Born as Abraham Cunninham on July, 27 1973, Abe Cunningham plays drums in The Deftones. As a drummer he considers Stewart Copeland (The Police), Ginger Baker, Mitch Mitchell as the greatest. Abe recalls his first band: "I lived up in Mendocino on the coast; we call it Mendo for short. We were 11 or 12 and we all wore camouflage and stuff so we were called Mendo Corps, like the Marine Corps. We all wore camouflage, the whole get-up and everything. It was killer because there was a teacher that taught music at this alternative high school kind of thing where kids could hang with normal school kids, it was really cool, but I was in fourth or fifth grade. So we went there after school. And all my friends were really young, so he kind of took us under his wing. And I sort of played drums already and we had this little band called Mendo Corps. And it was me, the bass player, Stephen (Deftones-guitarist) played guitar and another friend played keyboards and stuff. So I played at my first bar, I think, when I was 11. And we played in the parade and at school and all that, so it was really cool."



Several years later Stephen and Abe started jamming. Abe went to school with Chino, Deftones singer, in middle school and high school, and he grew up in the same neighborhood as Stephen, a few blocks away. The three started jamming and eventually they would form The Deftones.