Earlier this month, Tool drummer Danny Carey was arrested at the Kansas City International Airport for assault. During the incident, it was revealed that Carey repeatedly shouted homophobic slurs at an apparent airport security guard, according to the police report.

It’s all been a strange sequence of events that doesn’t exactly paint Carey in the best light — but what was he doing in Kansas anyway? Well, he made a guest appearance with the pep band at a University of Kansas basketball game, obviously.

Carey actually grew up in the same city, Lawrence, where the University is located, so he’s got more than a few ties back to the school. Carey might have jumped ship to the rival University of Missouri’s Kansas City campus for college, but apparently, he was understanding enough to his hometown college to sit in for a Jimi Hendrix cover.

The drummer wound up playing ‘Fire’ with the pep band, a Hendrix song made legendary thanks to the mind-bending rhythms provided by Mitch Mitchell. Carey obviously counts Mitchell as one of his influences, because he plays the song like someone who’s practised it for years as a teenager in his basement.

All the stop-start hits, all the slightly off-kilter fills, and all the rapid-fire rhythms are perfectly reproduced by Carey, and he’s clearly having a ball sitting at a drum kit that he dwarfs. Carey’s a big guy, and his kits usually have more than just two toms and a few cymbals, so it’s funny to see a drummer like Carey get so stripped down.

It would have been a super cool moment had Carey not gone and (allegedly) assaulted an airport security guard literally only a few hours later. But hey, at least he got that sweet Hendrix cover in before he wound up doing something stupid.