Q : What Do You Call A Guy Who Hangs Out With Musicians?

“I tried the guitar when I was 14 or 15 and didn’t really have much luck with that,” Piazza says with a smile before explaining that dexterity with his fingers — aside from putting them down to call pitches, of course — has never been his strong suit.

“For some reason, I was very bad at putting down chords. But when I play drums, I guess my aggressive side comes out.”

Piazza began bashing the tar out of drums in his senior year of high school in Norristown, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia. It was the late 1980s, and Piazza was a huge fan of the hard-rock, “hair-band” sound that had dominated the radio — groups such as AC/DC and Van Halen.

That’s why he was thrilled when he met, befriended, and got lessons from Gregg Bissonette, a session pro who was in Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth’s successful solo band.

“I always loved live music and always loved rock,” Piazza says. “And when I started getting into music, I always listened to the drum patterns and the fills, and I wondered if certain sounds were hi-hat or if they were ride cymbals, and I started picking that stuff up.

He adds that he always uses bigger sticks because, “I have big, gangly hands,” and that “you can never have enough pedals or cymbals.” But Piazza also admits that he doesn’t practice with a drum pad while he’s on the road, that he pretty much leaves the music at home during the season.

“I don’t practice my rudiments as much as I should,” he says. “I’m deficient in rudiments. I can play songs, but I do need to continue to work on my ABCs.”

Piazza got a chance to do that live on stage recently, when he jammed to a few Metallica songs with the hugely popular Southern California hair-band cover act, Metal Skool, in San Diego.

“I like all hard rock, pretty much, everything from AC/DC to Zebra,” he says. “A lot of hard rock, some classic rock, some metal, some speed metal, some punk. But when I play, I try to play more musical songs, not just speed rock.”