2
WORKING-CLASS HEROES
Examined in the cold light of day, the idea that people choose to become drummers purely because they are nuts, screwy, or dim-witted doesn’t stack up. For one thing, there are thousands of drummers out there who seem perfectly sensible, sane, and intelligent. I can personally vouch for dozens of these people, because I have spent many hours talking to them during my research for this book.
For another thing, there is little evidence that the most infamously insane people in history were able to lay down a funky groove with a bass drum, snare, a few toms, and some cymbals. Adolf Hitler was a house painter and a civil servant before he became a genocidal maniac, the emperor Caligula preferred sawing people in half to playing drum solos, and Charles Manson played the guitar. Yes, we can point to a small number of drummers who have definitely had psychological problems at one stage or another, but then we can also finger a number of painters, poets, actors, truck drivers, bankers, shoemakers, politicians, college students, housewives, and customer-service workers who have had their sanity called into question.
Good news for misunderstood drummers arrived in 2008 when a pair of scientists in Sweden announced that they seemed to have found a link between drumming and superior intelligence. Professor Frederic Ullen, from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and his colleague Guy Madison from Umea University, in northern Sweden, asked thirty-four men aged between nineteen and forty-nine to play a variety of rhythms as consistently as possible with a drumstick. These guinea pigs were then given an intelligence test consisting of sixty questions and problems. “We found that people with high general intelligence were also more stable on a very simple timing task,” announced Ullen. “We also found that these participants had larger volumes of the white matter in the brain which contains connections between brain regions.”
Of course, it would have been a more enlightening experiment if the guinea pigs had been actual working drummers. Plenty of people are good at keeping time, but they certainly don’t all end up behind a set of drums. (Equally, some people who become drummers don’t have a great sense of timing.)
But if insanity and stupidity are not the main qualifications for a life in percussion, what are? It was time, I decided, to move into the realm of socioeconomics.
When I began my love affair with rock music as a teenager in the 1970s, I formed the opinion that the drummer was often the most working-class member of the band. I think this idea was partly inspired by the physical effort that drumming requires, as opposed to singing or playing bass guitar or keyboards, for example. The drummer was usually the toughest-looking and sweatiest person in the band, and for practical reasons drummers tended to “dress down” much more than singers and guitarists, who would often be parading at the front of the stage in fancy clothing fashioned from the rarest silks, satins, and velvets.
In many cases, the working-class-drummer idea is confirmed by the former occupations of drummers, or their activities off the kit. John Bonham is a classic example. Bonham’s future bandmate Jimmy Page was born in the sedate county of Surrey and regularly donned a snow-white surplice to sing as a choirboy in church. By contrast, Bonham was born in Redditch, in England’s industrial Midlands, and as a boy spent hours fooling around on filthy building sites. His father, Jack, ran the construction firm JH Bonham & Son with Jack’s father and brother Ernie, and John initially followed in their footsteps, joining the business as an apprentice carpenter. When he was drumming in various bands before he joined Led Zeppelin, he would do some bricklaying on the side to ensure he had an income. And even after he became a successful household name, he continued to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty. He bought a hundred-acre farm near Stourbridge, Worcestershire, where he bred Hereford cattle, planted trees, maintained agricultural outbuildings, and worked on the interior decoration of his farmhouse. At heart, he was a proud, salt-of-the-earth laborer who wanted a good, solid home for himself and his wife, Pat. “I was determined that when we had a house and garden of our own, I would keep them in wonderful shape,” he once said. “I picked up quite a bit about house construction when I was working on the building sites.”
When they started receiving serious attention from the UK media in 1972, it became clear that the art-rock band Roxy Music comprised an interesting collection of characters, most of them decidedly middle-class. The singer Bryan Ferry and the saxophonist Andy Mackay were both well-spoken aesthetes who had worked as teachers; the electronics wizard Eno was an articulate conceptual artist with a penchant for makeup and androgynous costumes; and the guitarist Phil Manzanera (born Philip Targett-Adams) was half Colombian and had grown up in a series of exotic locations including Hawaii, Cuba, and Venezuela. The drummer, Paul Thompson, on the other hand, was born to a working-class family, had retained his strong Geordie accent from the northeast of England (unlike Ferry), and had done a ton of work with his bare hands. In fact, the beginning of his career behind the kit with Roxy overlapped with the end of his career as a bricklayer and general laborer.
Even as the band was rehearsing and gigging, Thompson was living a Bonhamesque double life as a drummer/construction worker. This seems slightly absurd when you consider how important Thompson was to the early sound of this seminal band, which would influence artists as diverse as Talking Heads, Chic, and the Sex Pistols. Known as “the Great Paul Thompson” by fans—and one of the favorite drummers of the American producer Butch Vig, who plays drums in Garbage—his solid and persuasive drumming frequently served as an anchor for compositions that might otherwise have been dismissed as airy-fairy art-school electronica. Much of Thompson’s work from the 1970s is still a delight to hear—highlights being the spine-tingling way he bursts into “The Thrill of It All” at the start of the Country Life album, and his majestic dynamics in “A Song for Europe” on Stranded.
Thompson hadn’t been with Roxy Music for very long when he decided to leave construction work behind—and graduate to night work on London’s subterranean rail network. “In the early Roxy days, we weren’t getting any wages or anything,” Thompson told me. “So I was working on a building site. But I was getting a bit sick of that, so I went for one of those night jobs on the London Underground, doing maintenance work and cleaning during the night. So I went to apply for a job; I had to go to a place off Marylebone Road in London, I think. The guy I saw was an ex-military type, and he gave me a look when I walked in with my long hair. I filled in a form and answered some questions. And his reply was ‘Your application’s failed.’ I’m sure it was just because of the length of my hair.”
Roxy had a novel approach for their early singles. Rather than shove album tracks on the B-sides, as many artists did, they indulged the individual members of the band with the opportunity to write experimental or frivolous instrumentals. It was this quirky B-side policy that gave Roxy’s drummer the opportunity to enjoy some revenge on Colonel Blimp at the London Underground recruiting office. “I was a bit of a comedian at the time,” recalled Thompson. “I used to make all the lads in the band laugh with my Geordie humor. I told them the story about going for the job, and at some point after that, somebody said, ‘Oh, it’s your turn to write a B-side,’ so I was fiddling around with a guitar and I had this little idea. The Roxy B-sides were always fun things.”
The band took Thompson’s little idea into AIR Studios, the recording facility established on London’s Oxford Street by a group of studio boffins including Beatles producer George Martin. “I think it was Bryan who said, ‘Why don’t you say, “Your application’s failed” in the middle of the track?’” said Thompson. The recording, a funky little number with some nice Rototom work, duly became “Your Application’s Failed”—a percussive anthem for struggling working-class drummers everywhere.
I recently watched Clem Burke, the drummer in Blondie, give a talk at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London as part of Blondiefest, the ICA’s celebration of America’s most successful new wave band. He talked about his origins in a “working-class New Jersey suburb,” and it was clear from his continual wisecracking—and the strong residue of a Noo Joizey accent—that deep down inside he was still a streetwise kid from Bayonne.
I spoke to Burke after the talk, and he elaborated on his social background and his early motivations. “You hear about so many people who use sports or music to get out of the factory,” he said. “I never really thought I was going to work in a factory, but I always wanted to get out of my working-class existence. I was fortunate: when I was in school, I was always drumming in bands, and it was always a way of earning money. I earned money as a musician from the time I was a teenager. I did other work as well sometimes. I remember at one point, I was playing in Blondie, I was going to college, and I was working in the post office, all at the same time. So that basically involved being up till three or four o’clock in the morning, going to work at about seven o’clock in the morning, and going to school around two or three o’clock in the afternoon. We had to do the photo shoot for the first Blondie album, but it was the Christmas rush at the post office, and they made an announcement: anybody who doesn’t come in to work tomorrow is immediately fired. I went up to the boss and said, ‘Sorry, I’m not gonna be able to make it in tomorrow.’ I explained my dilemma, and he said he understood and let me take the day off. I did the photo shoot and went back to work the next day.”
Another drummer who had to juggle drumming, school, and casual work is Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden. “I grew up in Wood Green in north London, and I went to Woodside secondary-modern school for boys. I was missing a lot of school, because I was playing gigs in the week with bands. I was going to stay and do my GCE exams, but I got the drumming bug, and I said to my mum, ‘I don’t want to stay at school: I want to go off and play in bands.’”
McBrain was granted his wish and left school, but gigging didn’t cover his living expenses and he had to find extra income. His first job was also carpentry—or it was meant to be—and it didn’t last for long. “They had me filling in cement foundations with slurry, and I said, ‘Look, I’m here to do carpentry, not just laboring.’ And they said, ‘You do what you’re fucking told.’ And I said, ‘You know what you can do with that—you can stuff it up your arse!’ I lasted three days. I eventually ended up working in engineering; I worked for the Standard Bottle Company, a glass bottle manufacturer in Bounds Green, north London. They’re not there anymore. They started me off on a day-release program, so for four years I went to college to study engineering, for one day and two nights a week.” On the very day in the early 1970s when McBrain received his examination results, he turned professional as a drummer. “I only went to college because my mother insisted on it. My father knew I was good enough to turn pro.”
Secondary-modern schools of the kind that McBrain attended existed in Britain until the 1970s, and were seen by many critics as a dumping ground for non-academic children who were not clever enough for grammar schools and were largely destined for menial jobs such as factory or building work. John Bonham attended Lodge Farm Secondary Modern, where the head teacher notoriously predicted in a report that “He will either end up a dustman or a millionaire.”
Significantly, Keith Moon was the only original member of the Who to have been educated at a secondary modern. He went to Alperton Secondary Modern School for Boys in Wembley, northwest London, while Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, and John Entwistle were all considered bright enough to attend Acton County Grammar School for Boys, situated a few miles farther south. Like Clem Burke and Nicko McBrain, the young Moon juggled casual work with his education. At one time, he was employed by a greengrocer to wash and sort the fruit and vegetables; for another period, he was employed by a butcher to deliver cuts of meat to customers.
Many other drummers tell almost Dickensian stories of disastrous early jobs, with a musical opportunity finally arriving to provide a Cinderella-style happy ending. Paul Hester of Crowded House once listed some of the many jobs he’d had before he became famous, including working on a chicken farm, rounding up shopping carts for a supermarket, working in a timber yard, and making dental fillings. Travis Barker of Blink-182 once worked as a trashman in the seaside resort town of Laguna Beach, California.
Jobs like these may have been character-forming for the boys who would later choose the sweatiest jobs in the music business. While growing up in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, John Densmore, the future drummer with the Doors, found himself folding a seemingly endless succession of shirts in a Chinese laundry. Densmore later recalled that the temperature of that shirt-folding room “never dipped below ninety-eight degrees. And that was in winter. It was like taking a sauna every day. I drank gallons of Orange Crush and ate Twinkies by the box while singing the Sweatshop Blues . . .”
Steve White drummed for Paul Weller for twenty-five years, as well as enjoying short stints playing in Oasis and the Who. While in the sixth form at school, White applied to study at two colleges, and was successful. “But I come from a working-class family, and my parents couldn’t afford for me to go to college,” he explained. “So I left school, almost in protest. Once I’d left school, my mum said, ‘You’ve got to get a job, then, haven’t you?’ And I remember doing one day working on a building site in Swanley in Kent, with a group of big, hard tunnel diggers from Newcastle. And I cut my hand on the first day and ended up in hospital, in Accident and Emergency. I thought, ‘That’s it! I’m not doing that again.’” Fortunately, he was rescued from a life of dangerous drudgery when a friend mentioned that Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, formerly of the British band Squeeze, were looking for a drummer. White auditioned, got the job, and drummed with them for three months before receiving a call from Polydor Records, suggesting he try out for one of the label’s new bands. He succeeded again, and joined Paul Weller in his post-Jam band, the Style Council.
Ross McFarlane worked in “a series of dead-end jobs” before he sat on the drum stool behind an impressive series of Scottish bands including the Proclaimers, Belle and Sebastian, and Texas. “I was a bit of a jack-the-lad at school and never really concentrated,” the amiable dark-haired Scotsman told me. “So I left school at sixteen without many qualifications. I was seriously into drumming and I was playing gigs, but I had to find paying work as well. I worked in a stationery warehouse, but I was always turning up late for work, because I was going backwards and forwards from Glasgow to London and playing gigs. I’d leave work on Friday and go to London, then I wouldn’t get back till the Tuesday. I was so tired, I used to sleep in the bubble wrap in the warehouse, and I was found out, because I had bubble marks on my face! So I got the sack from there. Then I got a job as a landscape gardener, but I knew nothing about either landscaping or gardening, and I got the sack from that as well.”
Before he settled on the drum stool behind the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the young Chad Smith had brief, unsuccessful jobs at a paint company and a pancake house. “I had a few jobs, but nothing that I liked or was any good at,” he told me. “I don’t know what I’d be doing now if I wasn’t a drummer. I’d be probably like, you know . . . I’d have to be a bank robber—I’d need money. And I’d be in jail!”
Even if drummers never have to endure a demeaning job or a spell in the penitentiary, they may still be regarded as inferior human beings. Drummers generally have long suffered from the fact that not all musicians respect the drum kit as a legitimate instrument; in the eyes of the doubters, drummers are therefore low-ranking musicians, if they are musicians at all. Throw in all the jokes about drummers, plus the myth that all drummers are either crazy or stupid, and you can see why Internet drum forums are frequently full of pain. Here is an extract from a rant about drumming that recently appeared online:
It’s not a hard job, you just sit there on a stool smashing some sticks on the bongo things. Occasionally you might have to hit a cymbal. Big deal. Anyone can be a drummer so there is no excuse for being rubbish at it. If you are the drummer in a band you are probably an idiot and there is a good chance that the lead guitarist hates you. You should try having a bath once in a while.
While this was actually written in jest, it sums up some of the genuine negative attitudes that drummers have had to endure, and it was irresistible bait for some aggrieved drummers who took it seriously.
When drummers audition to join a band, they can suffer all kinds of humiliation even before they’ve played a beat. The Red Hot Chili Peppers held auditions for a new sticksman in 1988 after they had fired D. H. Peligro, formerly of the Dead Kennedys. Chad Smith was one of the last drummers to audition, and there were objections from the Los Angeles band as soon as he appeared. “I was wearing this Detroit rock ’n’ roll leather jacket,” he recalled, “and I had long hair and a bandana—at the time, it was the look of bands like Guns N’ Roses, which was the antithesis of what the Chili Peppers were about. They were very much into this aggressive punk-rock look, with funny haircuts and ‘What kind of tattoos do you have?’ So when I walked in there, they were like, ‘Oh, jeez, he’s like some rocker dude,’ and, ‘Oh, God, let’s get this guy outta here.’ And then we started to play, and that all went out the window—we immediately connected musically. But they were like, ‘You gotta shave your head,’ and I was like, ‘Fuck you, I won’t shave my head for you.’” Fortunately for everyone, the band grew to tolerate the outsider’s appearance and went on to shift tens of millions of records.
One very subtle indicator of the low esteem in which drummers have historically been held is the nickname. In countless cases, an ordinary name is not sufficient for a drummer, who traditionally requires an additional, jokey handle or an unnecessary first-name replacement. Sometimes these names are provided by fellow musicians, and sometimes they are self-created. Richard Starkey became Ringo Starr, the first name indicating his habit of wearing rings on his fingers, and Peter Baker became Ginger Baker because of the hair coloring he was born with. John Bonham became Bonzo, which is the sort of name you give to a dog. Keith Moon became Moon the Loon, with some justification, but he was also condescendingly addressed as Moonie—though his bandmates were never known as Townshendie, Entwistlie, and Daltreyie, no matter how catchy that might have been.
Musicians apparently need the tiniest excuse to find a catchy new name for their drummer. Ed Cassidy of the American psychedelic band Spirit was dubbed “Mr. Skin” simply because he shaved his head, as if nobody had ever seen a bald man before. The drummer in Dr. Feelgood, the 1970s band now regarded as a harbinger of British punk rock, was plain John Martin—but because of his impressive physical stature he was known as the Big Figure. Soon after joining the Clash, drummer Nick Headon became Topper Headon because bassist Paul Simonon thought he resembled a simian cartoon character called Mickey the Monkey, who appeared in a children’s comic called The Topper. The drummer Brian Taylor, who played in the Tom Robinson Band (TRB), another notable ensemble in the British punk era, ended up with the nickname Dolphin.
The longtime drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees was born Peter Clarke but is called Budgie—because when he was young, he saw somebody maltreating a budgerigar and intervened to stop them. Patrick Seacor, who played in the Scissor Sisters, answers to the percussive name of Paddy Boom. Ahmir Thompson, drummer in the Roots, is better known by his adopted alias, Questlove. Jimmy Sullivan was the drummer for the American metal band Avenged Sevenfold, but he is usually remembered now as Jimmy “the Rev” Sullivan, his pseudo-clerical handle deriving from a silly stage name he once adopted, the Reverend Tholomew Plague. When Carmine Appice played drums for Rod Stewart in the 1970s, the singer grew tired of Appice’s fondness for bashing round the kit and started calling him the Dentist because of all the “fill-ins” he played.
Sometimes drummers receive their nicknames even before they become drummers. It’s as if the people around them can sense their future occupation and want to give them a proper drummer’s name in advance. Mott the Hoople were a highly enjoyable, hardworking British rock band that produced a string of UK hits and toured America in the 1970s. Brian May of Queen, who played on the same bill as Mott in 1973, once paid them this compliment: “On tour as support to Mott the Hoople (the only time Queen ever supported anyone), I was always conscious that we were in the presence of something great, something highly evolved, close to the centre of the Spirit of Rock ’n’ Roll, something to breathe in and learn from.” Mott’s highly capable drummer was Terence Dale Griffin, who had attended the same school in Hereford as the bass player, Overend Watts. Watts explained how his bandmate had acquired a new name. “At school his name was Terry Griffin,” said Watts, “and for some reason he got called Sniffin’, and I didn’t think that was good enough. I used to say, ‘He’s a bugger, that Sniffin’,’ and because I tend to change everything round backwards, I turned it round to ‘He’s a snigger, that Buffin.’” Henceforth, and for the vast majority of his career as Mott’s drummer, he answered to Buffin or, because two syllables can be troublesome for rock musicians, just Buff.
There are many other examples of drummers having their names changed. One of the earliest is Warren Dodds, who acquired the patronizing name Baby, presumably because he was younger than other members of his band. His name is still trotted out today as Warren “Baby” Dodds, as if he were an American assassin like Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth, and despite the fact that he deserves more respect as a seminal New Orleans jazz drummer.
Of course, other musicians are blessed with nicknames as well, especially singers, but their handles are usually more grandiose than those handed out to mere drummers. Bruce Springsteen is the Boss, while many other vocalists have taken on royal status: Nat Cole became Nat “King” Cole, Elvis Presley was the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, and Aretha Franklin was crowned the Queen of Soul. But only the occasional drummer is lucky enough to be granted a complimentary nickname. Al Jackson Jr., who played in Booker T. & the M.G.’s and laid down the immortal groove of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” was dubbed the Human Timekeeper. Similarly, the American metal drummer Gene Hoglan is so highly respected for his timekeeping abilities that he is known as the Atomic Clock.
A substantial number of drummers may have been restless, antsy, or hyperactive as children, and may even have been diagnosed as ADHD, which brings its own torrent of prejudice from society. There has been a long-running tussle over the causes of this complex condition, with some scientists blaming faulty genetic coding or a deficiency in essential fatty acids, some social commentators whining that ADHD is an imaginary complaint—a label for parents to stick on their naughty, out-of-control children—and some people suggesting that it is a genuine problem arising from lower-class lifestyles. They point the finger at mothers who drink alcohol during pregnancy, or mothers and fathers who fail to bring up their children properly, are incapable of discipline, and allow their kids to live on junk food. Americans might use pejorative terms like “trailer trash” while snobbish Britons may mention “chavs,” loosely defined as the inferior, lowlife element of society.
Unfortunately, it is within the social milieu of chavs and trailer trash that we find a particular practice that has been widely adopted by drummers. This is body decoration. Tattooing cuts across the musical community: many singers, guitarists, and other musicians have hearts, flowers, birds, cobwebs, or arcane Oriental symbols adorning their flesh. Even boy-band members who have never handled a grown-up musical instrument have it done now. But if it were possible to carry out a detailed, worldwide skin survey, it is my belief that drummers would emerge with the largest total surface area covered with permanent ink.
Some drummers settle for one or two designs, such as Nicko McBrain, who has one large, Oriental-themed tattoo on each arm. One of them resembles a dragon, and the other is an elaborate Samurai warrior. But many drummers take skin art much, much, further. Look at Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe, who has had so many tattoos needled onto his body that he is said to have lost count of them. (And when a drummer loses count of something, you know they’re in trouble.) He is estimated to have fifty of them, but now that there is so much overlapping and intermeshing of designs, he has said he prefers to see them as “one big work of art.” His first design, acquired at the top of his right shoulder when he was seventeen, is a picture of the cartoon character Mighty Mouse flying through a bass drum. He has explained that “Mighty Mouse was my childhood hero. He always saved the day, he was a good guy, he was a role model who did the right thing, and at the end of every episode, he always got the chick.”
Lee looked in the mirror after gaining that first piece of “art” and decided that he was artistically unbalanced, and he had to have more. Hanging around tattoo parlors became an inspiration, as he glimpsed some of the more exotic possibilities and acquired a taste for Oriental symbolism. Two dragons appeared on his chest, which also has the word MAYHEM on it, and an obscure “tribal” design was added to his back. In the early noughties, his fiancée Mayte Garcia—the singer and dancer formerly married to Prince—kissed Lee on the neck, and the drummer had her lip print turned into a tattoo as well. He had the self-referential word TATTOO tattooed on his wrist, and he had two designs resembling electric switches added to the inside of one elbow, marked RESET and KILL, which have been pressed at stressful moments for a form of personal therapy. Perusers of other parts of his body may find a koi carp, a cheetah, and a skull wearing a top hat, unless these have recently been obliterated by fresh new layers of designs.
Travis Barker is another hot contender for rock’s most illustrated man. His first tattoo was the word BONES in honor of a childhood nickname. He had a Cadillac emblem emblazoned on his chest, and a checkered racing flag on his neck, and just to remind you that he is a rock musician rather than a racing driver, he had a little bit of musical notation added to his neck as well, along with a boom box on his stomach. Barker added glamour and drama with some sexy women, flames, and smoke.
Compared with Lee and Barker, Dave Grohl is the personification of tattoo restraint. But Grohl does have some of those miscellaneous “tribal designs” on his arms and shoulders, FF (for his band Foo Fighters) on the back of his neck, and a symbol—tattooed in three places, so you know he means it—that will be very familiar to Led Zeppelin fans. This is the mystical three-circle symbol that represents John Bonham on the Led Zeppelin IV album.
Tattoos still create an unfavorable impression in certain places, branding drummers as unwelcome lower-class types. In 2013, Jeff Fabb, the drummer in the American rock band Filter, tried to enter an eatery in Denver after playing a show in the city, but was stopped by the doorman because of the large multicolored tattoo on his neck. “I was kind of hurt,” he told the Hollywood Reporter after the incident, “since most of the people who were in there at the time were from our show,” and he had been eager to join them.
Some drummers have become so enchanted by the world of tattoos that they have crossed the line. Corey Miller was an American punk drummer who became so enchanted with the art form that he started working as a tattoo artist himself at the age of twenty, needling customers’ flesh at Fat George’s Tattoo Gallery in La Puente, California. In 1997 he set up his own parlor, Six Feet Under, in Upland, California.
Nobody knows who was the first drummer to stumble into a tattoo parlor and lay down cash for body art, but it’s tempting to believe that it all started because of a linguistic misunderstanding. There are two different words with the spelling tattoo in English. The one meaning “pigment design on skin” was mentioned by Captain Cook back in 1769, and comes from the Polynesian word tatau or tatu. The other tattoo is an earlier word, meaning a military drumbeat—originally a signal calling troops back to their quarters—which has Dutch origins. Is it just extreme coincidence that both tattoos have strong drumming connections? Perhaps a drummer was out strolling one day, centuries ago, when he saw a sign offering TATTOOS, thought it was something to do with drumming, wandered in, liked what he saw, and started the whole drum-needle connection there and then. Stranger things have happened.
Drummers’ tattooing tendencies have got so out of hand now, the tattoos have taken on a life away from their bodies. They’ve been celebrated by the manufacturers of the drums and drumsticks that they use. Ludwig’s Corey Miller Tattoo Drum Set, designed by Miller himself, is covered in Miller’s trademark black-and-gray tattoo art. (A drummer with all-over tattoos could appear to be invisible behind this kit, as the audience sees only a vague mass of merging designs.) Chad Smith once had a kit painted with octopus and whale designs that were based on tattoos on his body. And Zildjian’s Dave Grohl Artist Series Drumsticks are decorated with replicas of the tattoos up Grohl’s arms.
Even drummers you wouldn’t expect to have tattoos have been inked. Steve Gadd isn’t a lank-haired, dead-eyed heavy-metal basher but a highly respected master of his art, a drummer who has graced innumerable recording sessions and gigs with some of the biggest music stars of all time. He is Dr. Steve Gadd now, having had an honorary doctorate bestowed on him by the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. The British drummer Bill Bruford, no slouch himself in the percussion department, has given Gadd this glowing encomium: “Steve is a veteran of thousands of sessions, during which he can assess and provide exactly what is required to lift the music, in countless different styles. He is the interpreter without parallel. From the lilt of Paul Simon, to the blues of Eric Clapton, the jazz of Chick Corea, or the laidback vocal style of James Taylor, Steve does detail in one take. His encyclopedic knowledge of the appropriateness of a given rhythmic feel is born from his voluminous experience. No matter how dismal your little offering, if you have Steve Gadd on it, it’ll shine.”
But look at Gadd’s lean, pink arms and you’ll find some extensive dark-blue decoration, which he discussed at length in a recent interview. The first tattoo he ever had, in the early 1970s, is an animal design near his right shoulder (very close to where Tommy Lee had his first one). Gadd said it now reminded him of a dog he used to have, an old English bulldog—although, confusingly, he had the tattoo done years before he had the pooch. The other tattoos followed more recently, many of them “shared” with his wife, Carol—meaning that he has the same designs that she has on her body, including an Oriental om symbol on his right hand, a chi symbol on his left wrist, and “a tribal thing” adorning his right arm. He also has a Japanese version of the number thirteen on his left hand, “because I like the number thirteen.” When his wife had some tattoos done, “something happened, and I just felt the need to decorate myself,” he said.
Lovers of Gadd’s exquisite drum skills have been disappointed and horrified by the low-rent appearance of all this self-decoration. One fan from Arizona has complained online: “I really wish Steve was a tux-and-tails kind of drummer . . . When you are at the top o’ the heap you should also look like you belong there . . . his artistry and skill set deserve better.”
When I met Russ Miller, another prolific and skillful American session drummer, I noticed that he had writing on both arms. One has his wife’s name in Japanese, and the other has his daughter’s name, also in Japanese. He lifted the left sleeve of his T-shirt to reveal another tattoo, a drawing of a drum kit. “I think it’s my ongoing midlife crisis,” said the forty-four-year-old, “because I got them later on in life.”
I asked Roger Taylor of Queen why he thought so many drummers acquired tattoos. “Well, of course, they have the most beautiful bodies to put them on,” he laughed. I was unsurprised to learn that Taylor, too, had crossed the threshold of the tattoo parlor. “I have a few, mostly on the legs,” he said. However, what was surprising was that, like Miller, he was a late starter: his tattoos weren’t acquired in his 1970s heyday, when he was bashing away behind Freddie Mercury to make exciting records like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “I Want to Break Free,” and “We Will Rock You,” but much more recently, in his sixties. He is known to have a fondness for dragons, and a recent photograph shows him with a big dragon tattoo slithering up his right leg. When I asked Taylor why he had acquired the tattoos—was it because drummers were generally under some kind of pressure to have them?—he seemed to dislike the question. He started muttering, before terminating the conversation. “I just thought . . .” he said, “I really don’t . . . It’s my choice . . . I don’t give a fuck . . . I tell you what—I’m gonna have to go, because I’ve got to take my wife to the airport.”
Chad Smith blames his bandmates Anthony Kiedis and Flea for his tattoos, which now honor his chosen instrument, his zodiac sign (Scorpio), and his children, as well as some of the sea creatures he has spotted while scuba diving. “I didn’t have any tattoos when I came out to California and started playing with the Chili Peppers,” he told me. “But then I went to Europe for the first time in my life, and we played to three hundred thousand people in Amsterdam. Anthony and Flea had gotten tattoos from this famous artist there, Henk Schiffmacher, and I think at the time it was sort of a band thing—‘Let’s all go get tattoos from Henk.’ And after my first experience of getting a tattoo, it became kind of addictive. You kind of want to get another one, and then another one.”
If clothes maketh the man, then they can also—like tattoos—give drummers the impression of belonging to an inferior social bracket. The British drummer Robert Wyatt is an interesting case in point. The Canterbury Scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s was very much a middle-class affair, based loosely around the historic cathedral city—the center of Christianity in Britain since the sixth century—that gave the movement its name. Nicely educated musicians from relatively affluent families formed bands such as Soft Machine, Caravan, and Gong to explore the furthest reaches of experimental rock and pop, throwing jazz, classical, and literary influences into the mix. Robert Wyatt was certainly not an ordinary working-class prole: his mother was a BBC journalist, he went to grammar school, and he was privileged enough to have lessons from an American jazz drummer. But Wyatt’s social status was apparently downgraded by the fact that he sat behind the drums in Soft Machine. He has since described himself as “the only lout in the group” and has said that he sometimes saw his bandmates’ eyes “raised to heaven” at his behavior and utterances. It probably didn’t help that while the other players were usually dressed to the nines in the latest psychedelic finery, Wyatt often played the drums shirtless like a sweaty builder, roustabout, or fairground worker.
If you’re a drummer who tends to perspire a lot, it’s probably a bad idea to wear a three-piece velvet suit with a fur coat over it. There is the shirtless option, but there is also a variety of sports clothing that does the job—at the expense of your position in the social hierarchy. “Why is it that drummers have a habit of wearing basketball jerseys on stage?” asks one perceptive commentator, Vince Neilstein of the MetalSucks website. “Tool’s Danny Carey constantly rocks his Lakers jersey (though dude, [what’s] with the t-shirt underneath? That’s like wearing socks with sandals).” According to Neilstein, other offenders have been Zoltan Chaney, drummer for the solo band of Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe, and Mike Portnoy, who “is rarely seen on stage without a jersey of some kind (though to be fair, he also sports baseball and hockey jerseys) . . . Think about the utter ridiculousness of a guitarist or bass player wearing a basketball jersey as their stage outfit . . . they’d be laughed off the stage . . . Is it the comfort? The pure athleticism of being a metal drummer is certainly demanding, and I’ve known drummers to be completely soaked in sweat from head to toe after a performance. But I’d think a plain old cotton t-shirt with the sleeves cut off would absorb the sweat way better than the mesh of a jersey, and I’d think it would be more comfortable/less itchy to boot.”
It’s not just online ranters who disapprove of what drummers wear. In the summer of 2009, Matt Helders, drummer with Arctic Monkeys, was attempting to buy a camera at a store in the British band’s home city of Sheffield when he was asked to leave the premises by security staff who didn’t like the cut of his jib. The drummer—reportedly a multimillionaire—was wearing casual, sporty clothing, including a hoodie. According to one British newspaper, he had been mistaken for “a chav shoplifter.” Helders would get on well with Questlove, who loves hoodies so much that he cofounded a store to sell them on the Lower East Side of New York City, with the imaginative name of the Hoodie Shop.
Many drummers have acquired an undesirable reputation in quiet neighborhoods simply because their chosen instrument is so loud and lacks a volume control. Jack Bevan is the energetic drummer in the British band Foals, whose album Holy Fire was voted the best album of 2013 by readers of the UK music bible NME. Bevan told me about the problems he suffered as an aspiring drummer growing up in Oxfordshire in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “It was all right in the beginning,” he said. “A lot of the time, I’d play after I got home from school and before my parents got home from work. But then one of the neighbors started complaining. Then it felt like treading on eggshells when I was practicing. Eventually they took it to the local council, they did a volume test in the adjoining garden, and I was basically told that I couldn’t play anymore. I had to buy an electronic drum kit, which I hated: it sounded so synthetic, and you don’t have the feel of playing a real drum kit. But then I joined a band, and then I only really played when the band was rehearsing.”
Steve White, who has given many lessons to young drummers, told me he had seen a change in attitude toward drumming over the years in England. “When I was a boy living in south London, “ he said, “my dad built a practice room in the loft, which wasn’t particularly soundproof, but I could go up there. I played in there from when I was eight until I left home years later. And we handled it really well: when I decided that I wanted to do it, we went and spoke to all the neighbors and said, ‘If there’s a problem, let us know.’ We told them that I wouldn’t practice at particular times, and all the neighbors were so supportive—people said things like, ‘Oh, drumming—that’s a really good hobby.’
“But these days, practicing is a real problem for young drummers. The trouble is, people are ultrasensitive to any kind of invasion of their own space. They’ll happily put up with somebody revving their Range Rover up at nine o’clock in the morning, but if a kid gets up and plays the drums, immediately it’s taken as an antisocial act. I get a lot of students who come up against all this intolerance the minute they start to play the drums. There’s not a lot of give-and-take with people now. They take it as an offense. Well, there are electronic kits that you can play with headphones. It’s not the same, but I would say it’s better to be playing in some way than not at all. You have to deal with your own set of circumstances and find a way round it.”
Even before you achieve the tricky task of winning over Sid and Vera next door, you have to avoid upsetting the people you live with, such as your parents. “Playing the drums caused a lot of grief in my house, I have to say,” Ross McFarlane told me, “a lot of hassle. We didn’t live in a stately home—there wasn’t a B-wing to the house where the drum kit was! It was in the bedroom above the living room, in a semidetached house in Glasgow. My parents would go out and they’d say, ‘Don’t play your drums,’ and then I’d play them. And I wouldn’t hear them coming in, because I was playing, and the door would swing open and my old man would be very angry.”
If you want to become a drummer nowadays, you’ve got to have a perfect storm of good things happening,” said Steve White. “You need the support. If you’re lucky enough to have a tolerant family and neighbors, you can practice. If you don’t, you’re screwed.”
Joey Kramer, the drummer in Aerosmith since the band’s formation in 1970, grew up in Yonkers, New York, where his drumming was anathema to his parents. “My mother never used to allow me to practice,” he said, “so I would wait until she went out. Whenever she was leaving, I would get downstairs and practice.” One day, when he brought home a bad report card from school, Kramer’s father punished him by confiscating his drum kit, dismantling it, and stashing all the pieces in the attic—“because he knew my determination, and he knew that if he didn’t take the drums apart, I’d sneak up there and use them.” Kramer ended up borrowing a set from a young man he would later come to know very well: Steven Tallarico, who would become Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith.
“My parents discouraged me the whole way,” said Kramer. “But if not for my parents’ discouragement, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. Whereas if they had encouraged me and said, ‘Yeah! Go ahead! That’s what you should do,’ I probably would’ve canned it long ago. I thank my mom for it now, and she thinks it’s funny.” Kramer’s insight is revealing. The big attraction of the drums for him, initially, was a powerful urge to rebel against the authority of his parents. It might explain why many of the people who are drawn to this often antisocial instrument are rebellious in their nature—the kind of people who like to cover themselves with tattoos, misbehave like Keith Moon, and get wasted like John Bonham.
On one level, drumming is a form of physical exercise, and because its practitioners need to be reasonably fit, many of them participate in one sport or another. As sports are an important element of working-class life, this provides another link between drumming and chavvy, plebeian life. The street sport of skateboarding has been an attraction for many drummers, including Travis Barker, who lived for both drums and skateboards when he was a boy. Barker has said that skateboarding actually gave him the incentive to become a better drummer. He was envious of the older boys in his neighborhood in Fontana, California, who skated on a very special mini-ramp, and said they would only allow him to use it if he learned to play all the drum parts for the song “Master of Puppets” by Metallica—a stop-start rock epic that has been dubbed “the metal Bohemian Rhapsody.” It took Barker a week or so to learn the song, pounding away on his kit, but he got his wish.
Jack Bevan said that skateboarding, like drumming, helped him use up excess energy when he was younger: “I can’t remember if I was diagnosed or not, but I was definitely hyperactive. I think I used to drive my parents nuts as a kid—I’d always be running around. When I was a teenager, I started skateboarding at the same time that I started drumming. And that was good because skateboarding was a huge energy release, and so was drumming, so I actually tired myself out.”
Aaron Beamish was the drummer in the Canadian rock band Slow Motion Victory, based in Toronto. Like many drummers, he had an alternative name—Aaron Arsenic—and he was fond of skateboards. Unfortunately, his hobby led to tragedy. In the early hours of October 21, 2011, the twenty-five-year-old drummer was skating on his long board when he was hit by a garbage truck and killed.
Had his life worked out differently, Ginger Baker might have earned his living on a pair of wheels. “I was obsessed with the idea of being a professional cyclist when I was a kid, and I rode everywhere,” he once recalled. “I worked in the art department of an ad agency, and I used to ride in on my bike every morning.” One day he was cycling in Duke Street, in the St. James’s district of London, when he had an accident and wrote off his bike. It was around this time that a friend suggested he start playing the drums, having noticed that he seemed to have an aptitude for it, and the professional-cycling ambition was left behind.
When the worlds of sports and music are scrutinized, it becomes clear that there are parallels between drummers and goalkeepers. In soccer or hockey, the goalkeeper may not receive his fair share of respect from his teammates, despite the fact that he plays an essential role on the team. “When I played football as a kid, I was always a goalkeeper,” said Richard Jupp of Elbow. “And it’s just like being a drummer. You’re the man at the back, and you’re there when you need to be. But if you cock up, people really notice it. You’re holding the beat, and if you drop a beat, or miss that fill going into the chorus, everybody knows about it. But when you get it right, when you save the penalty, you’ve done your job.” Roger Taylor of Duran Duran (not to be confused with Roger Taylor of Queen) actually had a burning ambition to be a goalkeeper for his favorite British soccer team, Aston Villa, but never grew tall enough to make the grade and had to settle for keeping time in a 1980s New Romantic band.
The legendary soccer goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, who played for Manchester United and Denmark, has said that his heroes are drummers, “and specifically drummers who have played with Sting since he left the Police. Guys like Omar Hakim, Manu Katché, and Vinnie Colaiuta. I would go and buy videos of these guys and watch them. I have always felt a lot of empathy with drummers, because it’s a bit like being a goalkeeper: you’re behind the rest of your team.”
But some drummers are drawn to more glamorous and exotic sports. In the 1970s, when Carl Palmer played behind the kit in the prog-rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer, he studied Oriental martial arts and even had a personal karate instructor accompanying him on the road with the band for a while. And on at least one occasion, karate has helped a drummer land an important gig. The British skin basher Geoff Britton studied the martial art and became a part-time karate teacher in the early 1970s. One day, Britton was informed by one of his pupils—Clifford Davis, who had managed Fleetwood Mac—that Paul McCartney needed a new drummer for his band Wings. Britton went along to audition and got the job.
Ralph Johnson of Earth, Wind & Fire is another drummer with martial-arts skills. “I’m a double black belt,” Johnson told me. “I have a black belt in Kong Soo Do, which is a kind of karate, and I also have a black belt in Kung Fu San Soo. I love the martial arts, and I noticed that after I got into the martial arts I got stronger on the drum set. But I’m not in the dojo as much as I used to be. These days, I gotta tell you, my real love is tennis. I’m on the court once a week with my instructor for two hours, and I’ve been working with him for the past six years.”
Two other important American drummers used to meet regularly to smash a rubber ball around with a pair of racquets. These are the fusion legend Billy Cobham, who has played with Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the top session drummer Ndugu Chancler, who has also drummed behind Miles Davis, as well as performing with acts such as Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Santana, Donna Summer, Patrice Rushen, George Duke, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, and Weather Report. “Billy and I used to play racquetball together a lot,” Chancler told me. “You guys in Britain play squash, but we play racquetball. Billy’s now a squash player as well, because when he was living over in Switzerland, there was more squash than racquetball. He’s moved to Panama now, so we don’t see each other as much. Billy would beat me at racquetball most of the time.”
One way of elevating your social status might be to choose a sport with high-society connections. At least two famous drummers have done this by racing around fields on horseback in pursuit of a 3¼-inch-diameter ball. Ginger Baker’s travels took him to Nigeria in the 1970s, and it was there that he first threw himself into the sport of polo—a pastime more usually associated with the British aristocracy, the Raj in India, and the British Royal Family. After returning to England, Baker continued to play, plowing much of his money into the upkeep of dozens of horses. His daughter Ginette, who began working with him as a groom, taking care of the horses, recalled: “We traveled up and down the country and met all these members of the aristocracy, which was great fun. I thought I’d marry a polo player. I was really getting into the polo when the money went.”
Years later, Ginger Baker indulged his passion for polo in California and was soon swinging a mallet again when he went to live in South Africa in the 1990s. “It was always his dream to have his own polo farm,” said Ginette, “and he achieved it in South Africa, where it was much cheaper. He couldn’t live the polo life in Britain, because it absolutely breaks you.”
When I spoke to Ginger Baker, he gave me the impression that he had thrown himself headlong into polo, not unlike his approach to drumming. “A lot of my favorite polo ponies have been horses that not many people could play,” he said. “I tend to find a crazy horse very enjoyable. It’s because of the horses that I love polo so much. You have to get into the horse’s brain so it will do what you’re thinking: you don’t have to tell it what to do all the time.”
In 1987, when he lived in the English countryside, Stewart Copeland flung himself into the same sport with a Bakeresque enthusiasm. But he discovered that despite being a posh activity, polo was not without its hazards. As he recounted in his autobiography, Strange Things Happen, “One day, in the semifinal of the County Cup at Cirencester, having a great game on a hot day, I ask my horse to turn right when he’s just about to turn left. He crosses his front legs, trips, and is suddenly somersaulting . . . Even though I roll like a ninja and am back on my feet before the horse is, there is something wrong with my shoulder. My collarbone has a new flexibility in a place that it shouldn’t. Damn! It’s broken. The horse is fine, but there is no more polo for me this summer. Pity also about that Police album that we were just about to record.”
One recent incident in London provided a wonderfully cartoonish picture of drummers’ place in British society. On the evening of Saturday, May 4, 2013, Dame Helen Mirren was on stage at the Gielgud Theatre. The world-famous actress was performing in The Audience, a play by Peter Morgan in which she played the reigning British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II—reprising her Oscar-winning role in the 2006 movie The Queen—when suddenly she became aware of a loud drumming sound outside the theater. The noise increased in volume until it became impossible for her to deliver her lines audibly and effectively to the audience. Mirren then blew her top; she stomped off the stage, up some stairs, and walked out the stage door to confront the noisemakers in person.
She found a group of about twenty-five people beating drums, who were surprised to see a woman looking remarkably like Her Majesty, wearing a string of pearls. The drummers—who were parading through the West End of London to promote a gay music festival, One in the Park—carried on drumming. “Shut the fuck up!” shrieked Mirren, who launched into a rant about how she was trying to perform a play, and how much money people had paid for tickets to see it. If any drummers had doubted it, here was an extraordinary tableau illustrating the contempt with which they were regarded by the British Establishment.
Speaking after the incident, as herself rather than the British monarch, Mirren said: “The irony is, I love drumming and I love drummers. In another situation, I would have been out here enjoying it with all the punters. Unfortunately, I was having to do a play at the same time.”
Suddenly, it looked as if my quest for the truth—why would anybody become a drummer?—might be near to its conclusion. Drummers are drawn from one of the lowest classes of society, and drumming is an escape from poverty and demeaning, unskilled manual work. And that’s why drummers dress badly, have horrible tattoos all over their bodies, play all kinds of rough sports, and regularly thank their lucky stars that they have been rescued from a life of drudgery and anonymity by the magic of music.
But the more I examined my research, the more I realized that there were serious problems with this conclusion. I might have to tear that whole idea up and start again. But I did have another theory that was seriously worthy of investigation.