10
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
Drummers are everywhere. It’s very likely that you walked past one today without knowing it, spoke to one without realizing it, stood in line behind one, or sat very close to one in a restaurant or bar. They don’t always wear giveaway T-shirts with pictures of drum kits or portraits of Keith Moon on them. There are certainly thousands and possibly millions of these people, which means that you’re never far away from a drummer.
The magic of statistics means that even if you’re not a drummer yourself, you’re very likely to know somebody who is. And whenever you meet somebody else, there is quite a strong likelihood that they know a drummer too. Mentioning my book at a couple of social events recently, I was quickly introduced to several drummers. And I was sitting on a London Tube train recently when a fellow passenger, an American woman called Michelle who lived in California, attracted my attention and asked me something about the destination of the train. I happened to mention that I was en route to the London Drum Show, explaining that it was a big showcase for the drum industry and for famous drummers, and that I was going to watch a performance by the incredible Terry Bozzio and interview the fantastic Russ Miller. “Oh!” said Michelle. “My neighbor Mike is a very good drummer.”
For some people, the sheer ubiquity of drummers may have apparently unpleasant consequences. Perhaps somebody on your street or in your apartment block has been playing a set of acoustic drums recently, interrupting your thoughts and conversations or distracting you from the television. Your reaction might have been to cuss, fly off the handle, and complain to the person concerned or to a higher authority. You might choose to come over all high and mighty, like Dame Helen Mirren dressed as the queen, striding into a London street—“Shut the fuck up!” But before you do that, you might consider an alternative reaction.
Do the drummers sound as if they are having fun? Are they laying down a nice groove? Perhaps they’re rehearsing for an important gig, making sure they get their drum chops into great shape for their big moment, playing for an audience at a dive bar in Cleveland, at a cool café in Amsterdam, at the Royal Albert Hall, or at Madison Square Garden. You never know. They’re doing something they love, trying to make music, being creative and artistic, trying to make something out of their lives, and getting some exercise into the bargain. Would you rather they were unemployed and bored, robbing banks, or mugging people in the street? When you think about it, give them a larger context, cut them some slack, I would argue that there is surely more to admire than to complain about.
Other drummers are cool about this sort of thing, as they should be. “There’s a kid who lives in one of the houses beyond the bottom of our garden in London,” said the comedian Rowland Rivron, “who I hear every now and again drumming on a kit, thrashing away. And it’s quite nice—I quite like it, because I’m a drummer.”
Drummers don’t just have hypersensitive neighbors to worry about: they suffer in so many other ways. Did you hear the one about the drummer who went into a recording studio and spent days laying down drum tracks for an important record, which turned out to be a total waste of time and effort because the powers-that-be then decided that they weren’t going to use any of his drum parts? It’s actually not funny at all, and it happens over and over again.
The very capable Ash Soan was booked to play some studio sessions for Dido, recording tracks for the album that became The Girl Who Got Away. He knew the singer well: he had previously worked with her when they had performed with the band Faithless. “I did four tracks for the album,” he said, “and then I got a message from Dido saying she really loved what I’d played, it was absolutely beautiful. But then a bit of time went by, and she had a child, and they ended up redoing it all, and none of my drums made it. They used synthetic drums instead. That’s what’s really annoying about the business: a bit of paranoia sets in somewhere, and somebody says, ‘It’s not modern enough—let’s change it.’ It’s a real shame, because I really enjoyed playing on those tracks, and I enjoyed seeing her again after all those years.”
It has happened to the best of them. September 11, 1962, saw the Beatles arrive at EMI Studios in London’s Abbey Road for their third recording session, with the aim of nailing their first single, “Love Me Do.” It wasn’t a great day for Ringo Starr: although he had played the song seven days before, he wasn’t considered good enough for the job by the producer George Martin, who hired the session drummer Andy White for the new recording. Starr was permitted to play a pair of maracas on the B-side, the drippy “P.S. I Love You.”
Fourteen years later, Starr met the singer Cat Stevens by chance when they were both staying in Copenhagen, and Stevens invited the drummer to play in a recording session for his next album, Izitso. They played several songs and had fun jamming on some old numbers they both knew, but none of Starr’s beats made the album. The drummer later reflected that this happened during a bad period for him, when he was drinking a lot, and said he had no animosity toward Stevens: “I mean, I can’t blame him because around those years, I was losing control! It’s funny because you cop such a resentment at the time: ‘What! He wiped me off!’ God knows what I played for him.”
Patty Schemel’s nightmare came in 1998, when Hole were recording the album Celebrity Skin with the producer Michael Beinhorn. “He had a reputation for replacing drummers with his own session players,” said Schemel. “He kept making me play my drum parts over and over again. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I just carried on. I wasn’t giving up until he said, ‘Okay, that’s it!’ He had to call it, because I wasn’t going to stop. Usually, I guess, when he does that kind of stuff, the drummer will just be like, ‘Okay, forget it, I give up.’” Eventually a session drummer called Deen Castronovo appeared in the studio to take over.
Schemel said she was deeply scarred by the experience, which is documented in the riveting 2012 film about her life in Hole, Hit So Hard. “It’s still tough to talk about,” she told me. “I felt that I had to do something with the feeling, and making the film was my way of expressing that and letting it out.”
Something downright peculiar happened to the drumming on Ozzy Osbourne’s second solo studio album, Diary of a Madman. When it was released in 1981, it had drum parts recorded by Lee Kerslake. But when it was reissued in 2002, fans noticed that something had happened to the rhythm section. Kerslake’s drum tracks, as well as the original bass playing, had been removed in favor of new parts recorded by the drummer and bass player who were then in Osbourne’s band, Mike Bordin and Robert Trujillo. The bizarre decision was reversed in 2011 when a thirtieth-anniversary edition restored the original drums and bass.
Even when drummers are allowed to leave their beats on a successful record, they might not receive an adequate credit for their efforts. Joey Waronker played all the solid and tasteful drum parts on R.E.M.’s 2001 album, Reveal, but his name only appears near the bottom of a list of “Additional Musicians” on the CD sleeve, and there is no indication that he played drums. The casual reader might guess that he contributed a snatch of trombone or Appalachian dulcimer to one or two of the tracks. Worse, at the point when I spoke to Waronker, the Wikipedia page for Reveal didn’t mention him at all, and listed the drummer on that album as Barrett Martin. “Oh . . . That’s not correct,” Waronker said when I pointed out the anomaly. “When I came into the R.E.M. world, they were just finishing the previous album, Up; Bill Berry had left and they didn’t have a drummer. They had Barrett helping out, and we both play on that album. But Reveal is all me.” This fact having been confirmed by other descriptions of the making of that album, I amended the Wikipedia page to give Waronker an overdue credit.
Many drummers have lost out in the financial department as well. This is because drumbeats, no matter how creative or catchy they may be, are not recognized for the purpose of songwriting royalties. These go to the people who write the tunes and the lyrics of the songs. “It’s so weird, and it’s always astounded me,” said Ash Soan. “One of the most important things in pop music is the beat. But in the eyes of the law, it’s melody, harmony, and lyrics. I’m not bitter or angry about it personally, because I’ve had a great career, but you can see why some people would be.” However, Soan explained that many drummers receive “performance royalties” when recordings they have drummed on are broadcast or played in public.
When I met Ginger Baker, he was still annoyed that he hadn’t been credited for his work on two specific Cream songs in the late 1960s. “When Jack Bruce played the riff of ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ the first time, it sounded way too fast, and I said so,” Baker told me. “I suggested he slow it down, which transformed the whole rhythm of the song. Then there was ‘White Room,’ where I suggested that introduction, which is a bolero in 5/4 time. It totally makes the song. But I didn’t get any credit for either of them.”
Of course, drummers can earn songwriting royalties if it is accepted that they have written part of the music and/or lyrics. A more satisfying solution is for bands to draw up their own special royalty-sharing arrangements for their music—as Shirley Manson, Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig of Garbage have done. “We decided right away,” said Vig, “that if we were going to stay together as a band, we’d have to split everything equally, so the money never becomes an issue.” This can now be seen as an important step for a band that has sold upward of seventeen million albums. “Even if I write a song on my own and bring it in, or Shirley writes one, it ends up being credited to all four of us. That’s how U2 does it, that’s how R.E.M. did it, and those bands have had long careers.”
“Yeah, a lot of bands today split everything,” said Nicko McBrain. “That works really well until there’s a big hit, and the girlfriend of the bloke who wrote it goes, ‘’Ere, do you know you could’ve had one hundred percent? That’s your bloody song—you ’ave the lot!’”
Most drummers are simply like other honest, hardworking people: they want to do a job they can be proud of, they want to be allowed to do it properly, and they appreciate a little recognition every now and again for their efforts. When I spoke to Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips, he was recovering from the shock of being omitted from an important list. “Spin magazine just did a list of the one hundred greatest alternative drummers, and I didn’t even make the list,” he said. “At first, I was kind of pissed off and my ego was, like, really bummed out. But then I saw that they’d left all these other people off as well. They didn’t have Steven Morris of Joy Division, who to me pretty much invented alternative drumming. Larry Mullen of U2, Bill Berry of R.E.M., and Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü—they’re not on the list either. And they had, like, ten drummers from these bands that came out four years ago that no one gives a shit about. It’s crazy!”
Michèle Drees has had a long career in drumming, during which she has played in an impressive variety of styles, from jazz, funk, and R&B to pop and heavy metal. She has backed the British singers Kirsty MacColl and Marc Almond, and was once the house drummer for Jonathan Ross’s popular UK television chat show. “I do feel I deserve a little bit of acknowledgment now,” she said. “It would be great if people said, ‘You know what? Michèle swings! My God, she’s such a fine player.’”
It’s particularly unfair when hardworking drummers are insulted by their bandmates. Asked the unlikely question of whether Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon is supposed to have quipped: “He wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles.” The line has been quoted over and over again in books, magazines, newspapers, on the Internet, and in countless conversations, and has developed its own mini-mythology. People often add that Lennon was referring to the fact that Paul McCartney also played drums, and had to get behind the kit for some songs on The White Album when Starr briefly left the band in 1968. It does sound like the kind of remark that Lennon might have made in one of his more caustic moods. The trouble is, I’ve tried for years to find the reporter or broadcaster who obtained that famous quotation from Lennon, but I’ve always drawn a blank. He never said it. The indefatigable Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn recently traced the remark to a joke told by the British television comedian Jasper Carrott in 1983, three years after Lennon was killed. Somehow, through a process resembling Chinese whispers, the line was reattributed to Lennon as it was spread from person to person, with nobody bothering to do any fact-checking as they passed it on.
During the early days of Aerosmith in the 1970s, Joey Kramer overheard a conversation between a manager and other members of the band that made it plain that he was considered just a sideman, an accessory to the band rather than one of the stars of the show. He was just the drummer—a phrase to raise the hackles of drummers everywhere. “I have a completely different outlook now,” Kramer told me in 2014. “I don’t feel as though I’m ‘just the drummer.’ I feel as though I’m an integral part of what makes Aerosmith Aerosmith. I think it takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to be a drummer, because you have to deal with a lot of shit and you’ve got to love what you do. And I love what I do more than anything else in the world, but at the same time I’m not going to be a doormat for anybody, and I’m not going to take any shit from anybody. And I did for a long time, but those days are long gone and are over forever.”
Kramer has faced a particular disadvantage because Aerosmith’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, is also a drummer, and has had some strong ideas in the past about Kramer’s drumming. “Let’s just say that he had a lot to say about what I was playing,” said Kramer. “And that’s magnified when the drummer, being me in this situation, also has a strong personality and also has a strong idea about how he wants to play and what he wants it to sound like. I was able to decipher the kind of direction that Steven was giving me in the beginning of the band, because I had a lot of respect for him as a musician and as a drummer, so my attitude has always been: if there’s somebody that’s doing what I’m doing and it’s plain to me that they’re doing it better, then I can learn from it, obviously. The only thing that’s going to prevent me from doing that is my own ego—and I’ve tried to not get in my own way for quite some time now. So I learned a lot of things from him. But then you get to a point where, okay, the teacher lets the student go. But Steven, being the way that he is, never lets go. So I just deal with it.”
Drummers suffer in so many other ways. A player who doesn’t have a band to play with might consider becoming a session drummer, imagining what a wonderful life he could have formulating brilliant drum parts and hearing himself on hit records, like Ash Soan or Ndugu Chancler. But it’s a tough world out there, with hundreds of drummers competing for a limited amount of work, and many talented players struggle, fail, and eventually give up. The American player Russ Miller endured a period of grinding poverty while he tried to get a foothold in the business. After growing up in Ohio and moving to Florida to go to college, Miller came to Los Angeles in 1996. “And I lived in a ten-foot-by-eight-foot storage closet at a rehearsal facility for a year,” he recalled. “I had a little burner you could plug in, and I had the phone company come and install a phone in there. I joined a gym so I could go for a shower. And I crawled up on top of the closet and put an air conditioner there with a garbage bag on it, so it would blow cold air into the closet.” When he wasn’t living in his tiny closet, Miller was haunting casual entertainment offices, asking if they would book him as a drummer for weddings or other events. “I would play events and meet other musicians, and I figured that the more guys I played with, the better chance I had of them knowing other people and recommending me.” Although there were days when he did more valet parking than session drumming, Miller said he always had the right mind-set. “I was a professional drummer who this week was valet parking: I was never a valet parker who wanted to be a professional drummer.”
“If you talk to ten different session drummers about how they made it,” said Omar Hakim, “you would probably hear ten very different stories. When I was trying to get more work in the sessions scene in New York in the 1970s, it was a challenge, because the drummers who were already there were the likes of Steve Gadd and Bernard Purdie. So why are they going to hire me? But one of the things on my business card at the time was ‘percussionist’: one of my drum teachers was a conga player, and I learned djembe drums and timbales and all of this other stuff as well. So when I didn’t get gigs on the drum set, I could market myself as a percussionist. I thought, Okay, if they’re not going to hire me as a drummer, I could slip in and play percussion. And I remember when everything shifted. I was on an advertising-jingle session, playing percussion opposite the drummer Allan Schwartzberg, who was one of the top drummers in New York. This session was going overtime, and Allan had another session afterward with a pretty big pop star that he didn’t want to be late for, and at a certain point he just stood up and said, ‘I gotta go!’ So the producer looked at me and said, ‘Omar! You’re up.’ It was the first time that that group of people in the room had heard me on a drum set, and that really helped: after that, I started getting a lot more calls for drumming work.”
Drummers who join bands have to struggle as well sometimes. A drummer who plays for a long time in the same band is usually at a severe disadvantage when the group breaks up, explained Nick Mason. “You have to bear in mind that the drummer is the one person who can’t operate without the others,” he said. “All the others can go off and do something on their own—go off and sing on their own or play guitar on their own, for example. But no one’s that interested in listening to two and a half hours of drumming. Well, apart from other drummers!” he laughed. “The public at large are not going to buy lots of tickets to hear solo drummers.”
This echoes a point that Robert Wyatt has made: that a drummer needs a band; that drumming is a “social act.” With a few exceptions, drummers are not celebrities on their own. Proof of this particular injustice comes from the websites that help journalists to find contact details for famous people. When I logged in to one such useful website and typed the names “Ringo Starr,” “Phil Collins,” and “Sheila E.,” the site showed their publicists’ contact details. However, the names of many brilliant virtuoso drummers such as Omar Hakim, Vinnie Colaiuta, and Cindy Blackman Santana were not recognized at all. When I started typing the name “Terry Bozzio,” the site suggested I might be looking for the wrestler Hulk Hogan (evidently because his real name is Terry Bollea, which is vaguely similar).
It has been said that Keith Moon, despite his independent notoriety and evident insanity, was fiercely loyal to the Who and secretly terrified that they would split up. He did try his hand at some studio session work, but found he wasn’t adaptable enough: his frenetic style worked well in the Who, but not in most other musical settings. As he once explained, “I’m not used to being told to play a certain way. I’m a lousy session musician.” Ultimately he became the only member of the Who to die before he got old, passing away while his beloved group was still together.
Ringo Starr was bereft when the Beatles broke up in 1970. As he recalled years later, “I went back to my luxury home in Weybridge and just sat in the garden for months, wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself. Playing with the Beatles had been my whole life for ten years, and now it was over and I didn’t feel qualified to do anything else. The initial breakup was so emotional, mainly for me but not so much for the others. We had been together for so long, and then suddenly I had nothing to do. I sat in my garden thinking, ‘My God, where do I go from here?’ I felt so absolutely lost.” Starr soon began hitting the cognac and suffering blackouts, and ended up in rehab for a while.
David Lovering shuddered as he recalled how the Pixies had split suddenly in 1992. “I loved the Pixies; it was something that I had done for years, and I enjoyed it. It was a blow when I heard about the breakup. I was upset about it and I didn’t know what to do. Before the band I’d worked in electronics, but after all those years I couldn’t just go back and get an electronics job: I’d have to learn a lot of new things, and also I’d become disenchanted with it. So I started doing session work. I had a lot of friends who wrote music, and they helped me out. But I found out after a while that I can’t do it: I’m not that good at going into a studio and immediately coming up with something good. So that was very hard, and I stopped doing that.”
Adding to the pain of the Pixies’ dissolution, said Lovering, was the fact that he had just acquired a shiny new red Gretsch drum kit when the band called it a day. “I joined a band called Cracker for a couple of years, and we did some touring, but after that I gave up the drums. I put the drums away, in storage. Luckily, I had some money from the Pixies, so I had the freedom to have a little vacation. But the vacation kept stretching.”
Lovering was lucky to find another showbiz role in the mid-1990s, though adapting to it was initially a struggle. “I decided I wanted to be a magician, and then I had to figure out how to take on that career,” he said. “I did thirteen-year-old girls’ birthday parties. Don’t do thirteen-year-old girls’ birthday parties! If you think being a musician is hard, being a magician is a billion times harder. But I love magic and I wanted to do it, so I had to come up with something. You need a big stage show to make money.” A lightbulb suddenly appeared above his head, and he transformed himself into the Scientific Phenomenalist, presenting science-based tricks onstage, dressed in a white lab coat. He became one of the world’s strangest support acts, opening for shows by Pixies-related acts such as the Breeders and Frank Black. “People love smoke and fire, so if I had fire and smoke in my show, I could do no wrong. I used my kick drum in my act: I filled it with smoke and shot smoke rings out of it.”
Despite his success in the world of conjuring, Lovering eagerly put his kit together again when he heard that the Pixies were regrouping in 2004. “That was great news, because I was at a very low point, and I had a terrible girlfriend at the time.”
It was Nick Mason who revealed one of the most profound facts about drummers. Because it’s such a struggle for the drummer when a band splits up, he explained, it is very much in the drummer’s interest to keep the band together. This is why he or she is very often the band’s diplomat and peacemaker, breaking up fights and pacifying feuding band members. “I’ve had people say to me that I was the one holding it all together,” said Mason. “Bands are very interesting in the way that they group together and show solidarity when there’s adversity, and when they fragment it’s at the point when they’re loved by all and sundry and they don’t need each other anymore.”
Debbi Peterson explained that she and the rest of the Bangles have made great strides with band harmony and diplomacy after suffering from infighting in the 1980s. “We all used to keep things to ourselves and not discuss things. Probably one of the reasons we broke up in 1989 was because everybody was keeping their own angst and frustrations to themselves. There were mean, catty looks at each other—all this bitchy girl stuff. It would have been better if we’d actually tried to punch each other out or yell at each other: we might’ve lasted longer. It’s different now that we’re back together: we’ve learned over the years that hey, come on, if there’s a problem, let’s talk about it. We are a lot more open with each other now. And I’m definitely the one who will say, ‘Okay, you guys, let’s stop, let’s sort this out.’ I’m like lukewarm water. I’m pretty much the diplomat, I think.”
Carl Palmer recently said that his role in the prog supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer was “kind of referee-cum-juggler,” despite the fact that he was several years younger than his two bandmates. And in 1970, when Phil Collins became the drummer in Genesis, joining Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford, he also found himself taking on the role of mediator. The guitarist Anthony Phillips had just left the band, and his replacement, Steve Hackett, would climb aboard later that year. “When I joined the band,” said Collins, “my social background was very different from that of Tony, Mike, and Peter. They were very tightly wound public schoolboys, and there was a lot of stress and bickering around the time when Anthony left. Peter and Tony had a love-hate relationship. Whether you played an F-sharp-major chord or an F-sharp-diminished was really important in those days, and nobody wanted to appear to be wrong. Steve Hackett hit the nail on the head a while ago when he said that there’d still be arguments about who had stolen whose protractor at school! But I found myself coming in from a stage-school background, where anything goes, and being a lot looser as a person. And I would be watching these arguments, looking from one side to the other like I was watching a tennis match, and it would sometimes be down to me to deflate the atmosphere, which I might do with a joke. If you make a joke, people tend to relax a bit.”
Collins’s point suggests that the drummer’s diplomatic tendencies are inextricably tied up with the role of “the comedian in the band.” “Comedy is a great icebreaker,” said Ross McFarlane, “and I’ve been told that I’ve been a great tonic on tours with my sense of humor. And there are a lot of other drummers I know who are funny. There is a lot of ego in singers and guitar players, and I always take the approach of ‘Let’s all work this out.’”
“Drummers are basically the friendly ones in the band,” said Steve White. “I remember when I was in the Style Council in the 1980s, we did a TV show with a lot of other acts on the Polydor label. And all the singers were shut in their dressing rooms, or looking around to make sure that everyone was looking at them. But the drummers were hanging around the coffee machine, chatting to each other. I think as drummers we’re in touch with something that goes back a long, long way. Not being too hippie-dippy about it, but in Africa, people get together to play the drums if somebody dies, if somebody marries, if somebody’s born, or if they’re going into battle: drumming is a communal thing. And drummers never have a problem with hanging out together, and taking ideas from other drummers and incorporating them.”
“There’s quite a lot of sharing among drummers,” concurred Nick Mason. “Drummers play a lot of master classes for other drummers, and they’re very social. My impression of guitarists is that they’re a bit more separated, whereas drummers really like to get together and talk. Even wildly tattooed, television-out-the-window-brigade drummers are still absolutely charming and love to talk about drumming. Tommy Lee, for instance, is delightful.”
“Drummers sit at the back and see everything that’s going on in the band,” said Butch Vig. “A good drummer is able to work within the context of a band and deal with some of the more ego-centered issues that might occur between, say, a lead guitarist and a lead singer. A lot of drummers are more grounded and can be more objective about the music. Look at Larry Mullen in U2—he’s sort of their bullshit detector. Bono and the Edge will often experiment, going off in tangents, and Larry is the one who will say, ‘That doesn’t sound like U2 . . .’”
For me, it was the producer and drummer Ben Hillier who put his finger on the main reason why drummers are often more socially skilled than other musicians. “You can quite easily learn to play guitar or keyboards on your own, just sitting in a room and practicing for a long time,” he told me. “But with drums, you really can’t learn how to play them all on your own. You can practice to a certain extent, but you’re not going to get a huge grasp of dynamics and tone unless you’re playing in a live situation, with other people. So most drummers have grown up playing with other musicians, whereas a lot of guitarists and keyboard players and other musicians have grown up playing on their own.”
“Drums are really hard,” said Julie Edwards. “They’re exhausting and it’s a relentless job. I just think that the drummer’s job is so different from anyone else’s in the band—so drummers can bond with other drummers in a way that they can’t necessarily with other musicians. Drummers understand each other.”
There was a notable bonding session for drummers at the Greek Theatre, Los Angeles, in the summer of 2011, when Steely Dan arrived to play their Aja album in its entirety with Keith Carlock behind the kit. “Steely Dan are my favorite band,” said David Lovering, “and every one of their drummers has been great. I went to see them play Aja, and there was a little meeting area in the theater where people were having drinks before the show. I looked around, and I couldn’t tell you how many drummers I saw there. There was everyone from Josh Freese to Danny Carey, and it went on and on; Pat Wilson from Weezer was there too. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Drummers aren’t just beat keepers, explained Ben Hillier: they also make an enormous contribution to the sonic distinctiveness of a band. As well as producing acts including Blur and Elbow, Hillier has worked as a sound engineer with U2 and believes that there is a unique chemistry between the band’s drummer, Larry Mullen Jr., and their bassist, Adam Clayton. “Larry and Adam are amazing,” said Hillier. “Larry usually plays the same distance ahead of the beat. If there’s a perceived beat that drives through the song, he will push it to the front of the beat as far as he can. So even when U2 play a slow song, it sounds fast and exciting. But Adam is the opposite: he’s behind the beat. And the two of them create this unique combination; you could get them to play almost anything, and it would still sound like U2.”
According to Hillier, Blur had an equally intriguing chemistry, thanks to the interplay between drummer Dave Rowntree and bassist Alex James. “Dave is metronomic; few drummers are more in the center of the beat than Dave. He’s absolutely square in his feel. And then, on the other hand, as a bass player, Alex is quite laconic.”
The list of skills and qualities that people require from drummers just gets longer and longer. Not only are they expected to keep the beat and provide sonic distinctiveness, but they are also supposed to be highly sociable people who can be very funny and can defuse disagreements. As if that weren’t enough, there is another role that many of them take on: that of the chronicler and historian of the band they play in. Nick Mason has penned Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. Mickey Hart has written about his experiences as a member of the Grateful Dead, while John Densmore has written not one but two books about the Doors, including the recent volume The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison’s Legacy Goes on Trial. The late Mitch Mitchell documented his time in Jimi Hendrix’s band in The Hendrix Experience. Tony McCarroll put out Oasis: The Truth: My Life as Oasis’s Drummer, Peter Criss wrote Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, and other drummers including Joey Kramer, Bill Bruford, and Ginger Baker have pitched in with their own autobiographies, describing what it was like to play the drums in bands such as Aerosmith, Yes, King Crimson, and Cream. One of the most charming and original pop-music memoirs ever published is Ringo Starr’s Postcards from the Boys, which reproduces many of the postcards he was sent through the mail by the other three Beatles.
I was at the ICA in London when Clem Burke gave a public reading of extracts from a book he was writing about Blondie. “I’m telling the story from my perspective,” he told me afterward. “I think I have a pretty good recollection of what went on. The beauty of keeping a diary is that you can go back and relive the experience, which is what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to make any great statement about my life being so wonderful and everybody needs to know the story of my life, but I think the anecdotal stories I tell give some insight into being there. It’s like descriptive narrative: what color the wallpaper was and what kind of cigarette I was smoking; all that kinda stuff.”
Although Dale “Buffin” Griffin didn’t write a book about Mott the Hoople, he became an enthusiastic archivist of their music. “A while after Mott split up, most of us lost interest in the band,” said Mott’s bass player, Overend Watts. “I wasn’t interested because I was doing other things, and the rest of the band were doing their own things. But all through the lean years, Buffin was raiding recording archives in London, finding old things we’d never finished off, and then getting me or someone else to play a bit on them to finish them off. He took the best of the stuff—and he found some amazing stuff—and mixed it and got it all sounding good, and got it released. And he did all the research on the tracks and wrote the sleeve notes.
“A lot of that work, like the sleeve notes, has fallen to me now, because Buff has Alzheimer’s and can’t do it anymore. I curse him: I think, ‘You bugger, you’ve left me to do all this!’ It’s not my sort of thing at all, whereas it was his. I think if there had been a proper book about Mott the Hoople, it would have come from Buffin. He was a good writer. He was very articulate, and was a stickler for good English grammar.”
The role of historian may seem an unlikely one for a drummer. But there are certain key qualities, possessed by a wide range of skin beaters, that would be extremely useful in this field. One of these qualities is an outstanding memory. Reflecting on the qualities of the late Keith Moon, Pete Townshend once said: “The most interesting aspect about Keith was the excellence of his mind, the rapidity of his memory. You often find this with drummers, that they have the most extraordinary memories. It’s an extension of their work. Maybe their memories are centered in a different part of their brain, because they have to remember long musical phrases as pure data. It’s almost binary. They must know exactly where they are in a song at any given time.”
When Mike Portnoy played drums in Dream Theater, he boasted that he had “an elephant’s memory” and went on to explain: “The guys in my band, they joke about it, because when we did our twentieth-anniversary tour a couple of years ago, one of the things we were doing on that tour was playing the first song we ever wrote together from back in ’85, a song called ‘Another One.’ And basically, when it came time for tour rehearsals, I never even listened to it. I just sat down with a kit, and it was still stored in there from twenty years earlier.”
Nick Mason identified another quality, also common in drummers, that helps them write the histories of their bands. “The reason I’m the historian is that I kept more stuff relating to the band than the others did,” he told me. Mason—a prodigious collector, like so many other drummers—has preserved “ephemera” including concert programs, T-shirts, and ticket stubs from various Floyd tours, and clippings of press articles about the band, which he started methodically sticking into scrapbooks in the 1960s.
Mason is one of those drummers who have transcended the role of simply playing the drums in a band. He has been a record producer whose production work includes the classic album Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt and the album Music for Pleasure by the British punk band the Damned. “I like producing,” he told me. “I like being on the other side of the glass and trying to make it sound right.” Other drummers who have worn the producer’s hat include Phil Collins, Omar Hakim, Butch Vig, Questlove, and Ben Hillier.
Drummers are sometimes inventors as well. When I saw Russ Miller play, I noticed he had something attached to the front of his bass drum that looked like a baby bass drum. This, he told me afterward, was one of his own inventions, the Subkick, a “low-frequency capture device” that amplifies some of the deepest sounds of the drum. “I was doing these hip-hop records,” recalled Miller, “working with these guys who were programming stuff on drum machines. The beats they made sounded huge, but they didn’t feel good, so they had me playing beats over the top. But the natural drum sound was a little small-sounding in relation to the machine beats, and I thought, ‘We need to get some more bottom end here.’ So I got a seven-inch speaker, wired it so it became a microphone—which is an old trick—and put it in a little drum shell. It only picks up the low end of the drum sound, and adds so much more to it.” Other drummers now use Miller’s Subkick to give more oomph to their bass drums—and his invention can even be seen on the drum-kit tattoo adorning Miller’s left arm.
A few drummers have ventured into the rarefied world of fine art. Bill Ward, formerly of Black Sabbath, has worked in the medium of “rhythm on canvas,” making abstract light paintings based on the movements of his drumsticks. Carl Palmer and Rick Allen have produced work in the same medium.
Mickey Hart has also created dazzling displays with his drumming, after collaborating with California neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley. In 2012, Hart and Gazzaley presented a show in which Hart drummed in front of a live audience while his brain activity was captured by electrodes and converted into a light show. This isn’t just trivial entertainment, as Hart has explained. “This is about breaking the rhythm code, our genome project,” he said. “Once we know what rhythm truly does, then we’ll be able to control it and use it medicinally for diagnostics, for health reasons. To be able to reconnect the synapses, the connections that are broken in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s—that’s where we are heading.”
Another American neuroscientist who has explored the world of drumming is David Eagleman. The scientist was intrigued by a story that the British musician and producer Brian Eno had told him about U2’s drummer, Larry Mullen Jr. As a 2011 feature by Burkhard Bilger in the New Yorker explained, Eno was working with Mullen in the studio, and the drummer was playing to a recording of the band that had a click track on it. But Mullen complained that he couldn’t play to the click track, because it was ever so slightly out of time—a tiny fraction too slow. Eno disagreed, but discovered later that Mullen had been correct: the click was several milliseconds out. It was clear that the drummer had an extraordinary perception of timing.
Was Mullen a freak of nature, or was there something special about drummers’ brains? Eagleman decided to conduct an experiment. Drummers were invited to Eno’s studio, and each one played while wearing an EEG monitor on his head. They discovered that the drummers did have something happening in their brains that wasn’t going on in the brains of other randomly selected subjects—people who were not drummers who were used as controls in the experiment. Their sense of timing really was exceptional. Not any old Tom, Dick, or Harry can become a drummer.
However, drumming is an equal-opportunities gig: drummers can be male or female, from any race, straight or gay, intellectual or moronic, dyslexic or highly literate, perfectly sane or certifiably crazy. They can be carnivores or herbivores—Omar Hakim, for example, has been a vegetarian for over thirty-five years. “When I was on tour as a young kid in the 1970s,” he said, “I ate a lot of junk food that started taking a toll on my digestive system. So by the time I was nineteen years old I was not feeling so great, and I went to a doctor who suggested that I try a vegetarian diet for six months. I immediately started feeling better, and I feel my drumming got better too: it helped my endurance and my focus and concentration.”
Even sinistrality—left-handedness—is no impediment to drumming success. Just as some musicians manage to play guitar and bass despite being left-handed, there are plenty of brilliant southpaw drummers. But this is where life gets a little confusing. When you start classifying drummers as right-handed or left-handed, you discover that there are actually three classes of drummer, not two. The majority of the world’s drummers are right-handed people who play standard, right-handed kits. Then there are left-handers who play left-handed kits—drum sets that resemble a mirror image of an ordinary kit, with the snare drum and hi-hat to the right instead of the left. Phil Collins and Joey Waronker are two drummers in that category. But then there are other left-handers who play right-handed kits, such as Ringo Starr and Clem Burke.
“I took formal lessons when I began drumming,” Burke told me, “and the drums were set up the traditional right-handed way, and I just took to it and was taught to play that way—although I do lead with my left hand quite a bit, which makes my style somewhat unusual, which also makes Ringo Starr’s style somewhat unusual. I feel I’m somewhat ambidextrous, but Ringo has said he has a hard time going around the whole kit, because he’s starting with his left hand and going the wrong way round.”
“Ringo basically plays the kit backwards,” explained Joey Waronker, “which is why his approach to drum fills is so unusual—going from the low toms to the high toms, when we’re all used to hearing drummers go from high to low.” Waronker made a surprising discovery when he was in the studio with Paul McCartney, contributing to the ex-Beatle’s 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. “I set up my kit left-handed, as usual. And Paul plays guitar and bass left-handed, but when he tried to play my kit he found it really difficult. He couldn’t do it.” Like Clem Burke and his old bandmate Ringo (whose kit he often played when Ringo was out of the room), it seems that the sinistral McCartney learned to play the drums on ordinary, dextral kits.
So many drummers are so different from each other in so many ways. But is it still possible to ascertain a type—a particular sort of person who becomes a drummer? What’s obvious is that it’s usually an energetic, resourceful person who loves music and doesn’t mind sitting at the back of the stage and being the butt of endless jokes. And the evidence of all my research suggests a bit more. Just as a professional drum kit is really a collection of instruments, the best professional drummers need a collection of qualities—including physical endurance, a good memory, excellent timing, loyalty, a healthy sense of humor, diplomatic inclinations, and perhaps even the ability to write books about the bands they’ve kept the beat in.
But my ideas about the type of person who makes a great drummer were shaken up severely as I finished this book. There was a short documentary film circulating on the Internet, popping up on social-media networks, and steadily gathering an audience of hundreds of thousands of people. Created in 2012 by the filmmakers Ross Harris and Stanley Gonzales, it’s called Drummer Wanted. The star of the film is Dean Zimmer, a rock drummer in his early fifties with a fantastic feel for rhythm, who lives in Southern California. There’s nothing too unusual about that, of course, but Zimmer has a rare congenital condition called arthrogryposis, which stiffens the joints and severely restricts the movement of the limbs. He has used a wheelchair since he was very young, and accomplishing most tasks is hard work for him, and yet here he was in this film, laying down a fantastic groove on a drum kit. Zimmer has played many gigs behind the kit and has opened for big acts such as Styx, Kansas, and Thin Lizzy; he has even managed to play demanding prog rock and speed metal. But he recounted how, one day, he had responded to a “drummer wanted” ad, arriving in person in his wheelchair. The musicians who had placed the ad “looked at me like I had three heads,” he said.
“What we didn’t realize when we came to make the film,” said Ross Harris, “is how long it would take Dean to set up his drum kit. It took hours. We helped him, because it was taking forever, but he insisted on doing most of it himself, because he was very particular about everything. I think many other people would’ve been exhausted at the end of it, but Dean is so patient. I think he has the greatest attitude of anybody I’ve ever known.”
Zimmer’s disability has forced him to find a unique way of playing the drums. He holds the sticks the other way round, so that the fatter ends hit the drums and cymbals, and he has to strap the sticks to his hands so that he doesn’t let go of them. “And in order to hit the drums on time,” said Harris, “Dean has to throw his arms well in advance, way ahead of the beat. And he uses his back and his shoulders to propel his arms. I’m sure it took him years even to reach a basic level of playing. But here’s the thing: he loves really technical drumming. His favorite drummers are people like Terry Bozzio.”
Many drummers around the world have been wowed by the film, and by its star. “We had a really nice note from a guy in Brazil who has the same rare condition as Dean,” said Harris, “and he said that Dean was such a huge inspiration.” Zimmer recently received an endorsement from the DW company, whose drums are played by the likes of Dave Grohl, Clem Burke, Sheila E., and Terry Bozzio. “And DW gave him a brand-new, personalized drum kit,” said Harris. “That was beyond what we’d ever imagined when we made the film.”
Never mind drummers—Dean Zimmer should be an inspiration to people in general. Born with all those odds stacked against him, he has nevertheless pursued his passion with almost superhuman persistence, battled through the pain, disregarded the skepticism of others, mastered his instrument, and become an Internet celebrity. Next time you find yourself complaining about a teensy-weensy problem or setback in your life, it would be salutary to consider Dean Zimmer and what he has accomplished despite the overwhelming problems that he has faced.
That’s what drummers are like. They’re not loonies and nut jobs—not many of them, anyway. They’re not sex-mad, masochistic show-offs—not all of them. They simply play the drums because they have an overwhelming urge to do so. It’s a vocation—just as much as medicine, philosophy, painting, or politics are vocations—and it calls out to all kinds of people around the world, regardless of race, sex, class, or physical ability. I asked an old friend of mine, an extremely talented and versatile drummer named Glenn Harris, why he chose to play the drums. He sipped his beer and pondered for a while.
“I didn’t choose the drums,” he said, in all seriousness. “They chose me.”