Concert Trip Turned Into Michael Schaedler’s Green Day

By John Voket

Newtown Health District staffer Maureen Schaedler didn’t pay much attention when she heard her son Michael was heading off to see the band Green Day in Amherst one recent Saturday night. After all, he had seen the veteran punk band several times before, and Michael himself was an aspiring drummer with his own Green Day influenced band called The Tablesport All-Stars.

But the morning after the show, Ms Schaedler learned that her son not only got to spend most of the show standing just a few feet from the band in the front of the cavernous Mullin Center, he also got to see one song from an even better vantage point: the seat behind Tre Cool’s elevated drum kit!

Armed with Polaroids and the good word of more than 2,000 witnesses including this reviewer, Michael Schaedler proved that, despite the fact he never took a single drum lesson, he could mix it up with one of his favorite bands without so much as missing a beat.

For years, Green Day front man Billy Joe Armstrong has treated a trio of fans to an opportunity to play on stage with them, stepping in on guitar, bass and drums and finishing off a verses or two of the Operation Ivy song “Knowledge.” And since Mr Schedler was familiar with the routine, and the tune, he thought for a fleeting moment that maybe that night, he would be the one to get up on stage.

As the band plowed through the show, spotlighting much of the material on their latest – and arguably greatest – offering, American Idiot, the moment drew closer. Schaedler said he had been trying to catch singer Armstrong’s attention all night, riffing air drum lines from many of the hits the band played.

“I knew they picked the drummer first so I had to get up there and get noticed,” Michael told The Bee from his home in Southbury this week. “I was ten feet from the stage all night, and I kept going crazy trying to make sure Billy noticed me.”

So when the first few notes of “Knowledge” pounded out from the sound system, the local drummer enlisted two of his bandmates and a couple of other capable looking fans to pick him up and practically catapult him onto the stage. With the approving signal of Billy Joe, Michael suddenly found himself standing next to one of his musical idols in the spotlight with the roar of several thousand fans cheering him on.

“Billy put his arm around me and asked me if I could really play the drums, and I said yes. And he said ‘swear to God?’ and I said yes, so he looked over to [bassist] Mike Dirnt and said ‘I want this one,’” Michael recalled.

Once he climbed up on the drum platform, drummer Tre Cool told Michael the basic beat of the song and handed over the drumsticks.

“As I was walking up to the drum set, I still couldn’t believe it,” Michael said. “But Tre just looked at me and said, ‘kick, snare, kick, snare,’ and he handed me the sticks. Then he came up behind me and told me no fills, keep it simple.”

For the next minute or so, Michael jammed along with bassist Dirnt until a bass player was recruited from the crowd. Then he spent another couple of minutes jamming along while Billy Joe worked on getting a guitar player.

Once the replacement ensemble was in place, Billy Joe took them through a couple of verses and a chorus before it was time for the ecstatic audience members’ rock and roll fantasy to come to an end. And while the lucky female guitar player apparently got to take home one of Billy Joe’s guitars as a souvenir, Michael ended up with a pair of autographed drum sticks and a few Polaroids taken by Mr Cool as mementos of his five minutes of glory.

“I just never though I was going to be the one to get picked,” Mr Schaedler said. “Thinking about it again right now just blows my mind.”

The son of a musician, Michael always enjoyed listening to music. But it wasn’t until about four years ago that he told a couple of his friends who happened to be guitar players that he was thinking of learning how to play drums.

“So we got another one of our friends and had him learn to play the bass and we started writing our own songs,” he said. “It was pretty ugly there for awhile, but we were having a great time.”

Now, with two self-produced CDs under their belts and more than 20 live performances to their credit at venues from Danbury’s Empress Ballroom to The Webster Underground in Hartford, The Tablesport All-Stars are ready to hunker down in the studio this summer to produce their third disc of original punk rock.

And maybe with a heaping dose of dedication, and a little bit of luck, Michael and his bandmates will be able to get an opening slot on one of Green Day’s tour stops in the future. It shouldn’t be too hard to make the call. After all, he already knows the drummer.