T.T. QUICK Drummer ERIK FERRO Dies

Erik Ferro, drummer for singer Mark Tornillo's pre-ACCEPT band T.T. QUICK, has died. No cause of death has yet been revealed.

The news of Ferro's passing was broken by Tornillo via his Facebook page on Sunday (June 25). Mark wrote: "It's with great sorrow that I post this …. T.T. QUICK drummer, my brother Erik (Erock) Ferro passed away last night. We are all devastated. I really can't say much more than that at the moment. I'm heartbroken. I'll post more info when it's available."

T.T. QUICK was a popular club band during the 1980s in the New York and New Jersey area and was known for the guitar work of David DiPietro and the powerful vocals of Tornillo. DiPietro's skills were especially singled out as he had given lessons to both Zakk Wylde of the OZZY OSBOURNE band and SKID ROW's Dave Sabo.

T.T. QUICK disbanded and later reunited sporadically and released a few more albums, including a live CD from one of their reunion gigs ("Thrown Together Live") and a studio effort, "Ink", which came out in 2000.

Regarding how T.T. QUICK got the attention of Jon "Jonny Z" Zazula and landed a deal with Megaforce Records, Mark told VWMusic in a 2021 interview: "Well, Johnny Z still had his Rock N' Roll Heaven store at the flea market here in New Jersey. Glenn Evans was the drummer at the time, and he was a frequenter of Jonny's store. He was there all the time buying records; that was the only place you could go to get underground stuff. So, Jon was looking for bands to sign, and Glenn had told him about T.T. QUICK. He knew about T.T. QUICK and said, 'Well, get me a demo tape,' so Glenn comes back and says, 'We need a demo tape.' Dave and I had been making demos all along; we just weren't telling anybody. I met David in Connecticut — he saw T.T. QUICK at the Agora Ballroom and wanted to work with me. He reached out to me, and I made a few trips up to Connecticut, and he and I wrote some stuff together and had a demo going. Lo and behold, he wound up joining T.T. QUICK because we needed a guitar player. When the time came that we needed a demo, we had it. It was almost everything that's on the EP, except for 'Go For The Throat' and a couple of other things that didn't make it. That's really what got us signed. Jonny listened to it and said, 'This is pretty fuckin' good.' Next thing you know, we had a record deal and were recording in Ithaca."

On the topic of T.T. QUICK's breakup, Mark said: "We were beating a dead horse. If you're not going to make money doing this, there's really no point to do it. I joined the electricians' union. Walter [Fortune, bass] had always been a businessman and had his own business. David went into construction. We didn't want to play that kind of music at that point either. We weren't going to change our tune, let's say. We made a lot of money for a lot of years, and it just wasn't happening anymore. It was that way for a lot of musicians, especially on the club circuit. They were becoming wedding singers and shit like that. I'm, like, 'There's no fucking way I'm doing this.'"