, and we’re very excited about the prospect of playing it live.

What else? I guess I don’t have an official drum endorsement per se, although Jenny at Gibson would let me borrow a Slingerland kit if I swung by the showroom and asked real nice-like. So that counts, right? Advertisement

Drum heroes? The Troggs’ guy, I suppose. I also really like the drummer for KC & the Sunshine Band, because he’s the most machinelike player I’ve ever heard. They couldn’t have squeezed a fill out of that guy if they tried.

For more on Bob Husak and the Blakes, go to www.myspace.com/theblakes.