inNate Rhythm

At the age of 4, Nate Wood sat down with a hot dog and French fries and proceeded to play with his food.

“He cut the hot dog up into pieces, to make a drum set, and he used the fries as sticks,” recalls Wood’s father, Steve.

This bit of family lore is cutesy but hard to resist because it all makes sense now. Nate, at 17, can do things on the drums that leave musicians more than twice his age shaking their heads in disbelief.

“As a person, he’s still a kid, but as a musician he’s incredibly mature,” says Dig Lewis, 40, a veteran local bass player who uses Wood in his R&B; and funk band, the Surgeon Generals of Soul.

Since graduating from Laguna Beach High School in June, Wood has dedicated his summer to club gigs, sometimes six in one week. The bands range from a pop trio to a Latin R&B; outfit. A recent Saturday night had him playing at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach with the Surgeon Generals from 4 to 8, then heading off to Mission Viejo for a 9:30 gig with Hands Down, his pop trio. It’s an apprenticeship in the hardscrabble life of club work--most gigs don’t pay him more than $50, plus food and soft drinks. Not that Wood seems to care; he just wants to play.

On stage at the Lighthouse, grooving through a funked-up version of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” Wood appears self-assured, his occasional grimaces stopping short of a pose. But watch him linger between sets, you sense his youth, his shy, awkward nature, how out of place he can seem in a dark club on a Saturday afternoon. He looks closer to the kid who played in his high school marching band. While his older bandmates hang at the bar, snacking on buffalo wings and beer, Wood fidgets, tapping out a rhythm on his thighs, eager to get back up on stage and play.

At the end of the month, Wood will begin a year’s stay at the Los Angeles Music Academy in Pasadena, a fledgling school designed to turn bassists, drummers and guitarists with promise into capable studio players. Wood is so good, says the school’s director, Tom Aylesbury, that they’ve decided to start him six months ahead of the rest of his class. He’ll drum for only half a year then spend six months working on the bass, which he recently picked up.

“He blew them away,” Aylesbury says of Wood’s audition in front of the school’s drum department. Joe Porcaro, whose experience in jazz and pop has included playing with Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Toto and Natalie Cole, heads the department.

The temptation to explain innate artistic talent is better left unindulged. Still, you want to ask: How did Wood get so good?

A visit to the Woods’ home overlooking the ocean in Laguna Beach provides some clues. Instruments--a guitar here, a bass there--lounge like pets over the furniture. A piano dominates the living room. Music plays constantly--from a CD by Brazilian guitarist Ivan Lind to James Taylor’s latest, “Hourglass.”

Wood’s room is pretty much gobbled up by his drums, which back up to an elaborate stereo system. This setup squeezes out any display of his other serious interest: surfing.

“When he was little, he was really good, and there was a temptation to show him off,” says dad Steve, a keyboardist and songwriter who scores commercials and Imax films, including “The Living Sea,” a collaboration with Sting, and the forthcoming “Everest,” with George Harrison.

“As a parent it’s as if it reflects well on you. But Beth and I had already been in show business and so we realized how much of it was a sham.”

From 1970 to 1975, Steve and Beth Wood were members of Honk, a band familiar to anyone on the Orange County club scene during that time. Honk played a combination of soft rock, folk and pop, with Beth on vocals and Steve on keyboards. In 1972, Honk provided the soundtrack to “Five Summer Stories,” a surfing film; they also released two albums. At their peak, Honk could sell out two shows a night at the now-defunct Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, Beth says, and they opened for the Beach Boys, Loggins and Messina and Santana.

Why did Honk break up? Beth sighs wearily and says it’s a long story. Somewhere in that sigh is a tale about the vagaries of the music business, with a moral that her son will have to discover on his own. But the breakup happened at least in part because Beth became a mother.

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“We have pictures of Nate in diapers playing the drums,” she says. “You’d hear his groove but you wouldn’t see anyone.”

By that time, Steve was on tour as a keyboardist with the Pointer Sisters. Later, he would join Kenny Loggins touring band, eventually becoming Loggins’ studio director and staying with him for 10 years. Meanwhile, back at the Woods’ home, Nate was doing his own quasi-studio work. “I would listen to my dad’s records a lot,” he says. “So I’d just put one on and play along with it.”

Growing up, he got periodic tips from this parents’ musician friends, but for the most part Wood taught himself--donning earplugs, turning up the stereo and banging away to Honk or Steely Dan records. Among the first things a drummer must master is the art of making his limbs operate independently of one another. Wood caught on early.

“When he was 5, we put a drum set together for him,” recalls Tris Imboden, Honk’s drummer and now on tour with Chicago, which he joined in 1990. “I thought it was just like the ‘proud father’ syndrome” when Steve said his boy could play. “But then I pulled up at the house and Nate was playing everything I played.”

Nate figures he formed his first band when he was 9. In his early teens, he got into death metal and glam rock. That phase left him with tendinitis in his knees from all that hard-driving work on the bass drums. The Woods’ next-door neighbors, a pair of UC Irvine literature professors, insisted on a curfew: no playing after 5 p.m. No matter. Nate by that time had taken up the guitar too.

The Los Angeles Music Academy is designed to tolerate a lot more noise than the Woods’ neighbors. Situated in Old Town Pasadena, the school is in its second year under founders Aylesbury and Hans-Peter Becker. Advertisements in Guitar and Guitar Player magazines have attracted European students; all applicants must submit a tape or audition live. A class of 33 the first year has grown to 60 this year, Aylesbury says.

Because it’s located in a recording and entertainment industry mecca, the academy has enlisted studio veterans to teach. There’s drummer Ralph Humphrey, who toured with the Don Ellis Big Band and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and later did studio work for the TV shows “The Simpsons” and “Deep Space Nine.” His credits reflect the schools’ ethic: Become proficient in a wide variety of musical styles, and you will get jobs.

“Most students here, they can all play by ear,” Aylesbury says. “But what really separates musicians is the reading. That’s what we teach them. To read totally different styles.”

“Wood’s parents wanted to reward him for doing well in high school. Their gift was a year of playing, free from the demands of college.

Locally, the Woods looked at the music departments of USC, UCLA and UC Irvine. They left feeling overwhelmed by the tuition or underwhelmed by the facilities. They went to Boston, to the famed Berklee School of Music. But the Pasadena academy, says Beth, “was the only place where we walked in there were 10 guys playing drums on the table.”

Adds Nate: “There were a lot of great schools I could’ve gone to in New York and Boston, but I know a lot of people here. So I can keep all of my contacts.”

For the $9,600 tuition, Wood will be exposed to such courses as Mallet Techniques for Drummers and Applied Sight Reading. He’ll play in ensembles of all stripes and have use of the drum labs, small rooms where the sign on the door reads: “Don’t use earplugs and learn to read lips.”

Wood will probably come out of the experience that much closer to doing studio work. His current passion is jazz fusion. But, he says, “Being a freelance artist is the best thing for me. I mean, right now, I love pop, but I also love playing jazz and funk.”

Imboden thinks Wood’s mind-set will translate well to whatever work he lands, because he’s not looking for glamorous solos.

“It’s a different ethic when you go into the studio, you have to play for the song or the situation,” he says. “It’s usually not about chops. But Nate already understands that, whereas most young players want to go to the hot dog stand.”

Meaning they want to show off. But Wood’s well beyond the hot dog and fries stage. You can see for yourself Oct. 18, when a band named Zero Ted is scheduled to perform at Laguna Beach High School. It’s Steve and Beth Wood and the next generation--Nate--on drums.