A Cambridge-educated lawyer, a property mogul, a VC executive, and a retired Microsoft veteran walk into a bar in Tel Aviv. This is not the setup for a joke. This is my band.
There is a version of my professional biography that I trot out when the situation calls for it. Cambridge law, 1988. English solicitor and Israeli lawyer. Thirty years of cross-border corporate transactions. Technology clients across the US, England, India, China, Latin America and Africa. Five working languages. Head of Global BizDev at Shepha. Editor of a blog about geopolitics, sport, tech and classic rock.
All of that is true. None of it explains why I spent last Tuesday evening in a rehearsal room arguing with a retired Microsoft executive about whether our version of “Gimme all your lovin” needs a longer drum intro.
My name is David Cohen. I am a lawyer. I am also the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of a band called the Core, and we are closing in on our sixth gig.
How four people who should know better ended up in a band
The Core exists because of that particular form of midlife stubbornness that makes grown men with serious careers pick up instruments they haven’t mastered and play songs written by people who could actually play them. There is no commercial ambition. There is no five-year plan. There is just four people who love rock music enough to spend their evenings butchering it in the most affectionate way possible.
Ronen Blonder plays bass — though “plays bass” undersells a man who is also a keyboard player, a producer, and one of the most naturally multi-talented musicians I’ve encountered outside the professional circuit. His day job is owning commercial property, which has nothing whatsoever to do with rock and roll, but which presumably funds the equipment habit. He has been playing with me for years, long before the Core had a name or a drummer.
Adam Zawel plays lead guitar and works for a late-stage North American venture capital firm. There is something deeply satisfying about watching a man who spends his days evaluating Series C investment decks stand in front of a small amplifier and try to nail the solo from “I heard it through the Grapevine.” The skill sets do not overlap. That is the point.
Mitch Nadler is our drummer. He has been drumming for 50 years. He retired from a long career at Microsoft. He joined a couple of years ago and completed the lineup, and since then the Core has been a real band rather than three people looking for a drummer, which is a different and significantly less interesting thing. Mitch brings the specific energy of a man who spent decades in corporate technology and has decided that the remaining years are for hitting things with sticks – as well as having over 50 years of drumming experience. I respect this enormously.
And then there is me, standing at the front with a guitar I am not the best player of and a microphone I am probably too old for, singing songs by people whose talent dwarfs mine by a margin that would be humiliating if I stopped to think about it. I try not to stop to think about it.
What we play, and why it matters that we play it
The setlist tells you everything about who we are. ZZ Top. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles. Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Cure. These are not obscure choices. They are the songs we grew up listening to, the songs that made us want to pick up instruments in the first place, the songs that we have heard a thousand times each and that still, somehow, make us feel something when we play them in a room together.
I wrote a piece for this blog a few weeks ago about Billy Gibbons and the night he played “Purple Haze” in front of Jimi Hendrix. I wrote another about Howie Epstein and the harmonies he gave Tom Petty for twenty years. I have a Rolling Stones piece in the pipeline. What I didn’t mention in any of those articles is that I play these artists’ songs on stage — badly, with enormous enthusiasm, in bars in Tel Aviv and Hod HaSharon in front of audiences who are mostly there for the beer. The blog and the band are drawing from the same well, and I think the writing is better because of the playing, and the playing is better because of the writing, and neither is as good as it should be, and none of that matters.
Mike’s Place, Tel Aviv
We have played Mike’s Place in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. We have played Ba BE bar in Hod HaSharon a few times. We have played Murphy’s. We have done a couple of private house parties where the audience was composed entirely of people who felt socially obligated to clap.
But Mike’s Place Tel Aviv was the moment. If you have ever been in a band — any band, at any level, from a garage in Milwaukee to a stadium in São Paulo — you know the moment I mean. It is the first time the room responds to you as a band rather than as four individuals making noise in the same space. The first time someone in the audience sings a line back at you. The first time you look at your bandmates and see the same grin that Howie Epstein gave Tom Petty when he covered that vocal line without being asked.
We are not the Heartbreakers. We are not ZZ Top. We are four men with day jobs and bad backs and a rehearsal schedule that depends on whose kids have what commitment on which evening. But the grin is the same grin. The feeling is the same feeling. And that is why we do it.
The songs nobody has heard
There is another dimension to this that I have kept mostly private until now. I am also a songwriter — ten original songs so far, in varying rock and blues genres, that I haven’t widely published. Some of them are good. Some of them are the kind of good that only the songwriter thinks is good, which is a different and less useful kind. All of them exist because playing other people’s songs eventually makes you want to play your own, and writing other people’s stories eventually makes you want to tell yours.
I’m not ready to put them in front of the world yet. But they exist, and the fact that they exist is part of why I write about music with the particular intensity that I do. When I wrote about Howie Epstein’s harmony singing, I was writing as someone who stands behind a microphone and knows what it feels like to try to hit a line that’s slightly beyond your range. When I wrote about Billy Gibbons learning tone from Hendrix in a hotel room, I was writing as someone who has spent evenings trying to coax a sound out of a guitar that the guitar does not want to make. The gap between what I can do and what Gibbons or Epstein could do is oceanic. But the impulse is the same impulse, and writing from inside that impulse, however imperfectly, produces something different from writing about it from the outside.
Why a lawyer plays in a rock band
People ask this as though there must be a complicated answer. A psychological explanation. A midlife crisis narrative. A theory about creativity and the legal mind.
The answer is simpler than any of that. We do it because we love it.
Thirty years of cross-border law teaches you many things, most of them useful, some of them transferable, none of them sufficient. It teaches you how to read a room, how to negotiate across cultural boundaries, how to hold complexity in your head while presenting simplicity to a client. It does not teach you what it feels like to stand in front of a microphone at Mike’s Place on a Tuesday night and sing the opening line of “Rockin’ in the Free World” to a room full of strangers who might or might not be paying attention.
That feeling — the specific, irreplaceable, slightly terrifying feeling of live performance — is not available in any boardroom, any courtroom, any conference room, any Zoom call. It is available only in front of an audience, with a guitar, with three other people who are simultaneously trying to remember the chord changes and trying not to laugh at each other. It is available only to people who are willing to be bad at something in public, in front of strangers, for no money, for no reason other than the fact that the music deserves to be played and they are the ones in the room who are willing to play it.
The Core is not a career. It is not a brand. It is not a midlife crisis. It is four people who love rock music standing in a bar playing it as well as they can, which is not as well as the people who wrote it but is well enough to make the room feel different than it felt before they started.
We’re closing in on gig six. I know the setlist will include at least one ZZ Top song, at least one Petty song, and at least one moment where I catch Ronen’s eye across the stage and see the grin. That’s enough. That’s why we do it.
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