4
SHE PLAYS THE DRUMS
As I proceeded with my research into drummers and what made them tick, I kept getting this nagging feeling that I was missing something. And after I’d largely dismissed the idea that all drummers were flashy, working-class lunatics, one of my nagging feelings jumped up and bit me hard.
Up to this point, all of the drummers I’ve mentioned have had two fundamental things in common. Firstly, they have all played the drums at some point, obviously. Secondly, they all belong to the heterogametic sex; that is to say, they have both X and Y chromosomes. They’re all men.
But the world of drumming isn’t like the Vatican, or any of those stuck-up golf clubs who insist that your loud checked trousers have one specific variety of genitalia in them. There is no law, at least in the USA and the UK and the rest of the free world, that says you have to be male to be a drummer.
There have been many periods of history when such a law seemed to be in force. Female drummers were rare during the jazz age of the early twentieth century, but that’s not to say that they didn’t exist. There were female drummers in the occasional all-woman band, such as Viola Smith in the Coquettes, Pauline Brady in the Vi Burnside Combo, and Elaine Leighton in the Beryl Booker Trio.
In the testosterone-charged 1960s and ’70s, the vast majority of pop and rock drummers were men, but again there were some shining exceptions. The Honeycombs, the British pop group who scored a hit in 1964 with “Have I the Right,” decided that they had the right to employ a female drummer, Honey Lantree. This resulted in accusations from the stiff and starchy UK press that their choice of drummer was merely a “gimmick” designed to attract attention to the band, and that the group were keeping a big secret from the public: that Honey couldn’t really play her drums. In 1965 the music newspaper Record Mirror quoted a peeved statement from the Honeycombs that read: “How can it be a gimmick just because we have a girl, Honey, on drums? Honey plays with us purely and simply because she is the right drummer for the job. If she wasn’t any good, she wouldn’t hold down the job.” They also denied that having a woman in their midst created sexual complications when they went on the road: “On tour, we don’t have any troubles by having a girl with us. We just operate as a group.”
We might be able to look back and laugh at the fuss that Lantree generated in the British media—such comical, misogynous sixties attitudes!—if we were all so much more enlightened today. But are we? The 2013 London Drum Show featured live performances from fifteen top drummers—all of them men. Women make only occasional appearances in mainstream drum magazines. And there are whole books on drumming that entirely ignore the existence of female drummers.
I recently visited Foote’s, the venerable old London drum shop (which has been serving the needs of percussionists ever since they were obliged to wear formal evening dress onstage), to listen to a discussion on the subject of female drummers. It was led by Mindy Abovitz, a thirty-three-year-old woman from Brooklyn, who is not only a drummer and a self-proclaimed feminist but also the editor of Tom Tom, a magazine for women drummers. A small crowd of people listened intently—mostly young women who knew their way around a drum kit—while Abovitz bemoaned the confusion, scorn, resistance, and prejudice that women still face when they dare to play the instrument. If you were casting an actress to play Abovitz in a movie, you might choose someone who resembles Jane Fonda circa 1970.
“I’m the editor of a drum magazine,” said Abovitz, “and I still feel sheepish when I walk into a drum shop. I actually worked at the largest independent drum shop in New York City for two years, and I still go [nervous, girly voice] ‘Hi! Actually, I’m a drummer . . .’ It’s like, what is happening when I walk into a drum shop? I’m not even sure. And, oh shit, do I have to play to show these people that I can play? It’s super awkward.”
She had been drumming for a while, she explained. “But I’d never consumed a drum magazine, because it didn’t appeal to me, didn’t speak to me, and I didn’t see anything in it that seemed relevant . . . And I remember typing into Google ‘woman drummer’ or ‘female drummer’ or ‘girl drummer,’ and every search result brought up something like ‘Can girls play the drums?’ Like a Yahoo question: ‘Can girls play?’ ‘How many women play?’ And then it’d be a bunch of sexy pictures of women next to drum sets. And I was thinking, ‘This is fucked! This isn’t real! This doesn’t match my world.’
“So in 2009 I set out to change the Google keyword-search result, and I started a blog. And I also thought for sure there was a magazine for female drummers, and they would contact me and be like, ‘Hey!’ And I’d be like, ‘Okay, cool, let’s do this together!’ So I started Tom Tom magazine as a blog, and I interviewed myself. You know, ‘Tom Tom: How did you get started on the drums? Mindy: Thanks for asking! . . .’ I really did that. And then, six months in, I was getting all this feedback.”
The “magazine for female drummers” never contacted her, because such a thing didn’t exist—not yet. But people told her how much they liked her blog and said things like “I wish you were in print.” Eventually she sorted some finance and hooked up with a photographer, some other writers, and a magazine designer, and suddenly Tom Tom was a going concern. “So we started the first issue, and I called it a quarterly, because I felt that that was the least possible commitment that I could make. It’s actually an enormous commitment,” she laughed. “And then I decided that this thing was gonna be really big. And I’m still in the same place: I want it to be bigger and bigger, and as big as it can possibly be.
“What I’m trying to do with the magazine,” Abovitz told her rapt audience, “and I don’t know if I’m doing it yet, is to normalize the girl/woman-drummer experience.” A dozen well-coiffured heads nodded in the Foote’s crowd, in perfect time. “If I have my way, in 2025 a woman or a girl will be able to walk into a drum shop and no one will bat an eyelid, and she’ll buy her shit and walk out. And she’ll go into her practice space and she’ll play . . .” Following some clapping and restrained cheering, Abovitz continued: “And she’ll go on tour, and no one will be like, ‘Hey, you’re such a good chick drummer’—it will just be normal.” More applause. “There’s no reason in my mind why it’s not. I love the drums; I love playing drums. It’s not about having a pair of tits or a penis when you’re playing the drums: it’s about making music. So whatever else is happening, I’m not really sure what that is, but it’s unnecessary for certain, and it’s some part of our socialization that I’m really working on undoing.”
Abovitz explained how, on many occasions, she has found herself at odds with drum manufacturers. “The drum industry does not think we’re there,” she said. “There are five female drummers: there’s Sheila E., Jess Bowen, Hannah Ford, Cindy Blackman, and Cora Dunham, and there’s no one else. I know that’s not true. One thing I set out to do with the magazine was to cover the average drummer . . . When I’m asking for advertising money from manufacturers like DW or Gretsch, Zildjian or Sabian, my challenge is to convince them that there are a lot more women drummers than they know . . . I’ve had to carve out a space for myself, and I got a reputation early on for being a hardass in terms of ad art. I did not want their typical ad in Tom Tom: I wanted an ad that was either product-based or showed a woman drumming in it . . . That’s part of my politics with the magazine: not only to ask them to invest monetarily, but to ask them to think about the imagery they’re putting out in the world . . . And if they can’t find a woman drummer—often they can’t—I will help them find a woman drummer. I will create ad art for them. I will introduce them to someone via e-mail. And I do this and it works . . . but the process is not easy, and oftentimes they’re pissed until it happens and then they’re happy, because they just widened their audience.”
Women in Abovitz’s crowd joined in with the discussion, telling their own stories. One of them, Michèle Drees, a regular at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, struck a chord when she talked about the phenomenon of “the before and after face.” Often, she said, when she was about to play the drums, she would see facial expressions registering shock or incredulity: this was a woman? Playing the drums? But after she had performed, demonstrating her proficiency on the instrument, these expressions would be replaced by looks of pleasant surprise and appreciation: this woman really can play! I had seen this expression metamorphosis firsthand when I watched Drees give an impromptu performance at the 2012 London Drum Show. Dozens of men were aghast as she sat behind a kit and laid down some cool jazz grooves, before switching to another kit and pounding out rock beats.
Mindy Abovitz had her own before-and-after-face story, demonstrating the assumptions that are sometimes made about female drummers before they have even struck a note. “I was going to play a show, opening up for another band,” she said, “and a guy walked up to me before I’d started playing and said, ‘You know, I give drum lessons.’ I was like, ‘Do you?’ And then I sat down on the kit and I played my set—probably harder than normal—and when I got off he was like, ‘Oh, you don’t need drum lessons.’”
Before the Foote’s event, I had heard some entertaining, if thought-provoking, stories from other female drummers. “There are still people who have these prejudices in their head,” said Cherisse Osei, a diminutive Londoner who has played many gigs behind the kit with the singers Bryan Ferry, Paloma Faith, and Mika. “They look at me and go, ‘Oh, you’re the drummer . . . but you’re a girl.’ I say, ‘Yeah? And . . . ? Nothing wrong with that, is there?’ You just learn to ignore those kinds of people. Actually, I find it quite fun when I see their faces drop. When I was sixteen, I was in a metal band and we played the Earthshaker Fest in Germany. I was the only female musician playing in the whole festival. And at one point I tried to go onstage to sound-check, but there were these big tattooed guys saying, ‘No, no!’ I said, ‘I’m sound-checking!’ And this guy said, ‘No, no! I’m sorry, little girl, you can’t come onstage.’ I said, ‘Look. I need to get onstage. I’m sound-checking.’ ‘No, no, no.’ In the end I had to call my guitarist, and he came down and said, ‘Mate, she’s in the band!’ And the guy said, ‘Her?’ ‘Yeah, she’s our drummer.’ So I played and then I came offstage, and the huge tattooed guy said, ‘Can I have your autograph?’”
Jess Bowen is the Arizona-born female drummer in the Summer Set, whose other members are all male. “I hate it when guys put me down, or they don’t believe that I’m a drummer, and they doubt my ability to play the drums,” said Bowen. “I get very offended by it. I realize it’s a male-dominated instrument, so people don’t see as many female drummers—and maybe they don’t see as many good female drummers. I feel like, unfortunately, in our generation, it’s a stereotype I’m going to have to face for a little while, until there are a lot of other girl drummers that start coming up and playing at a professional level.”
The British drummer Anna Prior is the only female member of the electronic band Metronomy, which has been praised as “Britain’s most-loved, quintessentially English, modern pop act.” “I’m usually the only woman in the touring party when we go on tour,” said Prior, “and I do occasionally get men assuming that I’m a production assistant, or the tour manager, or a lighting person. When I say, ‘No, I’m the drummer,’ they’re like, ‘Oh! Oh, God, sorry.’ I find that the reaction varies according to the age of the man that I’m talking to. If I’m talking to someone of my own age, in their twenties, they don’t even mention the fact that I’m a woman and I’m a drummer: it’s all cool. But whenever I talk to men that are my dad’s age, in their sixties, that’s when you get, ‘Oh! A female drummer! Oh, you never see that!’ And I’m like, ‘Well, you kind of do. There are a hell of a lot more than there used to be, for sure.’ And they’ll start talking about all the old bands they knew with female drummers in them.”
Certain drummers crop up frequently in such conversations. These might include the late Sandy West of the Runaways; Cindy Blackman, who played with Lenny Kravitz and later married Carlos Santana; and Samantha Maloney, who has played with hard-rock bands like Mötley Crüe and Eagles of Death Metal. Somebody is also bound to mention Maureen “Moe” Tucker, who created her own, highly distinctive drumming for the Velvet Underground from the mid-1960s. Tucker was an androgynous figure who stood up instead of sitting down, played with mallets, and used a drum kit that even some of the earliest New Orleans jazz players would have called primitive. She had a snare drum, a floor tom, and a bass drum without a pedal, which she turned over and played like an oversized tom. She contributed basic, repetitive beats, but these worked brilliantly within the band’s austere East Coast sound. Listen to “Venus in Furs” on the album The Velvet Underground and Nico: would you prefer to hear Carl Palmer, Terry Bozzio, or Keith Moon going nuts all over that song?
Moe Tucker disliked the frequent drum rolls of flashy drummers, and she wasn’t keen on cymbals: she had one, which she once described as resembling “a garbage-can lid that had been run over six times.” As she explained when she was interviewed in 1997 by Claudia Gonson (who has herself played drums in the Magnetic Fields), “I always hated songs where if you rolled at every opportunity, there would be a constant roll throughout the song. Or crashed a cymbal at every opportunity, or every place where you felt like you should do that. So I consciously avoided it. While you’re crashing, you can’t hear the vocal and you can’t hear the guitar part, you know? I just always felt like the drums shouldn’t take over the song. They should always be under there, obvious, but not taking over the song so that suddenly you realize all you hear is drums.”
Lou Reed once honored Tucker by saying that “There is only one human being who can play that way.” But Tucker herself has said that she never thought of herself as a musician, and when she started playing the drums—beating along to records by the Beatles, the Stones, and Bo Diddley on a secondhand kit in 1963—she wasn’t thinking of taking up drumming seriously. One of her earliest inspirations, she told an interviewer in 1998, came all the way from Africa: “You remember Murray the K? He was the biggest DJ in New York. He used to open and close his show with this African music and it was always the same song. Every time I’d catch it, I’d say ‘Oh man, this is great!’ But he never said who it was. It was really frustrating. One night he mentioned it, for some reason: ‘That was Olatunji, “Drums of Passion.”’ So I ran out and got it the next day. I love that stuff.
“It’s funny, because in ’62, I was in the high school library when an announcement came over: ‘Anyone who would like to sell candy to help pay for an African drummer named Olatunji to come to assembly to play, please go to the office.’ So I ran to the office for that! So, in our silly little Levittown [Long Island] school, we got Olatunji and his full troop with 10 or 12 musicians and 10 or 12 dancers. It was just stunning . . . I asked the teacher for the next class after the assembly if I could get a pass, so I could find him and get his autograph. She did let me go, and I got an autographed picture . . .”
A few million stylistic miles from the Velvet Underground were the Carpenters, whose slushy MOR music was elevated by the mellifluous vocals of Karen Carpenter. According to her brother and musical partner, Richard, she was happier behind a kit than behind a microphone. As he once recalled, “I never thought twice about her being a ‘girl drummer.’ ‘How quaint,’ they said. Oh, really? She was a reluctant singer, though—she considered herself a drummer who sings.”
Interviewed in 1973, Karen revealed that her drumming career began with a ploy to avoid athletic activities at school. “When I was in high school, I joined the band so that I could get out of gym classes,” she said. “The marching band was considered a substitute for physical education, and I wasn’t for running around a track at eight o’clock in the morning.” Initially she was given a glockenspiel to play, which she didn’t like, and that’s when she moved on to the drums. “I had this friend who had been playing them since he was three, and he was fantastic, so I copied him. And the rest came naturally.”
As teenagers in the 1960s, Karen and Richard teamed up with a bass player named Wes Jacobs and formed the Carpenter Trio, which featured Karen on drums. Later, when they started recording as the Carpenters, she was still behind the kit, but that wasn’t always practical when she became the singer. “At one stage, we realized that somebody had to go out front, and everyone was looking at me, so we hired another drummer to play when I’m doing the lead vocal.” In that early interview, she already sounded weary of the reactions she was provoking as a female drummer: “They’ve been telling me for five years that it’s unusual for a girl to be playing drums, but that doesn’t matter. The drums were the only thing I could play.”
Thirty years ago, I met an extraordinary young woman whose career seemed to have become distorted by negative attitudes toward female drummers. It was 1984, and I was interviewing Sheila E., who was then twenty-six years old, in the London offices of her record company. A woman of Mexican, African-American, and Creole heritage, she was dressed to the nines in smart 1980s designer gear, including a stylish broad-brimmed hat. Though she was already a phenomenal percussionist, the people around her seemed to be trying to mold her into a singing superstar. After playing with a galaxy of musicians including Prince, Marvin Gaye, and Billy Cobham, she had just released a solo album, The Glamorous Life, on which she sang as well as playing percussion. But for a solo star who was supposed to be promoting her new album, she was remarkably frank when I asked her about her role as a vocalist. How long, I asked her, had she been singing? “Just this year,” she replied. “I don’t like to sing. The last band I was in was Lionel Richie’s, and he had me singing live background vocals, so I got comfortable doing that. I didn’t want to sing any lead parts, though. They wanted me to sing Diana Ross’s part in ‘Endless Love,’ but I didn’t want to. And earlier this year, Prince asked me to come in the studio and do a lot of singing, so I went in the studio and sang with him, and did some other things. And he thought I should have a solo career and sing. So I tried it. I’m getting used to it. It’s a challenge. I do a lot of playing and singing at the same time.” I asked Sheila if she wanted to be a big star, and she said: “No. I just want to be a musician, a person that everybody likes and says, ‘Yeah, she’s good!’ I just want to make people happy. I don’t like being quoted as a star.”
I asked her if the idea of a female percussionist had provoked any reactions among anybody, and she replied: “Just a lot of negative things when I first started playing, from male drummers, I guess who were kinda jealous in a way. They used to put me down. A lot of bad things were said about me: that I couldn’t play because I’m a woman, ‘You’ve only got this gig because you are a girl,’ that kind of thing. But it never really bothered me, because I was confident in my playing—I knew that I could play. I had to prove myself, which took me a while. It’s okay now.”
With all the carping coming from the sidelines, many female drummers may benefit from extra support of some kind, and it was clear that Sheila E. was supported by a very musical family. Born Sheila Escovedo in 1957, she started playing music with her father, Pete Escovedo, and his brother Coke in their band the Escovedo Brothers when she was as young as five. Her brothers, Juan and Peter Michael, were also percussionists. “I stopped playing for a while,” Sheila told me, “and then started playing again when I was about fourteen, drums and percussion, and I played another show with my father, and the response was so good that I decided I wanted to be a professional musician. So I quit school and went out on the road with my father, and started touring with George Duke and people like that. And that’s all I’ve been doing since.”
Like many male drummers, Sheila E. came from an underprivileged, working-class background. And in the early days, she didn’t see her musicianship as having monetary value. “I grew up in a real poor environment,” she said, “a bad part of Oakland, California. It’s been real rough all my life. Even when I started playing, I thought it was an insult to take money from people. So I would play for free, and my father would get mad at me, tell me, ‘You have to take the money. You have to eat, you have to help support the family.’ I was fifteen years old. And after a while, when I saw that there wasn’t any food in the refrigerator, I said, ‘Okay!’ It’s been hard all our lives . . . but we’ve still been happy. That’s what counts.”
Like many male drummers, too, Sheila had a passion for sports, and she recalled that as a young girl “I was running a lot of track and playing soccer, and I kind of wanted to probably be in the Olympics or something.”
Jess Bowen, too, was drawn to sports as well as music, and played soccer as a girl. “But music was always my passion, and I had to pick one or the other, and I did end up picking music.” Like Sheila E., Bowen was born into a musical family, in 1989. Her father and brother were both drummers, and there was pressure for her to become a drummer as well. When she decided she would play guitar instead, her father said he would buy her a guitar on one condition: that she try playing drums in the school band for at least a year. The experience gave her a passion for the drums. “I’d always wanted to play guitar, and we always had drums round the house and I wanted to be different,” she said. “I didn’t want to be another drummer in the family. But I’m glad now that my dad did encourage me to do it. There’s not a lot of female drummers out there, and I guess I appreciate being able to maybe help and encourage other girls to do it. I’ve had a lot of people coming up to me and telling me their parents don’t let them play the drums because they don’t think it’s a very feminine instrument.”
Bowen has recently been encouraging more girls to drum in an official capacity: as the spokesperson for the 2014 Hit Like a Girl contest. This awareness-raising competition, launched in 2012, invites female drummers around the world to send in video clips of their performances, which are judged by hundreds of thousands of online voters and a panel of experts. Drummers from forty-two countries entered the 2012 contest, and the entrants received votes from more than four hundred thousand people around the globe. The winner in the over-eighteen category in 2013 was the twenty-five-year-old Chilean drummer Valerie Sepulveda, who won with a flashy, jazzy piece of music in 7/8 time. Alexey Poblete from Las Vegas, just ten years old, triumphed in the under-eighteen category of the competition with her performance of a tune by the LA metal band Five Finger Death Punch.
For many of the female drummers playing today, there was nothing like Hit Like a Girl to help them when they began. The stories of how they started playing are so often marked by vague yearnings and chance events. Anna Prior was fourteen years old and attending a school in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, when she had her eureka moment. “There was this girl at school who was always a bit of an underdog,” said Prior. “She was a tomboy with really short hair, and I was always intrigued by the fact that she would disappear at lunchtime. One day I asked her where she went, and she said, ‘I go to the music block, and sit and play drums.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, excellent.’ I’d tried to play lots of instruments before, like flute and piano, and as much as I wanted to be musical, those kind of instruments didn’t scream out to me; I found them boring. So I asked if I could go with her one lunchtime, and we went in and she taught me a few little beats.
“Then, I remember, this guy from the sixth form poked his head round the door, wondering what all this commotion was. And he was like, ‘Two lasses, playing the drums! You can’t be doin’ that!’ I think that was my first proper experience of feminism—you know, ‘I’m not having a man tell me that I can’t play drums!’ I went home that evening and spoke to my dad about it, and he was brilliant: he said, ‘Okay, well, let’s get you some lessons.’ And I started taking lessons and got into it very quickly, and my parents got me a drum kit.”
Debbi Peterson of the Bangles wanted to be in a band when she was young, but she was seriously considering playing bass or guitar. “I never really thought about being a drummer,” she said. “In fact, I thought, ‘I don’t want to be stuck at the back, playing the drums.’ When I was fifteen years old, my sister Vicki had a bunch of high school friends who were playing in a band together, and they were looking for another female drummer—they’d just got rid of one. And the bass player, our friend Amanda, suggested me to my sister, who thought, ‘Hmm, that’s kinda strange.’ So I went to a rehearsal, and I sat down on the drum set and started playing, like I’d been doing it before, and everybody was amazed. They said, ‘Okay, you’re our drummer! You got the job!’”
“I was always drawn to rhythm, and drums always resonated with me,” said Cherisse Osei. When she was just five years old, Osei received a drum kit of sorts as a gift from her uncle. “It was a tiny little thing,” she recalled, “a pink Mickey Mouse drum kit, with three drums and a little crash cymbal. Then, years later, when I finally saw a real drum kit, I went, ‘Oh! Hello . . . okay, I remember . . .’ I was actually a dancer before I was a drummer; I was always dancing. But when I listened to music I’d always be finding the drum parts.” There was an impressive music department at her school in the South-gate area of north London, and Osei discovered that she could count on the support of her parents and her best friend. “They had a few drum kits there at school, and when I was eleven I started playing there. My best friend Emily Dolan Davis and I started drumming on the same day, and we used to practice together at seven o’clock in the morning before school, at break time, lunchtime, and after school, for six years solid. My parents bought me my first drum kit when I was thirteen. They said if I was serious about playing drums, it was actually a good thing, because there weren’t many female drummers around; it was quite rare. They said if I worked hard at it and became really good, I could probably get a lot of work out of it.”
Patty Schemel, who used to play with Courtney Love in Hole, discovered the drums at the age of eleven in Seattle. “Drumming was such a physical thing to do, and I enjoyed that part of it, and I enjoyed the fact that I didn’t see a lot of women doing it. Also, it was really powerful and made a big sound. I got a snare drum first, and shortly afterward I got more drums because I wanted to audition for the jazz band at school.”
A great many drummers start playing as children or teenagers, but there are exceptions. Julie Edwards of the American female duo Deap Vally told me she was a late starter who began more or less by accident. “I was twenty-five when I took up the drums—I’d already lived a few lifetimes,” she laughed. “I was starting my first band, the Pity Party, with my best friend, Mark. We’d been hatching the plan theoretically, just talking about what we were going to do, and then finally we rented some rehearsal space. But we had no clue what he was going to play or what I was going to play: we were approaching it from a very DIY, craft standpoint. Before then, I’d done a lot of singing and taken piano lessons, and I’d done a lot of very private guitar songs. But when we showed up to rehearsals, I ran behind the drum kit first. I’m not really sure why. And Mark strapped on a guitar and plugged into an amp, and we wrote a song.”
However, she wasn’t fully satisfied playing the drums. “We did some more writing, and after a little while I was really missing a melodic instrument. So I cooked up the idea that if I put a keyboard on my left-hand side, I could play melodically from time to time. Once that keyboard was there, my left hand almost never played drums again for seven years. I would play really simple beats—almost like drum-machine or hip-hop beats—and with my left hand I would play bass lines on this Yamaha DX7 keyboard wired through a distortion pedal.”
Most drummers derive a certain pleasure from playing the drums. They’re doing something they enjoy, creating a powerful sound, and the physical act of drumming sends endorphins whizzing around the body. But again, Julie Edwards is the exception. “Sometimes I feel fine after a show,” she said. “Occasionally I’m elated—but that is rare. Usually I’m angry after a show. I think it’s my personality: I’m a little bit uptight and impatient. I’m kind of like a fighter and an activist, and I’ve always been that way. And when you feel an emotion, you can attach it to a reason, but I don’t think they necessarily go together. Like I could just say I was angry because I didn’t like my monitor sound, or because the kick drum was traveling away from me, or something, but I think at the end of the day those things can still be fucked up and I can still enjoy the show. It’s just the way I am: even when I was six years old, I remember being in a state of indignation about something.”
Edwards’s fiery personality is all over Deap Vally’s 2013 debut album, Sistrionix—especially in the monster beats on the songs “Gonna Make My Own Money” and “Woman of Intention.” I asked Edwards if she had been indignant about a particular review of the album, which had mentioned her “cavewoman beats.” “Oh, I get that a lot,” she said. “Well, maybe I am a cavewoman. I hit hard all the time—that’s how I play right now. What I didn’t like was when one reviewer said I had a ‘fundamental’ grasp of the drums. That made me so mad. By that time, I’d been playing for nine years. I’ve played for a long time, and I have my own style and a level of competence, and I really don’t think it’s fair to say I have a fundamental grasp. I think the reviewer saw a woman playing the drums and decided that’s how a woman is with an instrument.”
The word cavewoman has been used before, of course, to describe the drumming style of another famous American woman. When Meg White played in the White Stripes, her primal, apparently untutored style was castigated by many critics. However, there are many people who take a different view. Dave Grohl has called her “one of my favorite fucking drummers of all time. Like, nobody fucking plays the drums like that.”
Her ex-husband and former bandmate Jack White has said that “when she started to play drums with me, just on a lark, it felt liberating and refreshing. There was something in it that opened me up.” Answering her critics on another occasion, he commented: “Her femininity and extreme minimalism are too much to take for some metalheads and reverse-contrarian hipsters. She can do what those with ‘technical prowess’ can’t. She inspires people to bash on pots and pans. For that, they repay her with gossip and judgment.”
Clem Burke is another fan. “I think Meg White’s great,” he told me. “She was perfect for what the White Stripes were doing.”
“I always thought Meg White was kinda sexy, you know,” said Steven Drozd. “I liked her caveman style of drumming.”
“I love Meg’s drumming,” said Butch Vig. “Her drumming is loose, but when she played with Jack, they had a thing that worked—a push-and-pull thing.”
“I really like what Meg White does and the simplicity of it,” said Patty Schemel, “and I love that she exists, because it’s proof that you don’t have to be technical to be an amazing drummer. I believe she’s super talented.” Schemel teaches young drummers at the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Los Angeles in the summer, and uses the White Stripes song “Seven Nation Army” as a valuable teaching aid. The song features Meg beginning with a simple beat on the bass drum and floor tom before she introduces the snare drum, crash cymbal, and hi-hat. “It’s such a great song for teaching dynamics, and for demonstrating a basic beat that builds into something,” said Schemel. “It’s something that they can get right away, and they can feel that they’ve accomplished something. All the kids know the White Stripes, and it was such a cool band.”
There is another stereotype that people like to slap on female drummers, besides the image of the barely competent cave dweller with a fundamental grasp of her instrument. I heard it expressed by a customer standing in a queue at the London Drum Show when he saw a well-built, short-haired woman sit behind a kit on one of the manufacturers’ stands and start playing. “You know what I think?” he said to the men around him. “Female drummers are lesbians, aren’t they?” I heard evidence of it again during the Foote’s discussion, when Bex Wade, a British photographer who works for Tom Tom, said that her mother had been telling people that Bex worked for a lesbian drum magazine.
It certainly isn’t true that all female drummers are gay; it isn’t true of many of the women I interviewed. Debbi Peterson and Julie Edwards have husbands, and others talked about their boyfriends. But Patty Schemel is openly gay (her film, Hit So Hard, includes the touching story of the day she came out to her mother in dramatic circumstances), and Jess Bowen has mentioned her girlfriend in interviews. “Well, maybe drums make you gay,” joked Mindy Abovitz. “No, I don’t think it’s uncommon for women drummers to be gay. I think it’s to do with the fact that whenever you find women defying the norm or breaking down barriers, like female drummers, you find women who are already trailblazing in some way, already defying something.”
Julie Edwards echoed Abovitz’s thoughts. “Homosexuals forge the pathways,” she said, “because they’re used to being at odds with everything anyway. They’re social pioneers.”
I asked Jess Bowen if people had tried to stereotype her as a butch tomboy. “Yeah, sometimes,” she said. “I’ve always been a tomboy, and I grew up being athletic. But I don’t consider myself to look like a butchy drummer: I have kept my feminine image. I still have long hair. I’ve always had this long hair whipping around while I’m playing—it’s a kind of trademark.”
Other drummers succeed in retaining their femininity behind the kit, despite the fact that they are doing a hot, sweaty job. Anna Prior was featured in British Vogue magazine in 2012 as a stylish role model for female drummers. The article, “Percussion Power,” featured a full-length photograph of the immaculately styled “flame-haired percussionist” wearing an elegant Yves Saint Laurent jumpsuit, and revealed that she had worn a “sparkling emerald gown” when Metronomy had headlined at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Prior told me that it was not only possible to dress glamorously as a drummer, but it could bring surprising advantages. “My mother, who’s a really good seamstress, made some sequined jumpsuits for me, and I was wearing one when we played the Coachella festival recently. We were playing at three P.M., and it’s basically in the desert in California, so the sun was incredibly hot—it was about forty degrees [Celsius; 104 degrees Fahrenheit]—but I found the sequins reflected a lot of the sunlight, so I didn’t get that hot.”
Having discovered that many male drummers are keen collectors of all kinds of things, including drums, I wondered if that applied to female drummers as well. “Well, I collect empty jam jars,” revealed Prior. “I don’t know why, but I find them quite beautiful.”
Julie Edwards said she collected My Little Pony toys as a child, and she now has a series of collections, including stockpiles of mugs and fridge magnets. “And I’ve kept every pass we’ve ever had from each show, and every wristband.”
“I used to collect spoons from different states of America,” revealed Patty Schemel. “You know—they have the name of the state on them. I had that collection for a long time. I’ve collected a lot of albums and singles over the years. And I have three drum kits. One of them is a ’67 Ludwig that looks just like Ringo Starr’s drum kit.”
“I can’t seem to get rid of any of my drum kits,” confessed Jess Bowen. “I have four kits, and I have a fifth one coming. I have this great connection with a drum company, SJC Custom Drums, and I can design kits any way I want, and that has become a passion of mine. That’s why I have so many kits, and that’s why it’s so hard for me to let them go: because I designed them all myself.”
I was also looking for evidence among female drummers of tattoo culture, so prevalent among male percussionists. “Well, you’re not gonna find any here!” laughed Debbi Peterson. “I don’t know what it is with guy drummers and tattoos. I have known younger girl drummers who have tattoos, but it’s usually not that many—one on the ankle or one on the shoulder, maybe.”
“I do have one, on my right shoulder,” said Jess Bowen. “It’s a lyric from Jimmy Eat World, a band from Arizona that I’m a big fan of. It says ‘Sing while you can,’ and it’s a metaphor for living my life the way I want to, and to the fullest extent.”
“I got one of my first tattoos when I was in Hole and we finished our first tour of the States,” said Patty Schemel. “And I just started decorating my arms. I don’t know why; I guess it’s just part of being a drummer. I have John Bonham’s runes—the three circles—and an Asian design on my left arm.”
But tattoos might not be a great idea for many other female drummers, according to Mindy Abovitz. “Women sometimes have a hard time getting the opportunity to play the drums, and they don’t want to rock the boat,” she said. “Tattoos might be just another reason to write a woman off.”
Abovitz’s mission to raise the profile of female drummers has taken several forms. She has organized museum events that turn drumming into performance art, where she and other women play their drums in spaces that are usually reserved for quiet contemplation. When she took over the MoMA PS1 building in New York City in 2013, she had a woman playing a drum kit in the lobby, another playing in the boiler room, one in a conference room, and two on the stairways. “And I had a woman beatboxer traveling between all the drummers. She would beatbox at us, and we would drum back at her.”
When the CMJ Music Marathon was running in New York, Abovitz asked female drummers to meet her in Union Square. “I knew that women were coming from all over the world to play in that festival, and I asked them to bring buckets and any other kind of percussion that they had, and I brought buckets. We had about a hundred drummers there, and we played real fucking loud!”
During the discussion at Foote’s drum shop, Abovitz told her audience that she had considered another, less ethical means of raising the profile of women drummers. “I think about lying, because the media oftentimes lie, to persuade us that something is true. I could simply print a report and say, ‘Women are fifty percent of drummers now! It’s very normal to play drums if you’re a girl’—just to see, if I keep saying that, if I start convincing everybody that that’s true, if it actually becomes true.”
Julie Edwards said she expects a rise in that percentage before long, thanks to Meg White. “Meg created a situation where there are so many killer female drummers now,” she said, “because they were like nine years old when the White Stripes were huge, so they were like, ‘Oh . . . I could be a drummer.’ I know of so many young women drummers in LA who are nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and so good—way past me. So this whole notion that there aren’t as many women as men on the drums—it’s going to go right out of the window.”
Michèle Drees argued that female drum teachers are also making a difference. “I’ve been teaching for a long time, and half my students are girls. But, more importantly, half are boys, and I think that’s going to have more of an impact—because the boys will become fine drummers, and when they see sexist behavior around them, they’ll say, ‘What’s that about? I was taught by a great woman drummer!’”
Raising the profile of women drummers in 2013 was an anonymous white-haired old lady who became an Internet sensation. An online film clip showed her playing a version of the Surfaris’ 1963 hit “Wipe Out,” complete with stick twirling, on a kit at the Coalition Drum Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Within two days, the film had a million people staring slack-jawed at their desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. “We don’t know anything about her,” shrugged the manager of the shop, Dustin Hackworth, “except that her name is Mary; she comes in, plays ‘Wipe Out’ for about ten minutes, and leaves. She’s awesome.”
The search was on for the “mystery grandma drummer,” though nobody could confirm that this was actually a woman with grandchildren. She turned out to be sixty-three-year-old Mary Hvizda, who had drummed in many bands in her youth, including the Chantells, the first all-female rock band in La Crosse. She had sold her drum kit back in 1990, she said. Touchingly, the drum shop celebrated her sudden fame—and the amount of publicity she had brought to the business—by giving her a new electronic drum kit. And no, Hvizda had never had any children, so she wasn’t even a mother, let alone a grandmother.
A talented drummer—male or female—can impress a lot of people by walking into a drum shop, sitting behind a kit, and laying down a great groove. But there’s a much tougher arena for drummers—a place in which every single beat and cymbal strike is analyzed and picked over, a place where drummers either succeed or fail. I was becoming aware that I needed to consider how drummers behaved in that highly demanding arena. It was time to enter the recording studio, and to look at the skills that some of the best studio drummers use to survive.