In April, local self-described '60s/'70s punk-inspired quartet Blooddrunk Shenanigans hit the studio to record their fifth album in as many years. But the band isn't founder and drummer Pepper Denny's full-time gig. By day, he sells music equipment at his own Pepper's Pro Shop. It's a common Music City story — like so many Nashville denizens, Denny's had decades of experience working in studios, selling gear and playing in bands of all stripes across the country. including stints in L.A. reaching back to the last gasps of glam metal's heyday. But there's a little something more to this story, thanks to a chance appearance in the Los Angeles Times more than 20 years ago.
In November 1992, future Pulitzer Prize nominee Peter H. King, whose longtime column "On California" focused on personal and political stories throughout the state, profiled a young and hungry Hollywood glam band by the name of Queeny Blast Pop. King titled the piece "Last of the True Glamsters," after a line in a glowing review of the band.
"Pepper is Pepper Sweet," King wrote, "the band's 19-year-old drummer and the reason I hooked up with these young peacocks for a day. His father, an old friend, had called to report that the little boy I knew as Adam had moved from Kingsburg [a central California town near Fresno] to Hollywood, trying his luck."
A personal connection, certainly, but fully disclosed, telling a hopeful, hardscrabble story of looking for fame and fortune at a time when the rock music industry's focus had firmly turned away from the Sunset Strip to Seattle (perversely enough, the city the rest of the band had originally hailed from). Nearly five years later, and long after Queeny Blast Pop had dissolved without making a mark, King returned to his subject with a piece titled: "New Band, New Look, Old Dream." He caught up with the now-renamed Pepper Denny as the still-aspiring drummer kept looking for his big musical break, detailing his adventures playing in other bands from Seattle to Utah and back again in L.A. — as well as noting the drummer's day job as "a door-to-door salesman of fire extinguisher services." Denny had recently joined the Newlydeads, a then-new project by Faster Pussycat lead singer Taime Downe — a more successful, semi-famous glam survivor also trying to find his way in a new world.
King wrote in his column: "Los Angeles is filled with Pepper Dennys, with what he calls 'the in-between people.' They come in many varieties — musicians, actors, writers, would-be impresarios. They are the limo drivers packing screenplays, the waiters with country ballads. Their headshots hang behind the counters at dry cleaners. Talented but not exactly discovered, they are one of the city's most enduring cliches."
With barely a change, one could say the same thing about Nashville.
Recently, a random mention of the glam-metal days by a friend made me remember these columns. I'd read both when they were published and filed them away in my brain, and I remembered the name Queeny Blast Pop, just enough to trigger a successful search for them in the L.A. Times archives. Further research turned up his Nashville pro shop and band work. That resulted in a quick series of emails and eventually a chatty, entertaining phone conversation.
Raised by a father who worked for United Press International and later for the California Attorney General's office, and a mother who worked in nursing and teaching, Denny credits his family for much of the initial musical bug. "My uncle was a guitar player and he lived in Los Angeles," Denny tells the Scene. "My grandfather played guitar, and my dad played piano. My dad had a record collection that had everything you could imagine, from A to Z. He was a huge Beatles fan, but he had everything from classic rock to Ziggy Marley. I took jazz band in school, and listened to a lot of that as well."
While Denny learned to play guitar and keyboards over time, drumming has always been his principal instrument. "As a kid," he says, "I always wanted to be a drummer, and I got my first snare drum when I was playing in the band. ... At 13, I got my first drum set and played my first show, at the church! I currently play a four-piece drum set standing up, and I've been playing standing up since I was a teenager. I figured I might as well at least look good!"
With his family's encouragement and some gigging experience at clubs in Fresno under his belt, Denny set out for L.A. to take his chances. "I was about 16, 17 years old," he recalls. "I graduated high school early, auditioned for [Queeny Blast Pop] and got the gig." This also resulted in the nickname he's had ever since: "They had done a public broadcast show down in L.A., and they said that their drummer's name was Pepper, since nobody would have that name. But they had just lost their drummer, so for me to get the gig, they said, 'You've got to change your name,' and it just kind of stuck."
Denny elaborates on the experiences detailed in King's columns with humor and reflection. He notes that Blast Pop's return to Seattle didn't help the band, simply because all the bands they'd once played with were all signed and out on tours by then. As for the Newlydeads experience, Denny said it started off well, but ultimately ended in tears. "We played two shows," he recalls. "After a year-and-a-half I didn't get paid, and after the record was released, everything fell apart."
Denny moved to Nashville in 2005, when his now-ex-wife's employer relocated her here. After having spent years in Hollywood gaining experience in studio engineering and recording, he was fully aware of how much more friendly a city Nashville was for working musicians. In Music City, he got into retail, working as a sales rep at Guitar Center, but describes his time there as an experience that "made me hate music!"
"When you hear it all day long, and you're working with people and building recording studios," he explains, "you just think to yourself, 'Oh God ... this is just a miserable place to be at.' "
Both Blooddrunk Shenanigans and Pepper's Pro Shop grew out of Denny's overall experiences and a desire to do his own thing at last. The shop works as an online/by-appointment-only business, aiming at providing musicians a personal, experienced touch beyond eBay or Amazon hunting. The initial Blooddrunk Shenanigans album was a strictly solo affair he cut in a daylong studio session, but it has since grown into a full-band affair, including a recent appearance back in the L.A. area, during the annual NAMM Convention tradeshow in Anaheim. Shenanigans have had their own hard-luck stories, too. Denny wryly recalls an earlier singer from Australia getting deported due to visa problems: "I don't know if he's allowed to come back to the United States," Denny says. "I talked to some lawyers and they said, 'Well look, it's not like you're Keith Urban!' "
Looking back at that line from the second L.A. Times column, does Denny still consider himself an "in-between person"?
"I'm a professional musician," he says, "as well as a professional person in the industry. The band is becoming more and more well known. It's one of those things where I had a little bit of overnight success in my teenage years through my early 20s, and it didn't pan out, but as my dad tells me all the time, 'Would you rather be where you are now, or "Where are they now?" on MTV?' I've had a good career, I've been a musician my whole life, and I don't really think of it like 'the in-betweeners' any more."
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